Aviation East Africa Issue 3

INSIDE EA Flyer: Harvard Comes to Africa - P54

EAST AFRICA

air p o rts ISSUE No. 0003 April 2012

technology

i n frastru c tur e

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There’s No Business like

Show Global Aerospace Leader Thales’s In-Flight Entertainment Experience Sets the Pace - P22

PLUS AFRAA’s one-stop forum for africa - P10

Cover GRAPHIC | WILLIAM ODIDI

Business

Contents April 2012

P10 P22

Editorial | Aviation East Africa .......................................................... 7 News | AFRAA Convention.......................................................... 10 Kenya’s First All-cargo Airline......................................... 14 Business | Africa’s Fleets, Passenger Numbers Grow...................... 16 Aviation Role in African Economy................................. 18 Cover Story/ Technology | Thales’s world beating IFE ............................................. 22

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P18

Industry Analysis: The ET409 Accident........................ 26 Dispatches | Letter from New York ...................................................... 28 Letter from Kampala ...................................................... 32 Letter from Moshi ........................................................... 34 Letter from South Africa ................................................. 36

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Special Feature: Flying with the Military...................... 38 EA FLYER | Environmental Notebook............................................... 48 Cover Story/Conversations............................................. 54 Traveller’s Tales................................................................ 64 Foreigners........................................................................ 69 Big Ideas Forum............................................................... 72 Event................................................................................. 88 Essay................................................................................. 88

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material.No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any form without written permissionfrom the publisher. The views expressed in the articles are those of the authors. Return undeliverable copies to: East African Flyer Magazine, Woodley, Ngong Road, Box 636 - 00100 GPO, Tel: +254 020 8019387, Email: sales@aviationeastafrica.com, www.aviationea.com

Editorial Team PUBLISHER Professional and Advisory Management Consultants P. O. Box 636 -00100 Nairobi email; pamc@aviationeastafrica.co.ke BOARD MEMBERS Eric Mwandia (Chairman) emwandia@aviationeastafrica.com Samuel Kahiga skahiga@aviationeastafrica.com Commissioning EDITOR Wycliff Muga wmuga@aviationeastafrica.com CONSULTING EDITOR Matt K. Gathigira mgathigira@aviationeastafrica.com

DESIGN William Odidi Peter Githaiga PHOTOGRAPHY Jonathan Kalan Anthony Njoroge ADVERTISING INQUIRIES sales@aviationeastafrica.com SUBSCRIPTIONS Aviation East Asfrica is published monthly. Subscription rates: Individual, one year KSh3,360 aviation east Africa Box 636 - 00100 GPO Tel: +254 020 8019387 www.aviationea.com Printed by Atlas International Dubai

Welcome April 2012

The Voice of the Region’s Aviation Business Sector

Editorial

A

By Aviation East Africa Chairman Eric Mwandia

No Business like Show Biz: In-flight Entertainment and Connectivity

viation East Africa’s third Cover Story focuses on the Thales Group, the aerospace, space, defence, security and transportation multinational corporation is also one of the world’s largest In-flight Entertainment and Connectivity (IFEC) companies, second only to Panasonic.

The entertainment industry is one of the fastest growing sectors of the world economy, even in times bordering on recession in large parts of the developed world.

Indeed, entertainment has become ubiquitous, so much so that it has invaded even the workplace.

And the technologies that deliver entertainment have become versatile beyond all expectations of even a generation ago.

Travel – including air travel – is no exception. Thales makes the most advanced in-flight entertainment (IFE) systems, offering a vast menu of movies, music, videogames and other on-demand content formats.

The Thales TopSeries In-Flight Entertainment System has been fitted in the carriers of major world airlines, including British Airways, Singapore Airlines, Air China and Japan Airlines.

It consists of in-seat audio and overhead video entertainment located in bulkheads and aisles, managed by flight crew through the interactive Cabin Management

Terminal (iCMT) and individually controlled by the passenger.

IFE systems offer more than just an entertainment experience – connecting-flight information and baggage claim procedures are also embedded, as are details about global positioning, including about the very aircraft you are flying in, in real time.

What’s more, IFE systems are compatible with a wide range of other information communication (ICT) devices, including iPods, iPhones and USB sticks, enabling the traveler to review documents and photographs and enjoy music, movies and video-gaming five miles above the ground.

Thales, named after the preSocrates Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus, widely reckoned to be the first person to have studied electricity, describes itself as “utilizing expertise in the most sophisticated technologies and large scale software systems . . . aided by a global network of 22,500 high level researchers”.

Thales goes on, “We have earned particular recognition for our ability to develop and deploy dual civil and military techniques, leveraging international operations to provide an end to end supply chain, from equipment manufacture to systems and services”.

We are proud to showcase Thales’s innovative IFE technologies and software systems in this issue of Aviation East Africa.

In March, the African aviation sector gathered in Nairobi for the three-day African Airlines Association (AFRAA) premier African Aviation Suppliers & Stakeholders Convention at the Safari Park Hotel, under the patronage of the Ministry of Transport of the Republic of Kenya.

The Convention brought together about 200 participants consisting of mainly operators, suppliers and service providers with a view to fostering dialogue, building sustainable networks in supply chain management, creating a competitive environment for business and ultimately improving the aviation support base in the continent.

Aviation East Africa was at the AFRAA Convention and we bring you a news report and photographs.

Lawrence Dabney, our New York correspondent, brings you the second and final installment of the Special Report on being embedded with the US military in war-torn Afghanistan, “The Tragedy and Grace of Sgt. William Stacey”.

This poignant and heart-rending feature is a salute to a soldier who displayed unusual courage and leadership acumen but died too young.

And then there are all the regular features that go into the making of AEA’s unique media menu on airports, technology and infrastructure, making this magazine truly the voice of the region’s aviation business sector.

News |

Conferencing

African Airlines Association Aviation Suppliers & Stakeholders Convention 2012

AFRAA’S One-stop Forum for a Continent’s Airlines Sector

Improving the state of infrastructure, curtailing the brain drain, cutting on bureaucracy and determining the best way to minimize operational costs will constitute the most effective ways forward for the civil aviation sector

By JOE OMBUOR 10 |

T

he African Airlines Association (AFRAA), known in Francophone Africa as Association des Compagnies Aériennes Africaines, held its inaugural aviation supplies and stakeholders’ convention in Nairobi between March 7 and 9, bringing together member airlines, civil aviation authorities, senior executives and major suppliers for the first time since its formation in

AFRAA CONVENTIONEERS: Mr. Mohammed of Aero Industrial Sales, Ms. Justina Nyaga, Director East African School of Aviation and Dr. Elijah Chingosho, Secretary General AFRAA, listen keenly as Kenya’s Permanent Secretary for Transport, Dr. Cyrus Njiru, makes a point during a tour of the exhibition stands at the Convention.

collaborate and not work against each other”.

Njiru advised those charged with the responsibility of driving the aviation industry in Africa to improve the state of infrastructure, curtail the brain drain, cut on bureaucracy and determine the best way to minimize operational costs. “African operators could cooperate with their foreign counterparts and suppliers to evolve a streamlined aviation supply system that works in their favour,” he said.

Secure aerodromes

He emphasized the need for safe skies and secure aerodromes in these days of international terrorism. “As you are aware, Kenya has been in the eye of this menace. We have strived to ensure our air navigation equipment is modern as required by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)”.

On the new regulations governing cargo entering the European Union, Njiru said such rules must have the interest of the African aviation industry at heart.

Dr. Chingosho on his part praised Kenya for being among the African countries that have realized the enormous potential of air transport.

“Your vision to exploit this potential with a view to earning huge revenues from tourism and air transport has been remarkable,” he said.

PANELLISTS: Engineer Chris Oanda of Kenya Airways and Mr. Mohammed Mahmoud, President of Aero Industrial Sales, participate in the proceedings.

He described Kenya as one of Africa’s foremost air transport hubs, as demonstrated through the development of critical infrastructure witnessed in the modernization and expansion in progress at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, the completion of Kisumu International Airport and a Civil Aviation Authority that is equal to the task of effective safety oversight of air transport services in accordance with ICAO standards.

He said a conducive atmosphere had ensured a substantial growth and development of the tourism industry necessary for a vibrant aviation sector.

The Secretary General hailed AFRAA for launching a joint fuel purchase programme for nine of its member airlines, a move he said would help reduce expenses, given the fact that fuel alone accounts for between 40 to 50% of total direct operating costs of airlines.

He said the gesture would ensure quality of the product and supply reliability: “The suppliers on their part will benefit from higher fuel volumes”.

The nine airlines that have entered into the fuel supply pact are Air Malawi, Air Seychelles, Ethiopian Airlines, Kenya Airways, LAM Turn to P12

Photography | anthony njoroge

Accra, Ghana, in 1968.

Pointing to the theme of the conference, “Harnessing aviation growth opportunities in Africa through effective and efficient supply chain management”, the AFRAA Secretary General, Dr. Elijah , said such conventions would in future be an annual event in Nairobi, the city that hosts the AFRAA headquarters.

The Transport Permanent Secretary, Dr. Cyrus Njiru, said the convention had come at an opportune time, when the aviation industry in Africa and the world in general was experiencing great challenges, such as the spiraling costs of fuel, spare parts and aircraft maintenance.

“It is more difficult for African countries that by and large are net importers,” said Njiru, adding that the African aviation maintenance, repair and overhaul market has continued to expand rapidly and is approaching US$1.3 billion (KSh83 billion).

He said most African countries, including Kenya, were renewing and expanding their fleets to match the rest of the world: “This means that operators, regulators and service providers have to weather many challenges, making co-operation and information sharing vital for survival. African airlines ought to

April 2012

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News |

Conferencing

From P11

Mozambique Airlines, RwandAir, Precision Air and TAAG Angola Airlines.

Dr Chingosho congratulated the Kenya Airways Chief of Supplies Chain, Eng. Charles Oanda, for his nomination as chairman of the AFRAA Joint Fuel Steering Committee. Mr. Yemane Fitw of Ethiopian Airlines deputizes him.

“AFRAA has identified the need for a one-stop forum where we bring together suppliers of services such as aircraft, engines, equipment, components, spares, ICT services, training solutions, consultancy services, financing and the various customers of these services to facilitate interaction, networking and the sharing of ideas on how to move our industry forward,” he said.

Air transport, he pointed out, was vital in Africa for socio-economic development, the promotion of trade, tourism and regional integration.

Dr. Chingosho said aviation growth in Africa had improved connectivity that at one time had to

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CONVENTION SHOWCASE: AFRAA Secretary General Dr. Elijah Chingosho (far right) and Kenyan Transport Permanent Secretary Dr. Cyrus Chingosho are taken round the Worthington Aviation Exhibition stand at the Convention.

be done via European airports. Said he: “Aviation growth is delivering benefits to Africa with air transport creating about half-a-million jobs across various sectors”.

He said African airlines passenger traffic grew by 12.90% in 2010 as cargo went up by 23.80% compared to the previous year. But he lamented that Africa, with 12% of the world’s population contributes less than 3% of the global air service market.

Safety and security

Chingosho said safety and security topped AFRAA’s priorities alongside reduction of industry cost and human development. Adding that air transport growth inn Africa would continue being spurred by a strong growth of African economies, a widening middle-income class, and the influx of foreign investments.

“Six of the world’s fastest growing economies in the past 10 years have been in sub-Saharan Africa,” he said, adding that leading aircraft manufacturer Boeing had estimated that African economies would grow at over 6.1% per annum up to 2030.

He said tourist arrivals in Africa

grew by 6% in 2010 alone, partly due to the successful staging of the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, further underscoring the need for reliable and efficient air transport services.

Positive pointers to this end, he noted, were evident in the fact that almost 120 aircraft orders were placed by African airlines in 2010. He cited Ethiopian Airlines, which had planned to increase its fleet of 47 by 70 more aircraft in the next 15 years and Kenya Airways, which expects to double its fleet of 31 by 2025 at an estimated cost of US$3 billion: “Both the airlines and even smaller ones like RwandAir have the latest Dreamliners in their rudders”.

Costs down

Chingosho advised African governments, airports and other service providers to keep costs down by a transparent process of setting charges as air transport was no longer a luxury for the rich and affluent, but had increasingly become a means of mass transportation.

He said the airline industry in Africa was over-taxed, making it difficult to establish cheaper fares and constraining the development of Photography | anthony njoroge

Top: CONVENTION STAFF: AFRAA members of staff were out in force to facilitate the first Convention of its kind held in Africa.

Left: DANCING DELEGATES: Conventioneers from Mozambique, the Middle East, Ghana, Botswana and Namibia take to the dance floor at the end of a hard day’s work at a cocktail party during the Convention.

low-cost services. “Reduce the taxes imposed on airlines passengers and fuel,” he urged African governments.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) Regional President for Africa, Mr. Michael Higgins, said global air transport was carrying 2.7 billion passengers annually and 50 million tons of cargo freight.

“Five million and five hundred thousand workers, 46,000 of whom are in Kenya, are serving world airlines that are responsible for 35 per cent of world trade,” he said.

April 2012

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News |

Air Cargo

Kenya’s First All-cargo Airline

T

he brains behind Astral Aviation, Kenya’s first exclusively cargo airline originated in Kisumu, where Chief Executive Officer Sanjeev Gadhia was born 43 years ago.

Gadhia was born at the lakeside town’s Aga Khan Hospital on February 3, 1969, to a banker father and a housewife mother who still live in the town. He has fond childhood memories of Kisumu, which he describes as “a special town for me”.

Nobody, from his doting parents to his fellow pupils and teachers at Kisumu’s Aga Khan Primary School, where he had his first three years of elementary education in the 1970s, would have envisaged an astute aviation manager with pioneering instincts was growing up among them Gadhia’s vision crystallized into Astral Aviation, a homegrown cargo airline with its hub at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.

Earlier in his life, everything

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FLEET WINNER: A DC9 cargo plane with Astral’s livery and (inset) investor Gandia Astral won the Africa All Cargo Carrier Award 2011

for the first-born in a family of three children seemed to point to a banking career, where his father had excelled.

After elementary studies in Kisumu, Gadhia’s parents took him to Bangalore, India, where he completed his primary and

secondary education. “My parents believed India was the ideal place to give their first-born son a head-start foundation for further academic and professional pursuits,” he says.

For university education, Gadhia’s parents took him to Britain, where he pursued a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) degree at London’s Schiller International University between 1985 and 1988.

Upon graduation in 1988, young Gadhia enrolled for a Master’s degree course at the same university, graduating with a Master of Business Administration (MBA) in 1989. “I worked briefly as a banker in London before I returned home to Kenya to try my hand in business. I always wanted to do my own work as opposed to being employed”.

He finally ventured into aviation in the 1990s. “I started off, with some support from my father, by supplying various goods to the United Nations for their mission in

Somalia (UNISOM).

After delivering the goods that included blankets, mosquito nets, tarpaulins, foodstuffs and the like to the airport, cargo aircraft would come all the way from South Africa or Dubai to ferry them to Somalia.

“That made me think of starting a locally-based cargo airline to tap into the business that was going to South African and Dubai companies.

I started by leasing two Russian-built Antonov 12 aircraft in 1999.

‘Star shaped’

“I had two employees in the company that I gave the name Astral. There is no particular meaning attached to this name. I just liked how it sounded,” Gadhia says. Interestingly, the dictionary meaning of “astral” is “pertaining to or proceeding from the stars; stellar; star-shaped”.

Gadhia goes on: “Thus, the first cargo airline in Kenya to be licensed by the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority was born. All was smooth until 2008, when KCAA and other East African regulators decided to ban the Russian-built aircraft for lack of oversight for their maintenance.

Antonov maintenance was done only in Russia. Only Russians could pilot them”.

The move compelled Astral to surrender the Antonovs to the Russian manufacturers and hasten to lease DC9s in their place by January 2009.

Though not as robust as Antonovs that could carry over 20 tons of goods, DC9s had the advantage of local maintenance facilities. They were registered locally and piloted

by Kenyan pilots.

“Today, we are the largest cargo airline in eastern Africa and our fleet includes Fokker 27 freighter and Cessna Caravans,” Gadhia beams.

Gadhia says that, from its Nairobi hub, Astral Aviation flies cargo to Juba in southern Sudan three times a week, twice a week to Mwanza and Dar es Salaam and once weekly to Entebbe, Kigali and Mogadishu in Somalia, their newest addition. The airline uplifted 8.8 million kilograms of cargo in 2011 alone.

“Out of sheer hard work and determination, Astral was declared winner of the Africa All Cargo Carrier Award in 2011 by Stat Times at the Air Cargo Africa 2011 event,”

an effusive Gadhia informs Aviation East Africa.

The airline is a member of multilateral Interline Trade Agreement (MITA), the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the International Air Cargo Association (IACA) Clearing House and the Kenya Association of Air Operators.

It operates seven scheduled destinations and 40 charter routes on the intra-African network.

“We have interline agreements with Kenya Airways, Emirates Cargo, Qatar Airways Cargo, Virgin Atlantic Cargo, Allied Aviation, Singapore Airlines Cargo, Swiss International, British Airways, Air India, Etihad, Lufthansa Cargo, Brussels Airlines, EgyptAir, Air Mauritius, RwandAir, Ethiopian Airlines Cargo and Heavy Weight Cargo Airlines.

Cargo airlines in Africa have their fair share of challenges. Notes Gadhia: “Most cargo aircraft are old and uneconomical in fuel consumption, which makes them expensive to run – 50 to 58 per cent of our costs go to buying fuel”.

Many people regard it a prohibitively expensive luxury to transport cargo by air because it costs much more than road transport.

Expansion plan

Air cargo freight is therefore widely regarded as a means of last resort. “We have to work many times as hard as truck fleet owners to win over customers,” Gadhia observes.

Gadhia says Astral is eyeing the West and southern African markets in its expansion plans: “We also hope to replace our ageing fleet with modern, fuel-friendly aircraft”.

Addressing delegates at the inaugural Aviation Suppliers and Stakeholders Convention organized by the African Airlines Association (AFRAA) in Nairobi in Marxh, where he was among the select presenters, Gadhia regretted that 90% of all perishables exported from Africa were transported by foreign airlines.

He said there was need for more cargo airlines in Africa, where national carriers transport the bulk of cargo not handled by the foreign freighters. He said older aircraft of the Boeing family should be modified and converted into cargo fliers.

News bytes >> Paperless Air Travel on the Way An application that allows passengers to use their mobile phone for the journey, from booking right through to boarding the aircraft, to help make paperless air travel a reality, may soon be hitting the African aviation industry.

The CUUPS (Common Use Passenger Processing System) technology developed by SITA (Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques), a firm which delivers and manages business solutions for airline, airport, GDS, government and other customers over the world’s most extensive network, is set to make passenger management systems easier.

The world’s smallest full-function checkin kiosk and the world’s first passenger bagdrop solution allows a single bag-drop counter to be used to service passengers from several airlines in the same queue – an innovation that will ensure a faster process flow.

SITA was also the first service provider for the industry to develop a Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) software tool specially designed to accurately measure carbon emissions and fuel burn from aircraft in tonkilometres in line with the new EU regulatory requirements.

>> File Your Nails While Storing a Quarter Million Songs

How many times have you wished you could store all of your music and movies on the same device you use to tidy up your hangnails?

Hundreds at the very least … right?

Well, Victorinox to the rescue.

The venerable Swiss army knife-maker will be shipping its new SSD model later in the year with encrypted storage ranging from 64Gb to a whopping 1Tb. Price tags will be as huge as the storage capacity, with the premium version expected to retail for US$3,000.

April 2012

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Business |

Expansion

By ANDREW NJUGUNA

Africa Looks to Expand as Fleet, Passenger Numbers, Profits Grow

S

everal African airlines have admitted to reeling from the effects of ground infrastructural challenges that have impacted negatively on their staying airborne within the continent amid the pressing need to expand fleets.

A good look at Nairobi reveals that JKIA served about 5.5 million passengers in 2010, with a further rise to over 6.8 million last year. But the airports infrastructure can no longer handle this huge growth in number of passengers.

Quagmires

Expert analysts on the Renaissance Capital Airlines and Airports Report in Africa and the Middle East have looked at prevailing aviation business quagmires. “KQ wants to grow too, but the rights issue to kick-start a new round of aircraft purchases is tough to place. Even if successful, the risks are high as competition for travel in Africa is getting stronger.”

Other major African airports have registered teeming activity as they strive to expand their facilities to meet passenger demand for topnotch safety and service standards so as keep airlines, especially national carriers, relevant in the competitive African skies.

Arguably Africa’s busiest airport, Oliver Tambo International Airport in South Africa which underwent expansion ahead of the 2010 World Cup and handled 28 million passengers in 2010 and another 18.5 million in 2011, is well ahead of the pack.

Its closest equal, Cairo International Airport, handled 16.1 million in 2011 but its management has proceeded to close its terminal 2 until 2013 for complete renovation after which it will host

16 |

AIRBUS A340-300: Coming soon to Addis

8.5 million passengers per year. Bole International Airport in Ethiopia only allows for parking of 19 aircraft, but is already increasing its capacity to 44 aircraft at a cost of $62 million. That will include an additional runway to handle any size of aircraft, including Boeing 747s and Airbus A340s.

Expansion

Nigeria’s Murtala Muhammed International Airport can currently clear 6.27 million passengers per annum, but it is still in the phase of exploring its private sector for funds towards expansion.

Tanzania is going around the issue in a diverse fashion. It is formulating a multi-million dollar transformation of Kilimanjaro International Airport with an eye to building it into an informational hub.

The plan will see all runways, aprons, taxiways and newcomer lounges refurbished to offer holidaymakers a hassle-free outing

on the northern Tanzania travel circuit.

The Kilimanjaro Airport Development Company (Kadco) has secured a $30 million loan from a Netherlands-based organization, Orion Grand Facility, to finance the venture.

Other factors affecting airlines are the outlook on the European debt crisis, political unrest in Egypt and Nigeria, mounting aviation regulator fees per country and escalating fuel prices whose weight is still felt three months after world fuel prices dropped significantly.

However, as the African airports grow and expand, there will be increased pressure on their management to be moved from State parastatals such as the Kenya Airports Authority. The common trend across the world is for private companies to come in and build the airports through concessions and to further invite bidders to compete for management contracts.

Etihad Launches EA Flights

Etihad Airways – recognized as the World’s Leading Airline by the World Travel Awards – recently announced the start of flights to Nairobi, its first destination in East Africa. A daily service from Abu Dhabi to Nairobi begun on April 1 this year, operated by a two-class A320 aircraft with 16 Pearl Business class and 120 Coral Economy seats.

“This new route will allow Etihad to tap into large traffic flows between East Africa, North Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent,” the airline’s chief executive officer, Mr James Hogan, said.

Etihad’s strategy is to target areas of strong growth in emerging economies such as North, East and Central Africa and it has a number of other destinations

under active consideration.

Nairobi is an ideal addition to Etihad’s global footprint. There are 38,000 Kenyan nationals residing in the UAE and there are large and established point-to-point traffic flows between the two countries.

Also, Abu Dhabi and Kenya have much in common economically. “Both have 2030 plans in which tourism plays a vital role and the UAE is one of the largest exporters to the country,” Hogan added.

Nairobi becomes the 72nd destination in Etihad’s global network and the return flights will create a new link between the two capital cities of Kenya and the United Arab Emirates.

Biz bytes >> Ethiopian’s new jumbos grow destinations to 129 In keeping up with the competitive African aviation industry, Ethiopian Airlines recently acquired 10 new planes in its expansion programme, a move which positions the carrier as a leading service provider in the region. Mr Zemene Nega, senior vice president of the airline, said the planes will increase its travel destinations to at least 129, up from the current 79.

Ethiopian projects that the passenger traffic will rise to 18 million by 2025, from the current 4.5 million passengers.

Nega announced the purchase of the planes to delegates attending the 21st Annual African Aviation Conference and Exhibition held last month at Safari Park Hotel in Nairobi. “We have placed orders for the planes,” he confirmed, adding that the initial investment for the growth strategy is “very heavy”.

>>Seoul-Nairobi Direct Flight

Air Mauritius Cuts Down on Long-haul Flights Africa’s fourth largest national airline, Air Mauritius, has reduced its long-haul flights and disposed of an Airbus plane following a ninemonth spate of losses. The move comes a time when the carrier announced a loss of $28 million for the three quarters through December 2011, compared with a $5.34 million profit a year earlier, the Port Louis-based company said in a statement. “The current situation is worse than initial forecasts,” said Mr Andre Viljoen, the acting CEO. “Results for the full year will be “significantly impacted” by the debt crisis in Europe, a stronger rupee against the euro and higher fuel prices, the airline, which carries

about half of its passengers flying into the Mauritius, Viljoen added.

Europe is the Indian Ocean island nation’s biggest source of tourists, accounting for 63% last year, according to Mauritius’s national statistics agency. Arrivals declined to 2.2% in December, a peak tourist month.

The rupee has gained 6.5% against the euro since the start of last year, according to data compiled

by Bloomberg. A five-year plan will return the company to profitability in the 2013-2014 financial year, said Viljoen. Long-haul weekly flights will be cut to focus on fewer, routes with additional frequencies leading to an unused airbus A340-300 being “packed for sale,” he said.

South Korea recently announced plans to launch a direct- flight service from Seoul to Nairobi in June this year. The announcement news was made by the South Korean Ambassador to Kenya, Mr Syeong Woo, during the handing over ceremony of training equipment to the Athi River Training and Development Center located southeast of Nairobi.

“Korea is launching a direct route SeoulNairobi flight in June this year. The direct flight will provide an ideal opportunity for Kenya to take a stride forward in development, increase employment and benefit from technology transfer by having a strengthened relationship with East African countries, including Korea,” said Woo.

April 2012

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Business |

Economy

By ANDREW NJUGUNA

I

Aviation Plays Important Role in African Economy

n Africa, more than 6 million jobs and $67.8 billion in GDP are supported by aviation, according to a new report released by the Air Transport Action Group (ATAG) and Oxford Economics.

It outlines an industry that plays a larger role in both the African and global economy than many would expect.

According to Paul Steele, ATAG Executive Director, in Africa alone aviation directly employs over 250,000 people. “If we include indirect employment at suppliers to the industry, induced employment from spending by aviation industry employees and the jobs in tourism that air transport makes possible, this increases the regional figure to 6.7 million jobs,” said Steele. In addition, African economies derive substantial benefits from the spending of tourists traveling by air.

Benefits

Aviation’s economic benefits spread far beyond the monetary aspects outlined here. When you take into account the further benefits gained through the speed and reliability of air travel, the businesses that exist because air freight makes them possible and the intrinsic value to the economy of improved connectivity, the economic impact would be several times larger.

For Africa, forecasts indicate that passenger numbers are expected to almost triple from 67.7 million in 2010 to over 150.3 million in 2030.

Meanwhile, cargo volumes are projected to rise at a rate of 5.2% per annum. “The African continent can really take advantage of the benefits that aviation provides over the coming decades. Already, over 1.5 million livelihoods in Africa are supported through the trade in fresh produce to the UK alone. Tourism is another area

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EXPORT EARNINGS: Many businesses exist, like this Kenyan horticulturist’s because air freight makes them possible

for potential growth, providing longterm sustainable development of the economy.”

The report also outlined the role aviation plays at a global level, supporting 56.6 million jobs worldwide and $2.2 trillion of the world’s GDP. There are some 1,500 commercial airlines using nearly 24,000 aircraft to serve 3,800 airports around the globe.

Returns

The expansion in air transport activity witnessed in Africa is set to generate significant economic returns, particularly in terms of trade activity and tourism. Africa is a continent where surface transport infrastructure is very poor. Aviation offers benefits in social, economic and political integration of countries, regions and indeed the huge continent. While this report will help promote the very important role aviation has on the African continent, it also recognizes the

contribution aviation makes to longterm sustainable growth aimed at balancing economic prosperity with social responsibility and a reduction of environmental impact.

The major issue of aviation safety is being addressed by the industry and the United Nations specialized agency for aviation, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

All players are working to improve the region’s safety record through training and the implementation of safety management systems across the continent.

Says Ali Tounsi, General Secretary of Airports Council International Africa: “Figures in the report show that if Africa’s growth potential is fulfilled, more economic growth and more jobs are set to follow. However, whereas our airports are likely to be able to cope with this projected growth, the skills shortage in particular poses a short-term obstacle – we have jobs, but need well-trained people to take them.

Apple’s Apotheosis: The Half-trillion Dollar Corp

Biz bytes

>> Virgin Galactic Gears Up to Go Orbital

Apple Incorporated, formerly Apple Computer Company Inc., is the world’s most valuable publicly traded company. The technology giant overtook Exxon Mobil after volatile market conditions in early March saw the oil giant’s stock prices take another hit, continuing a two-week slump.

Apple’s shares put on more than $9.65 to close at $535.41 after the company sent out a cryptic invitation for an event in San Francisco in mid-

March saying: “We have something you really have to see” This gives the iconic technology group a market capitalization of $499.2 billion, according to data from Bloomberg.

Apple’s value has risen by an incredible 41 per cent in the last year, thanks largely to the success of the iPad 2 launch and the continued prominence of the iPhone 4 and Mac computer lines.

Phoenix Sets Pace in Safety Technology Phoenix Aviation has raised the bar for safety systems by fitting enhanced ground proximity warning equipment to the Company’s fleet of executive twin jets, a King Air 350 and a Cessna Caravan. In addition, a satellite tracking system has been installed in their operations room at Wilson Airport.

The enhanced ground proximity warning system is over and above the requirement of Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems (TCAS) specified by the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority (KCAA).The system, which shows high ground on a screen in the instrument panel of the aircraft, warns the pilot to gain altitude and shows the rate of climb required to clear the high ground in safety.

“The purchase of enhanced ground proximity warning equipment for our aircraft and the satellite tracking system for our operations room are part of an on-going safety programme”, said Captain Rob Cork, the Director of Flight Operations of Phoenix Aviation.

Pilots at Phoenix Aviation receive simulator training in Britain annually, covering the use of the enhanced ground proximity warning system and TCAS. Through radio signals between aircraft, TCAS gives the pilot instructions to climb, or descend, to avoid a collision. The satellite tracking system which has been installed in the operations room is a major safety measure.

Virgin Galactic announced plans to test-fly its first spacecraft beyond the Earth’s atmosphere this year, with a commercial suborbital passenger service to follow in 2013 or 2014, company officials said in March. The latest venture of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group confirmed that nearly 500 customers have signed up for rides on Spaceship Two, a six-passenger, two-pilot spaceship being built and tested by Scaled Composites, an aerospace company founded by aircraft designer Burt Rutan and now owned by Northrop Grumman.

The suborbital flights, which cost $200,000 per person, are designed to reach an altitude of about 68 miles, giving fliers a few minutes to experience zero gravity and glimpse Earth set against the blackness of space. Neil Armstrong, a former US test pilot for the 1960s-era X-15 research plane, astronaut and commander of the first mission to land on the moon, expressed the need to venture back to space: “In the suborbital area, there are a lot of things to be done. This is an area that has been essentially absent for about four decades”.

“There’s a lot of opportunity”, Armstrong told about 400 people attending the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Palo Alto, California. “I certainly hope that some of the new approaches will prove to be profitable and useful”.

Virgin Galactic is the most visible of a handful of companies developing spaceships for tourism, research, educational and business purposes.

SpaceShip Two, the first of Virgin’s planned fiveship fleet, has completed 31 atmospheric test flights – 15 attached to its carrier aircraft WhiteKnight Two, and 16 glide tests, William Pomerantz, Virgin Galactic’s vice president of special projects, said in a speech to the conference.

Preparations for the ship’s first rocket-powered flights are under way at Scaled Composites’ Mojave, California operations base, and planned test liftoffs are expected to take place this year.“We hope to have the rocket motor in the spaceship later this year and start powered flight testing”, Virgin Galactic chief test pilot David Mackay told the conference.

“We would like to be the first to do this, but we’re not in a race with anyone. This is not a Cold Warera space race.” He said passenger service could begin in 2013 or 2014, depending on the results of the test flights and other factors, such as pilot training.

No one knows what the suborbital spaceflight market might be worth, but Andrew Nelson, chief operating officer of XCOR Aerospace, another aspiring commercial space line, put the figure at $1 trillion. XCOR, which announced in March it had closed a $5 million round of equity funding, now has enough money to manufacture its Lynx suborbital vehicle. The company charges $90,000 for rides.

April 2012

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Technology |

Space Weather

Flights Rerouted as Earth Experiences Solar Storm It was never seen as a threat to people, just technology, and teased sky-watchers with the prospect of more-colorful-than-usual lights , reports ANDREW NJUGUNA

T

he strongest space weather storm in five years recently struck Earth in March, causing some airlines to reroute their flights, threatening power disruptions and sparking a spectacular show of the Northern Lights.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the agency of the United States government responsible for the nation’s civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research, and other agencies elsewhere had earlier warned that the storm had the potential to disrupt global positioning systems (GPS), satellites and power grids, and had already caused some air carriers to change their planes’ polar flight paths.

Potential for damage was real

It was never seen as a threat to people, just technology, and teased sky-watchers with the prospect of more-colorful-than-usual lights dipping further over the skies.

Some experts were concerned that because the world, especially the aviation industry, is more reliant on GPS and satellite technology now than it was during the last solar maximum, more disruptions to modern life are likely. The solar flares alone can cause brief high frequency radio blackouts that have already passed unnoticed.

The storm, which started with a solar flare, caused a stir because forecasts were for a strong storm with the potential to knock electrical grids offline, mess up GPS and harm satellites which then forced airlines

20 |

to reroute a few flights thereafter.

Traveling at 2.7 million mph, the storm was more a magnetic breeze than a gust of wind. The power stayed on. So did GPS and satellites in space.

But while some experts think the threat from the solar storm had just passed by, and perhaps fizzled, space weather forecasters warned that it was still too early to relax. That was because there is a possibility that the storm’s cosmic shooting effects could continue and even intensify through the coming months.

“It looks to me like it’s over,” NASA solar physicist David Hathaway said after noticing a drop in a key magnetic reading. “It just didn’t pack as strong a magnetic field as we were anticipating,” said Jeffrey Hughes, director of the Center for Integrated Space Weather Modeling at Boston University.

Relatively quiet . . . until recently

However, Doug Biesecker, a space scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center,

Techbytes which forecasts solar storms, said was premature. He pointed to an increase in a different magnetic field measurement from their end.

Astronomers say the sun has been relatively quiet for some time.

And this storm, forecast to be strong and ending up minor, still may seem fiercer because Earth has been lulled by several years of weak solar activity.

Storms like this start with sunspots. First, there’s an initial solar flare of subatomic particles that resembles a filament coming out of the sun.

That part usually reaches Earth only minutes after the initial

burst, bringing radio and radiation disturbances. Next is the coronal mass ejection, which looks like a growing bubble and takes a couple of days to reach Earth.

Solar storms have three ways they can disrupt technology on Earth: with magnetic, radio and radiation emissions. In 1989, a strong solar storm knocked out the power grid in Quebec, causing 6 million people to lose power.

Scientist Joe Kunches initially figured the storm would be the worst since 2006, but now it seems only as bad as ones a few months ago. The strongest storm in recorded history was probably in 1859, he said.

Europe’s Vega Launcher off to a Bright Start

Although there is a growing tendency for satellites to become larger, there is still a need for a small launcher to place 300-to2,000kg satellites, economically, into the polar and low-Earth orbits used for many scientific and Earth observation missions.

Europe’s answer to these needs is Vega, named after the second brightest star in the northern hemisphere. Vega will make access to space easier, quicker and cheaper.

Costs are being kept to a minimum by using advanced low-cost technologies and by introducing an optimized synergy with existing production facilities

used for Arianne launchers.

Vega has been designed as a single-body launcher with three solid propulsion stages and an additional liquid propulsion upper module used for altitude and orbit control and satellite release.

Unlike most small launchers, Vega is able to place multiple payloads into orbit.

Development of the launcher started in 1998. The first Vega lifted off on 13 February 2012 and conducted a flawless qualification flight from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, where the Arianne 1 launch facilities have been adapted for its use.

>> Next Generation Aircraft Bring High Tech into the Classroom

More than 1,600 orders for Next Generation aircraft – Boeing 787, Airbus A380 and A350 – are currently placed by airlines worldwide, with the African region forming a leading market for the wide-body deliveries. The increasing popularity of new generation aircraft reflects the change in the overall industry philosophy and the prevalent fleet management strategies.

The place where new generation high-tech maintenance specialists are being cultivated is the classroom, complete with modern maintenance training programs.

Next generation aircraft are packed with new technologies and differ from previous generation pieces in many respects. For example, 20 per cent of the Airbus A380 airframe is made of composite materials. Both Boeing 787 and Airbus A380 (or A350) are equipped with an Integrated Modular Interface – a real-time computer network airborne system. Even the concept of aircraft engines is changing – Rolls-Royce and General Electric B787 engines share the same standard electrical interface that allows relatively fast and cheap shift between the engines of different manufacturers.

Modern international technical training centers have significantly advanced since the dawn of the B747 era. In order to meet the market demands and trends, these centers are shifting their programs from ‘book-based’ to ‘computer-based’.

Nowadays modern classrooms are packed with 2D/3D visualizations – with their help future maintenance personnel can now scrutinize every single part of any airplane type.

>> Wireless Interface for Cabin Management Systems Apple have developed the all new iCabin software, an application available for iPad mobile digital devices which provides wireless control of cabin management systems (CMSs).

This application connects an iPad to an aircraft’s CMS, providing passengers with a remote control for sound, video and cabin lighting. The new application is available for aircraft equipped with approved Wi-Fi sources, a trend which most airlines are fast embracing.

The fully customized iPad application doesn’t interfere with other on-board systems or change functionality. iCabin may also be used to control most audio and video equipment, depending on the user’s preference. A wireless cabin control application for Android devices is also being tested.

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Technology |

Cover Story

Each day, approximately 130,000 passengers use Thales in-flight entertainment systems. That’s nearly 50 million viewers per year –and the number keeps on growing

The Rise and Rise of In-Flight Entertainment

By SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

W

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Photography | courtesy

ith brilliant colour menu screens that take the passenger to a captivating range of on-demand multi-language movies, music, games, map applications and more, In-Flight Entertainment (IFE) ranks as a top priority for air travelers.

Large-screen displays at every passenger seat are common today. And with the explosion of potable consumer electronics, such as laptops, iPods and digital cameras, the InFlight Entertainment system now interfaces with such products, providing in-seat power

Photography | courtesy

TopSeries system, which is expected to be a signature product.

The new TopSeries system

and enabling passengers to watch programmers from their device in the in-seat display. Connectivity through the IFE system is still in its infancy, although in-flight mobile phone services are already taking off.

Air travelers want the same entertainment experience in the air as they have on the ground, and as a younger generation take over the cabin, demands for new capability will grow.

In-Flight Entertainment plays a key role in passage perceptions about an airline. After an airline sells a ticket, its focus is to sell another ticket, which makes the experience between ticket purchases critical to passenger loyalty. Entertainment choice, personalization, revenue generation and airline promotion are drivers that formulate the airline’s IFE model. The critical touch point is the in-seat menu screen that lures the passenger into an entertainment experience.

Thales’s IFE organization and business

In-Flight Entertainment is already a $1.4 billion industry and is projected to grow to $3.2 billion by 2018.

In 1999, Thales entered the IFE market with a game-changing system

The business runs on nearly 1,000 employees who collectively speak over 20 different languages and have a common vision to be the best – not necessarily the biggest – IFE provider in the world

”

called TopSeries. Today, the product is geared to large carriers that spend millions per aircraft on IFE because they believe it is strategic to their market position.

The heart of Thales’s IFE business is in Irvine, California, where systems are exported to nearly every continent. Airline and Original Equipment Manufacturer relationships are managed by dedicated regional teams in the US, South America, the UK, France, Germany, Singapore, China and the Middle East. Some 60 world airlines have put their trust in the Thales, purchasing close to 1,500 systems to date.

Each system is comprised of more than 3,000 components and delivery rate averages 120 systems per year. Once in revenue service, each aircraft and passenger seat is monitored and maintained around the clock, every day.

The business runs on nearly 1,000 employees who collectively speak over 20 different languages and have a common vision to be the best – not necessarily the biggest – IFE provider in the world. Thales is in a two-horse race against a strong competitor, Panasonic, who has been in the business three times as long. In 2012, Thales will unveil its next-generation

Like earlier versions, the core of the new system can be described as Linux-based on-board Internet with high-capacity digital servers, a gigabit Ethernet network, and seat electronics with a unique IP address at each passenger seat. Top Series is like a medium office IT enterprise; except there is no IT help desk anywhere.

What makes the new TopSeries evolutionary is greater system redundancy for the best reliability, faster processing performance for more capability, consolidated component design for 30% less weight and power requirements, and enhanced industrial design for contemporary cabin aesthetics and user ergonomics. The new Top Series has already been accepted by Airbus and Boeing for A350 and B787 aircraft.

Creating the passenger experience – innovation at the seat The in-seat monitor, called the Smart Video Display Unit (SVDU), is the best ever. Available in four attractive colours, the SVDU will manage 256GB of storage for content redundancy, is capable of handling high-definition video for best picture quality, and has four ports (including USB) to accommodate passengers’ personal devices.

The product is sleek and its modular design supports ease of maintenance. To give passengers more leg room, the electronic box under the seat was eliminated by moving its processing functions to SVDU. The new TopSeries has already been recognized by the IFE industry, winning a ‘Best in Technology’ award for its Touch Passenger Media Unit (Touch PMU). A revolutionary handheld passenger device, the product in prototype stage has a 3.8 inch LCD screen with resolution of 800x 400 pixels. It incorporates ARM Cortex technology for PC performance at mobile phone power levels and capacitive touch technology for smooth-to-thetouch navigation. The Unit uses the Android operating system, which opens the door to a multitude of offthe-shelf applications offered in the Turn to P24

April 2012

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Technology |

Cover Story

From P23

Google marketplace and integrates their own mobile applications.

The TouchPMU doubles the entertainment experience and gives airlines a new way to differentiate.

Delivering on our promise – from Lean to Probasis

Going from zero to 60 airline customers in record time required the deployment of Lean and Six Sigma principles throughout the organization.

In 2005, a cultural shift began with the elimination of processes that did not add value to the customer and the introduction of those that did. Continuous improvement of products, services and processes is engrained into the IFE organization, embracing both Lean and Thales’s new Probasis initiative.

Engineering

The engineering department is responsible for system specification, design,software/hardware development, integration, testing and validation of the IFE system.

IFE test platforms are arranged by customer with over 50 active labs at any one time.

Tests today involve a complete system configuration, consisting of the same parts and software that are installed on the aircraft.

However, a new IFE simulator that provides full-scale test capability without all the hardware is in prototype stage and is targeted to improve testing capabilities, reduce lab space, lab power and lab hardware starting in 2012.

Operations

The operations department covers most of the hardware product life cycle. With its partners, the Thales IFE business delivers up to 27,000 parts monthly, with nearperfect on time delivery (OTD) and acceptance rates.

Operations achieved 100% OTD with Boeing for the last seven months and an A rating with Airbus.

With optimized production cells, Key Performance Indicators (KPI) root cause analysis and permanent corrective actions.

Operations have robust processes in place to

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manage rapidly changing demand and mitigate technical and supply chain risks.

Programme management

Every programme is a major undertaking focused on the goal of meeting customer expectations within budget.

The challenges range from technical to schedule as the numerous interdependencies are managed. No two programmes are alike, but the reward is the same when the aircraft is delivered.

Service and Support

Because IFE has a direct impact on passenger satisfaction and, ultimately, loyalty, airlines sometimes delay flights due to IFE problems and have compensated passengers too.

The difference between the number of operational seats at takeoff and landing is a closely watched reliability measure, with 100%

operational as the target. In over 20 airports around the world, Thales IFE personnel meet more than 6,000 aircraft monthly.

Tracking and supporting field activity is managed through Thales’s Airline Operations Canter (AOC), which provides 24/7/365 continuous system monitoring.

The IFE system is on e of the new few systems on the aircraft that interacts with flight crews, maintenance crews and passengers.

Crew training is essential to minimize user error and ensure airline personnel are confident with operating the system. Thales provides classroom and online training so airline trainers and their crew of members keep up to date.

When IFE parts fail through normal wear-and-tear or passenger accidents, such as spilling beverages on the handsets, fast repair ranks high with airlines.

Thales has a global network of

Photography | courtesy

repair stations for quick and efficient turnaround times.

Media Services

Organizing, packaging and delivering to each aircraft entertainment content, applications and updated GUIs is an ongoing detailed process.

Daily interactions with the airline, film studios, encoding labs, services providers and application developers is the task of a specialized team that operates under strict policies and in a controlled environment for piracy protection.

Tens of thousands of content, image and text files pass through Thales’s content lab each month and are delivered to the aircraft at the same time as the monthly in-flight magazine.

To automate content management, Thales has developed an online collaborative tool that enables the content management

Thales has a global network of repair stations for quick and efficient turnaround times

”

process to move faster and more accurately.

The Way ahead

Aircraft production and passenger travel forecasts are strong over the next 10 years, which is an excellent indicator for in-flight entertainment.

While the new TopSeries system will be Thales’s superior IFE system system for the high-end market, the firm will enter new markets with a lower-cost product for single-aisle aircraft.

New innovations will continue to be introduced following consumer

trends, and the system applications could extend into an airline’s IT enterprise.

New technologies such as the iPad do inspire Thales’s thinking and could influence product decisions.

Connectivity to Wi-Fi and satellite networks will add another layer of functionality to the IFE systems of the future.

Thales’s partnership with Boeing, Airbus, Embraer and Bombardier will continue to evolve, and the company’s new relationship with COMAC, a Chinese airframe maker, is a new opportunity.

Working closely with Thales country and division leadership around the world, the firm can mature relationships with airlines, bringing their vision into Thales’s offering.

Customer loyalty is the ultimate indicator of Thales’s success – and to the best IFE provider in the world takes the global Thales team.

April 2012

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IndustryAnalysis |

Accident

Analyst Accuses Ethiopian Airlines of ‘Stone Age’ PR & Media Strategies

I

Two years after a terrible tragedy in Lebanon, one of Africa’s largest and oldest carriers is still locked in an unsavoury dispute over the cause of an accident that took 92 lives. By AMY FALLON

t’s just over two years since an Ethiopian Airlines jet crashed into the Mediterranean Sea minutes after taking off from Beirut, killing 92 passengers and crew.

For the families whose loved ones perished that day, the pain and frustration continues. Recently Ethiopia’s national carrier, one of Africa’s largest and oldest, rejected a Lebanese investigation which found pilot error was to blame for the tragedy. They are refusing to rule out sabotage, a shoot-down or lightning.

Meanwhile a legal case against Boeing by families of the airline’s passengers remains unsettled.

There was stormy weather when flight ET 409 plunged into the sea about 2.30am on January 25, 2010, shortly after departing Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International bound forthe Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.

Witnesses later recalled hearing an explosion and seeing a ball of fire in the sky.

“There was huge thunder and it was raining like crazy. The lightning was coming down from the clouds.

The electricity had gone out, but I couldn’t sleep. Then I heard an explosion”, Hassan Ramadan, a 39-year-old engineering contractor from Khalde, in the south of Beirut, told the Guardian newspaper of London.

“I thought it was a building collapsing. I opened the window and saw a huge flame going down in different pieces. I can’t believe what happened. You usually only

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Ethiopian Airlines have not had a crash since 1996, when a hijacked767200ER aircraft dived into the sea off Comoros

”

see that on TV.” Those who died in the crash include 56 Lebanese, 22 Ethiopians, and individuals from the US, Canada, Syria, Iraq and Russia.

As people rushed to hospitals to carry out the heartbreaking task of identifying family members, a war of words erupted between Lebanon and Ethiopia.

Rage

“Why do you Lebanese never treat us good?” raged one Ethiopian woman, prevented from viewing the body of her sister at a government hospital in Beirut.

Many Ethiopians killed in the accident were young women who had gone to Lebanon to effectively work as slaves for wealthy families, according to human rights campaigners. The hostilities between the two countries, which centre around the cause of the crash, have continued since the

accident. On January 17 this year, just eight days before the second anniversary of the tragedy, a Lebanese report concluded that the pilot and co-pilot were entirely responsible for it. They had both worked for 51 days straight and were exhausted when they took to the skies, according to the investigation.

Lebanese officials also claim the pilot ignored instructions from the control tower, the same accusations they made in the aftermath of the accident. Ethiopian Airlines have not had a crash since 1996, when a hijacked767-200ER aircraft dived into the sea off Comoros.Ten of the 12 crew members and 117 of the 160 passengers were killed.

Witnessing the 2010 incident, said Captain Desta Zeru, VP Flight Operations of Ethiopian Airlines, were pilots from other airlines who had seen a “ball of fire on the aircraft

in the air” before recordings of the Digital Flight Data Recorder and the Cockpit Voice Recorder stopped at 1300ft and the aircraft disappeared from the radar screen.

“The last cockpit voice recording was also a loud noise which sounds like an explosion. All these facts clearly indicate that the aircraft disintegrated in the air due to explosion, which could have been caused by a shoot-down, sabotage, or lightning strike,” he said in a statement released at the time of the report.

The investigation was slammed for being biased, lacking evidence, incomplete and factually inaccurate

by Ethiopian Airlines’ CEO Tewolde Gebremariam.

He insisted both pilots onboard the Boeing 737-800 were “properly trained and qualified”.

“The captain had over 20 years of experience with a total time of 10,233 hours and the crew pairing was in accordance with approved policy.

The crew duty and rest time was in accordance with the regulation,” he said. “Any characterization of our pilots contrary to the foregoing is pure fabrication that cannot stand any scrutiny.”

On the day of the crash the Lebanese government ruled out terrorism, blaming the incident on the stormy weather. According to one story, an early analysis showed a severe mechanical failure probably caused the tragedy.

Black box

Three months on, Lebanon said data recovered from the black box showed all instruments were working well until the plane came down.

The crash doesn’t appear to have affected the reputation of Ethiopian Airlines, who announced in November that it had received an accolade from the African Airlines Association (AFRAA) for being consistently profitable and recording the best financial results in 2010. The carrier was also handed the 2011 African Cargo Airline of the Year Award.

As Ugandan-based aviation expert and blogger, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang H. Thome, pointed out, “every crash affects the reputation of an airline”.

“Though I find myself that because of the limited options people have in Africa to fly, that is not playing as significant a role as it

The crash doesn’t appear to have affected the reputation of Ethiopian Airlines, who announced in November that it had received an accolade from the African Airlines Association (AFRAA) for being consistently profitable and recording the best financial results in 2010

”

would in America or Europe, where lawsuits would continue to dominate the papers,” he said.

He’s referring to the multi-million dollar lawsuit filed against Boeing in March 2010 by relatives of those who died onboard ET 409. One lawyer representing the families, US attorney Manuel von Ribbeck, labeled as insufficient the reported US$20,000 in compensation per passenger currently being offered by the airline’s insurance companies.

Von Ribbeck has said he would be seeking upwards of a million dollars for each victim represented by his firm.

In a statement to Aviation East Africa, Boeing said it did not comment on pending or ongoing litigation.

Condolences

But it said, “we offer our heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of those lost in the accident, and we continue to keep everyone affected in our thoughts and prayers”.

Ethiopian Airlines, meanwhile, is moving forward in a bid to remain Africa’s number one airline. Ethiopian, which flies to 56 destinations, recently became the Star Alliance’s third African carrier.

Ethiopian Airlines ShebaMiles participants can now earn miles when flying on any Star Alliance member carrier, with the collected miles counting towards achieving ShebaMiles Silver Club or Gold Club status, the airline announced in December. All collected miles can be redeemed for flights operated by any Star Alliance member carrier.

The announcement coincided with the arrival of the B787

Dreamliner as part of Boeing’s B787 World Tour.

Despite the fanfare from some sections of the media, not everyone was impressed. Wolfgang said this is one example of how Ethiopian Airlines is “rooted in the media stone age”.

“Coverage was considerably less for those two events than for instance the coverage on the B787 showcasing in Nairobi or the entry of other airlines into Star and that I consider a crying shame,” he said.

“Positive engagement with travel media, travel writers and the use of the new social media compares poorly with such other regional African airlines like Kenya Airways or even RwandAir. “The latter are courting the media, embrace social networks and actively seek out key bloggers and travel writers to get their messages out into the new ‘cyber world.”

He says the airline seems “almost constrained”, maybe because of its culture and apparent “political aversion” to engage positively with mainstream and new media sources.

“Getting information is like pulling teeth and the harder it is to get details and updates, the less likely it is for them to get the level of exposure and media spotlight they actually should get, considering their fleet size, destination network and overall successes,” he said.

I think it is time for Ethiopian to ‘wake up’ and fully embrace the media opportunities which now exist to move their PR and media relations to the same top level as their operational and financial abilities and successes.”

April 2012

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Dispatch |

New York

Letter from

New York By lARS DABNEY

Manhattan’s Vacant Skies I

n early November of 2010, just as New York’s autumn began to show the symptoms of its wintry cancer, a video was uploaded to youtube. It contained three minutes and two seconds of unadulterated ingenuity, bravura, and arrogance, a potent mixture that guaranteed immediate Internet stardom.

It was a film, quite simply, of flying.

The crew behind the film, flying under the flag of Team Black Sheep, were not content with the usual paraphernalia: hot air balloons or helicoptered fly-bys or throwing one’s camera from a very great height and hoping it (or at least the tape) emerges in one piece.

Nor were they content with the usual buffet of lush valleys, ample farmlands, and fractured mountains that make up the backdrop of most flight scenes on film.

They went for the jugular instead.

The film they produced—entitled simply New York City—was shot by

28 |

attaching a high-resolution digital camera to a remote controlled airplane (don’t call it a ‘toy’, lest ye risk their wrath) with a six-foot wingspan. They then piloted that plane through all the yawning glass canyons and rusted redbrick detritus of the one city where—if anywhere—people are likely to get twitchy if you mention planes flying between the buildings.

Eerie Sense There is a certain fear that accompanies watching this video, and it is not unique to New Yorkers. The entire world has seen the footage of the planes hitting the twin towers so many times that an eerie sense of de ja vu, as their plane swoops in on Manhattan’s scarred southern tip, is unavoidable. But whatever fear may creep across one’s skin quickly dissipates as one thought overwhelms the mind: this is exactly what that dream was like.

The video is beautiful, and dreamlike, but

perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that no-one was arrested or disappeared into Patriot Act purgatory as a result of its making. The team’s pilot, one Trappy, had performed a cursory check online to see if there were any laws prohibiting their plan.

Finding none (a task for which one traditionally pays thousands of dollars to actual lawyers, who pay thousands more dollars for access to actual legal databases), the Team steamed merrily on ahead. City police briefly interrupted their flight plan but, after some polite explaining, permitted things to proceed.

This is remarkable because New York has fairly tight—some might say claustrophobic—laws about its airspace.

There are a plethora of reasons for this, and 9/11 isn’t the only one.

Well before the Day That Changed Everything, the city government had already left a heavy footprint on helicopter licenses, small plane flight permissions, and

commercial airway routing, all in an effort to keep planes and skyscrapers out of each other’s aluminium hair.

These laws are almost unprecedented in their scope and their paranoia. This is because—as you may have noticed—New York has one of the highest densities of high-rise buildings in the entire world.

Few people are aware that the reason no other skyline looks like New York has nothing to do with it being the greatest city on earth (which it is) or with its denizens being conspicuously wealthy (most are not).

This one is all about geography and geology.

Schist The bottom end of Manhattan, which makes up about three per cent of the city whole but about ninety-eight per cent of its Hollywood credits, is composed of an enormous lump of schist that caps off a spine running the length of the island.

That schist bedrock’s presence at the heart of an existing city, at the mouth of an exceptional natural harbor, allowed the construction of hundreds of skyscrapers close enough to hit your neighbor’s sixtysecond floor window with a well-fired spitball.

The sheer number of glossy tall buildings in Manhattan makes a tempting playground for any cocksure cockpit jockey with a Cessna in his backyard. Any number of aviation-warfare classics have instilled the joy of the flyby in our national psyche, particularly if it upsets other people. The city is more than aware of this and does its best to discourage anyone from replicating the Death Star bombing-run scene from Star Wars down the middle of Amsterdam Avenue.

Sometimes regulations aren’t enough, though. There have been more than enough reminders over recent years that the empty skies over Manhattan aren’t quite as empty as they should be.

Crashed Yankees pitcher Corey Lidle and his flight instructor, Tyler Stanger, crashed their single-engine aircraft into the thirty-first and thirty-second stories of an apartment building on the Upper East Side in October of 2006, killing both men and sparking a fire that gutted several stories of the building.

News of that crash spread like wildfire over the city, buoyed by the same terrorismrelated paranoia and de ja vu that helps give Team Black Sheep’s film its sharp adrenal edge.

Though government officials established within minutes that the crash was accidental, the ghost of 9/11 had already

Towering Terror: The ghost of 9/11 had already returned to the streets of New York, with a palpable and bloody-minded vengeance.

The fact that the date was exactly one month after 9/11’s fifth anniversary did not help.

returned to the streets of New York, with a palpable and bloody-minded vengeance.

The fact that the date was exactly one month after 9/11’s fifth anniversary did not help. It was all a sane person could do to not be trampled in the stampede for the bridges.

Miraculous disaster New Yorkers received another sharp reminder—albeit a much happier-ended one—from the miraculous disaster (or disastrous miracle) of Flight 1549, on January 15, 2009. The story hardly bears repeating, particularly to an aviation crowd. Suffice to say that the realization that a plane was currently sinking into the Hudson river while its half-frozen passengers huddled on

the wings, 15 blocks from my apartment, was a strange one indeed.

The terrorists this time around were neither lunatic fundamentalists nor mechanical failures, but common Canada geese. Some halfwit administrator more obsessed with gesture than common sense decided to get genocidal on New York’s goose population in revenge, using city employees to kill 1,235 of them that summer, leading to a sudden spike in foie gras served at government dinners.

Of course, the troublesome flock caused such a problem because they were flying, which they were doing because Canada geese are migratory.

But such details should surely not get Turn to P30

April 2012

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Dispatch |

New York

From P29

in the way of a delicious (and inexpensive!) hors d’oeuvre. Most estimates put New York’s rotating goose population at around 20,000, anyways, meaning that the mass killing barely dimpled their numbers.

One month after the Miracle on the Hudson, residents of New York (the state this time) were brought viciously back to earth with the disaster of Continental Airlines’ flight 3407, several hundred miles north, in Buffalo.

The flight’s captain responded precisely the wrong way to icing conditions and a stall, leading to the deaths of all 49 persons aboard as well as one exceedingly unfortunate man sitting on his living room sofa. The incident in Buffalo added itself to a litany of reminders that New York City’s airspace is a strange and dangerous place.

Confusion Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab managed to set his drawers on fire during a Christmas Day flight of that same year. Faisal Shahzad, though grounded, dumped his scotchtape-and-craft-paper ‘bomb’ in Times Square on May 1, 2010.

And a 5.8 Richter earthquake rocked the entire eastern seaboard on the 23rd August last year, evacuating all of Manhattan’s wobbling skyscrapers just after lunch hour, and causing much confusion in the process.

But for all the fear and paranoia that sometimes goes along with looking upwards in New York, it is almost pathetically insignificant in comparison to the joys that same space can provide.

There are few places in the world like a well-situated New York rooftop (my personal preference is for canyons—lower rooftops on old, five or six story buildings, surrounded by tall high-rises like glowing glass cliffs). There is no skyline that can withstand the comparison, though many an urban planner has tried.

There are many good reasons that the more legendary comic book heroes— Spider Man, Superman, and Batman, to name a few—do their crime-fighting in New York or a fictional version thereof.

How would Spidey sling his webs if he didn’t have such a compact plethora of skyscrapers to choose from? Nothing

A 5.8 Richter earthquake rocked the entire eastern seaboard on the 23rd August last year, evacuating all of Manhattan’s wobbling skyscrapers just after lunch hour, and causing much confusion in the process” provides the same evocative grandeur, the same sense of barreling virtuosity and daredevil competence, as flying through New York. Every denizen of this city has wished that they could do it, and they have wished it more than once.

Flashback And that is why the men and women of Team Black Sheep are doing something exactly right, no matter whether they get arrested or interrogated or give PTSD flashbacks to those still haunted by 9/11.

They have taken an experience that most of us can only hope to have a dream about,

and made it a reality. They even gave it a snappy soundtrack. As with so many things in this life—as with flying itself— what begins as the tremors of fear is soon transformed into pure, unadulterated joy.

Until the day comes when I can spread my own arms and take flight, and do all this urban swooping myself, I’ll just have to be satisfied with the kind of ingenious madmen who can build a UAV-equivalent in their garage, dive bomb the Brooklyn bridge with it, then share the product of their labors with the entire world.

It’s almost as good. I just hope they don’t hit any geese.

Lawrence Dabney is a war correspondent and humanitarian lawyer based out of Washington, DC. He grew up in Perth, Western Australia, and has since lived in over half a dozen countries around the world. He is a politics editor for The Faster Times, and the founder and lead correspondent of AK Diplomacy.

His writing has appeared in Kenya’s The Star, Eclectica Esoterica magazine, and The Blue & White, among others. He is currently embedded as a reporter with US Marine forces in Afghanistan.

30 |

Dispatch |

Uganda

Letter from

Kampala

By ANGELA KINTU

When We Went Easy on Roadside Roast Meat

I

know I promised a letter from the island of honeymooning, but I am now of the opinion that it is my personal business; kindly procure your own honeymoon memories.

What I will say is that someone needs to introduce daily flights from Entebbe to the various islands on Lake Victoria. From what the resort owners told me, the ferry is subject to sudden and lengthy absences for maintenance purposes. And many decades since the white man ‘discovered’ Lake Victoria for us, Uganda has neither a port at which this ferry can be serviced nor the local manpower to do so.

32 |

A few airlines even offered a Lenten menu for those who wanted to steer clear of beef

”

The ferry buggers off to Tanzania for months on end and local enterprise is left almost at a standstill.

Ferry or not, some things are at a standstill for some people because of the season. It was recently Lent (Lent starts every year on Ash Wednesday and ends on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter Sunday.

Fasting Ash Wednesday 2012 fell on February 22, 2012, and Holy Saturday 2012 on April 7, 2012), and, for 40 days, people gave up all kinds of things in the name of fasting.

Churches were notably devoid of

weddings, as people supposedly do not have relations during Lent. However, the fact that there are loads of (Christian) babies born in October means that the baby-making airwaves are far from silent during the Lenten period of February/ March. That being as it may, weddings are a favourite and big-spending pastime for Ugandans, and without them the social (and economic) scenes are quite bland.

However, the favourite thing of choice to give up during Lent seemed to be meat. A few airlines even offered a Lenten menu for those who wanted to steer clear of beef. Over in Kampala the bufunda

(popular roadside bar-and-muchomo type establishments) actually register a drop in sales during this period. Ugandans have a thing for roadside meat – be it roast sausages, goat muchomo, cow livers, chicken or fried pork. You can get it with a selection of bitter herbs, avocado, kachumbali and cassava sticks at your little neighbourhood kafunda; as a cute designer platter in the high end hotel bars for ten times the price; or still hot and on the stick, on the go on any highway out of Kampala.

Many a man will eat the equivalent of half a roast chicken or a quarter kilo of meat on the highway and then go home to a humble meal of beans with the family.

On one bus ride from Kampala to Jinja, the bus pulled into one of the popular roadside markets for roast meats. I, being in the window seat, enquired of my neighbour if he would like me to open the window so he could purchase something to eat. He shook his head vigorously and proceeded to regale me with his reasons for permanently ‘fasting’ when it came to roadside meat.

Mortification Apparently, this gentleman was in the habit of eating a bit of chicken on the way home before proceeding home for the daily offerings of vegetables. Unfortunately, one day he ate the wrong bit of chicken and as soon as he got home his stomach emptied itself of its contents, right at the front door.

His family rushed over to tend to ailing Daddy, and imagine his mortification when his youngest children examined his recent stomach contents on the ground and with much noise and gesticulation announced that Daddy had been eating chicken!

He said he did not know what hurt more; the weight of guilt or the ensuing night spent on the toilet. “I have never bought another piece of roadside meat since that day,” he solemnly concluded, while I tried my best not to burst into laughter or choke on the piece of roast banana that I was nibbling on.

I, like many other Africans, have family abroad; they will have settled back into their routines after their Christmas visits home. The one thing all my Diaspora siblings say they miss is the taste of the fruit and the meat back home. Steaks are big and juicy looking in America, but apparently one piece of meat here carries the flavour of an entire beef burger over there. I assume that makes it easier to give up meat during Lent for those living abroad.

In other news, Kampala hosted the first Regional Air Safety Group and the 18th

Many a man will eat the equivalent of half a roast chicken or a quarter kilo of meat on the highway and then go home to a humble meal of beans with the family

”

African-Indian Ocean Regional Planning and Implementation Group meetings in March this year. The meetings were graced by the Secretary General of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), Raymond Benjamin, council members and over 250 delegates from ICAO member states and international aviation organizations. Need I add that the 250-plus will all be flying in?

The meetings will review and consider the status of implementation of Decisions and Conclusions made at the 17th AfricanIndian Ocean Regional Planning and Implementation Group meeting, which was held in Burkina Faso in 2010.

The Air Safety Group will on its part review the regional, interregional and

global flight safety activities. I just want to know who I can approach to discuss supplying some roast chicken and cow liver on flights to make the experience more indigenous and reduce the levels of homesickness for those travelling back to hostile environs.

Angela Kintu is a freelance writer and columnist for The Sunday Vision. She has worked as a radio producer and been a writer, editor and copy editor for an array of publications in Uganda including The New Vision, Sunday Magazine and Flair magazine. She is a regular contributor to African Woman magazine and a media consultant at the African Centre for Media Excellence.

April 2012

| 33

Dispatch |

Tanzania

Letter from

Moshi

By JONATHAN KALAN

24 Hours at Kilimanjaro Airport

I

stepped out of the small 47-seater ATR 42 Precision Air aircraft onto the tarmac, and prepared for the usual.

Still groggy from the early morning takeoff from Nairobi, I went through the motions of international travel, even though I had hardly flown for 45 minutes – Change of SIM card. Check. Anything valuable left on, under, above or in front of my seat? Nope. Check. Fumble through my bag to make sure I have Tanzanian Shillings. Check. Last, but certainly not least, Passport. Check. All good, it seems.

Ready to face the typical assault of another international African airport – the chaotic mess of lines for Customs, the 34 |

I was stunned to find the only assault was a pleasant and sweet blast of fresh, morning air as I walked out of the plane”

stuffy and humid terminal with a shaky fan that might break loose at any second – I was stunned to find the only assault was a pleasant and sweet blast of fresh, morning air as I walked out of the plane, and looked directly at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

“Northern circuit Moshi, a quiet town in Northern Tanzania tucked into the slopes of the towering Mt. Kilimanjaro, is often overlooked as a tourist destination in favor of Arusha, the bustling capital of Tanzania’s “Northern Circuit”, or Tanzania’s northern tourist activities. Arusha is the launching point for nearly all of Tanzania’s superb wildlife experiences, from a night in Ngorongoro Crater, to a weeklong safari through Serengeti National Park and

Arusha National Park. It’s also the place where you’ll find and endless stream of fully-loaded backpackers ready to tackle the five-to-seven day climb to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

When most tourists arrive at Kilimanjaro International Airport, just a 30-minute drive from Moshi, they typically make their way through Customs, collect their bags, and are warmly greeted by a friendly safari guide or tour company. From there, they pile a week’s worth of safari gear or climbing equipment into a khaki Land Cruiser, and are swiftly shuttled off to Arusha, to begin their adventures.

Not me. My destination was, strangely enough, the airport itself. I, like most other travelers I know, had never imagined an airport as my final destination. And after

watching Tom Hanks in The Terminal a few times, I never really hoped it would be. Yet from the start, I felt quite good.

After I made my way through Customs, perhaps the easiest Customs experience I’ve encountered, I was warmly greeted

by Marco Van de Kreeke, the General Manager of KADCO (Kilimanjaro Airports Development Company,) a private business that manages the Kilimanjaro International Airport.

A tall Dutchman with wavy black hair, a firm handshake and welcoming smile, he guided me through additional security checkpoints until we reached his office, where I learned about the history of the airport, and received an in-depth explanation of public-private partnerships in the aviation industry.

Gateway Van de Kreeke has been managing airports and airport logistics companies around the world for years, and this is his second time running KADCO, after working for three years starting, difficultly enough, on September 11th, 2001.

Kilimanjaro International Airport (JRO), dubbed as “the gateway to Africa’s wildlife heritage”, is Tanzania’s second international airport, and was inaugurated in 1971 to serve northern Tanzania.

Although dwarfed in size compared to Dar es Salaam’s Julius Nyerere International Airport, it certainly makes up for it with the relaxed, almost tropical atmosphere. An open-air café in the middle of the airport provides travelers with a nice tranquil place to grab a coffee or bite to eat, surrounded by lush vegetation and even a small waterfall.

After a quick tour, interview, and lunch, I made my way around the airport with James, head of quality control, to photograph the airport. I must admit, it was like a child’s dream come true, being allowed to see the inner workings of an airport, and after a thorough initial screening, walking through security gates unchecked (shoes, belt, watch?

No problem!), and having permission to photograph everything.

Planes, Customs, and even the prestigious VIP area, where Tanzania’s highest ranking officials, and even some of the world’s highest royalty, pass through, were all part of the programme.

In fact, just two days before my visit, Prince Charles and Camilla walked through the very same halls, welcomed by a handful of dignitaries and a full-blown Maasai cultural performance. I could almost imagine the red carpet laid down on the runway leading them to the room.

Van de Kreeke led to me the Kia Lodge, literally footsteps from the airport, but in such a setting that I felt as if I had been transported to some exotic safari lodge in the Serengeti. One of many Kia lodgings, from tented camps to full lodges like the Kilimanjaro airport one, this one was built just a few years ago, and has undoubtedly benefited from the annual increase in traffic that the airport has received.

While I may have been expecting a Holiday-Inn like hotel next to an international airport, the Kia Lodge was beautifully decorated with wooden carvings, stone patios, and perfect little cottages that looked out onto the savannahs.

From the swimming pool carved into the earth on top of a hill, you could even catch a glimpse of Mount Kilimanjaro peeking through the clouds.

Flying High: Van de Kreeke has had two stints running Kilimanjaro

Yet by far, the most exciting part of my “work” was barreling down the 3,607 metres, over 3 kilometres, of smooth-asglass runway, which I would argue might be the best three kilometres of asphalt I’ve encountered in the entire country, in time to catch a plane coming in for landing.

The shaking of the earth, the roar of the propeller engines, and the sheer force of such a large object touching the ground after hours in flight, was something to marvel.

Fasting Add to that the sun setting over Mt. Meru, with the peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro breaking through the clouds just to the right, it was an experience one could never forget.

As I mentioned, Moshi Airport is not the place where many people find themselves hanging out. After a long day of doing my own trekking across tarmac, security screenings – and watching over 1,000 travelers come from or going to Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, and elsewhere – I was ready to put down my gear and relax.

Fasting Most travelers would miss this little place as they dashed to reach Arusha, but I was glad to have found it. After a long flight across continents and oceans, I would much rather find myself crashing just a few metres from the airport in such a gorgeous setting.

Twenty-four hours around Kilimanjaro International Airport was not exactly what I expected it to be, and, thankfully, nothing like Tom Hanks’ experience in The Terminal.

I was pleasantly surprised throughout the entire trip. Maybe I wasn’t passing through on to bigger and more exciting adventures – a luxurious safari to the Ngorongoro Crater perhaps like most of the travelers coming through – but I returned to Nairobi just 24 hours later with a new appreciation for airports, Moshi, and the unusual yet exciting adventure of an interesting assignment.

Jonathan Kalan is an internationally published photojournalist, journalist and blogger specializing in the intersections of business, innovation and social development in emerging markets. In just 24 years he has traveled to over 35 countries, worked in South Asia and Africa, and collaborated with NGO’s, social enterprises, technology start ups, and media companies.

His work has appeared in The Guardian, Financial Times, Boston Globe, GlobalPost, The Huffington Post, The Star (Kenya), Stanford Social Innovation Review, Destination Magazine EA, How We Made It In Africa, The Christian Science Monitor, On The Ground (New York Times blog), and many others. He was a Finalist for the 2011 Diageo Africa Business Reporting Awards.

Jonathan is currently based in Nairobi, Kenya, freelancing and documenting stories of social enterprises, entrepreneurs, and innovations for The (BoP) Project.

April 2012

| 35

Dispatch |

South Africa

Letter from

Jo’burg

By Mwangi Githahu

W

hen the South Africans put their mind to a project, they think big, really big.

Just over a century ago Johannesburg, or Egoli (the Zulu name for place of gold), was, as one writer put it, “nothing more then an unknown and forlorn ridge with rocky outcrops in the middle of nowhere”.

As recorded in a now sadly out of print 1976 book by historian and former chief librarian of the city, Anna Smith, the city grew quickly, from a tent town to wood and iron shacks, to brick buildings, within a decade or two, keeping pace with Paris and London in new developments towards the end of the 19th century – electric lighting, motor cars and telephones.

Today it is a modern, fast-paced, cosmopolitan metropolis. The third largest city in Africa, after Cairo and Lagos, it is literally abuzz with energy and activity and now it is looking to become the home of Africa’s first aerotropolis.

An aerotropolis, for those who may 36 |

In SA, We’re Now Talking about Aerotropolises already be imagining a city like those depicted in futuristic comic strips such as Flash Gordon, is in fact a type of urban setting made up of aviation-related businesses and enterprises.

Entrepreneurship The man who coined the term is Professor John Kasarda, an American academic focused on global management strategy and entrepreneurship.

Kasarda, in his stunning book, The Way We’ll Live Next, explains that an

aerotropolis is similar in form and function to a traditional metropolis, with a central city at its core linked to outlying suburbs by a rail and road network, only in the case of an aerotropolis there is an airport city at the centre which is hooked up to clusters of aviation-related businesses.

According to The Way: “Not so long ago airports were built near cities and roads connected the one to the other.

This pattern—the city in the centre, the airport on the periphery— shaped life in the twentieth century, from the central

Photography | courtesy

city to exurban sprawl. Today, the ubiquity of jet travel, round-the-clock workdays, overnight shipping, and global business networks has turned the pattern inside out. Soon the airport will be at the centre and the city will be built around it, the better to keep workers, suppliers, executives, and goods in touch with the global market.”

Aerotropolises Around the world aerotropolises already exist in places such as Amsterdam Zuidas (literally South Axis in Dutch, a large, rapidly developing business district in the city of Amsterdam), Las Colinas, Texas (an upscale, developed area in the Dallas suburb of Irving located centrally between the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth and close to DFW Airport) and South Korea’s Songdo International Business District (a planned international CBD planned to be built from scratch currently under construction).

In South Africa, the plan is to turn Ekurhuleni, the part of the greater metropolitan area of Johannesburg (Population 7.15million) where OR Tambo International airport is based, into an airport city.

I first came across the ambitious plan in an article in Johannesburg’s The Star newspaper, where, alongside a rendition of what an airport city would look like, there was an interview with Ekurhuleni’s executive mayor, Mondli Gungubele.

The airport city is the mayor’s dream and, according to all the literature I could find on the aerotropolis, plans are all set for Africa’s first airport city, which should finally come into existence in about two decades from now.

According to the article in the Star by Shaun Simillie, “A strategic roadmap is being drawn up, which will establish what needs to be done to move OR Tambo towards this new economic state.

“To see what Aerotropolis OR Tambo might look like in the future, it is necessary to jump forward 13 years.

“The plan is that, by 2025, businesses directly associated with the airport will have formed along transportation corridors 20km from the airport.”

All this talk of an aerotropolis put me in mind of the draft master plan of the new Nairobi Metropolitan region which I read about some time ago speaking of six new towns to be built in the three counties that make up the Nairobi metropolis.

A pipe dream, I thought, and then remembered I was talking about South Africa, the only country on the continent to stage the World Cup – and successfully, despite the doubting Thomases of the world who said it could never be done.

Roadmap The proof of this pudding, I decided, would be in the facts and figures Mayor Gungubele and his team have put together in their effort to achieve this dream city.

The Ekurhuleni growth and development strategy, which was reviewed last year to integrate the aerotropolis roadmap, also identifies the city’s infrastructure needs, in terms of energy, water supply and sanitation.

The mayor has said already that “once an aerotropolis strategy of this nature is adopted, interest is created worldwide. Already, a company from India is contemplating the construction of an

electronic product factory in Ekurhuleni, as well as an information technology college”.

According the Star article, Prof Kasarda recently spent some time in Johannesburg meeting business and political leaders, academics and youth formations to discuss the municipality’s new growth path.

The Star quoted Kasarda telling them, “All commercial developments in and around the airport will lead to urban growth because of the significant employment opportunities such as shopping, trade and business. The OR Tambo International will develop a brand image that attracts nonairport-linked businesses”.

They will not be starting from nothing, already just five minutes drive from the OR Tambo International Airport, there exists an area known as the Albertina Sisulu Corridor.

This is a prime investment and development location which links Johannesburg, the airport and Pretoria (the political capital).

However, while it’s likely to take decades before the ribbon is cut on Aerotropolis OR Tambo, Ekurhuleni will have much to demonstrate when it hosts the Airport Cities World Conference and Exhibition from April 17 to 19, in 2013.

Mwangi Githahu is a Kenyan journalist who now lives in South Africa. He contributes a weekly column to The Weekend Star and was for three years until April 2011 the Features editor at The Star.

He has written for a number of newspapers and magazines for the past two decades, including, the Sunday Nation, the EastAfrican, Eve magazine and the nowdefunct Weekly Review.

April 2012

| 37

Special Feature |

Flying with the Military

He died the same way that this war has progressed: in a storm of madness, blindness, and shattered hope. The IED that killed him will achieve nothing . . . By EAFlyer New York Correspondent LARS DABNEY

The Tragedy and Grace of Sgt. William Stacey

38 |

Photography | LARS DABNEY

T

here aren’t too many Marines that I wanted to get a beer with once we were back home.

I made good friends with many of them, but there weren’t more than a dozen who I really thought I’d spend time with once we’d returned to the civilized world of women and booze and concerns about what type of blinds to put on the windows.

A lot of the real world doesn’t make sense out there. A lot of the things people here worry about.

Try watching Real Housewives and imagine what it looks like to a Marine just returned from their deployment.

Beer makes sense though.

Everyone makes plans to get a beer

together once they’re back. I drank a lot of non-alcoholic Becks over there but needless to say it just ain’t the same.

Sergeant Stacey—Will, as he became once I’d returned to the States and exchanged a few emails with his mother—was one of the few I made plans with.

Firefight

He commanded the squad I was embedded with when I ended up in my first firefight, and it was plainer than anything that he kept the men

under his command alive. I’ve already written about him, his confidence and charisma and strangely rugged wisdom for a young man of 23, his ridiculous mustache, but now there is more to say because Will is dead.

Will was killed by an IED blast somewhere in Now Zad District of Helmand Province. He was the only casualty, though another marine was injured by a second IED. He was on a dismounted foot patrol and some halfwit insurgent Turn to P40

April 2012

| 39

Special Feature |

Flying with the Military

means your life. You give it because of the possibility that someone else might give theirs for you.

Will didn’t dive heroically on a grenade. He didn’t throw himself into the path of a bullet or get hit trying to drag a comrade to safety. He died the same way that this war has progressed: in a storm of madness, blindness, and shattered hope.

From P39

managed to cram enough explosive material into the bomb that it killed him. He’ll be buried in Arlington, I hear. The day he died was his mother’s birthday.

It’s easy to understand the Marines’ occasional fury towards their foes, towards sometimes the entire snarl-fucked catastrophe of Afghan society, when this sort of thing happens. It is not unlike the moment in Restreapo when one of the soldiers tries to explain his reaction to the passing of Doc Restreapo.

He says (and I paraphrase here) ‘Fuck no, not him, anybody but him’.

No-one wants another Marine to die either but there are those who are special, whose loss hurts more than others, and Sgt. Stacey was as special as they come.

Comrade

He had a bright and concentrated flame within him that could cut through stone. It spelled death and failure for his enemies and gave life to his comrades.

Quite literally gave life—there is no doubt in my mind that his cold competence, his charisma and cool under fire, his wisdom so far beyond his years that I wonder just what it is that old people are supposed to be so wise about, kept the men under his command alive.

In the end, though, their lives came at the cost of his life. That’s the bargain that the military demands of you, and it is as much a devil’s bargain as it is a life raft. You give everything you have to keep your comrades alive. They do the same for you. But sometimes everything

40 |

Withdrawal

Noone wants another Marine to die either but there are those who are special, whose loss hurts more than others, and Sgt. Stacey was as special as they come

”

The IED that killed him will achieve nothing. The withdrawal will occur on schedule, and the insurgents’ grip on Now Zad will remain insignificant until the day that the local police chief, who differs from a mobster only in uniform, takes command after the Marines have left and the Governor has fled.

The only change wrought by that hodgepodge of wires and fertilizer was the death of one of the most potent bundles of raw potential I have ever met. Will could have been president. He would have made a good one.

I can’t pretend that I knew Will incredibly well. He did me the kindness of granting me an interview and one of the first things he told me was that the last reporter he’d dealt with, a young woman from the Washington Post, had been justifiably elbowed in the face for being an intrusive jackass when a Marine had died.

But we got along well. Very well, in fact, and I spoke with him more that day as he took me on patrol, and afterwards, and the next day before I caught the first leg of my long ride home.

His parents are history professors.

He was about to finish his five-year

contract in March. He was going to go to university and study history.

He spoke of maybe working for the CIA down the line.

In among all that there was a certain kindredness between us, I think. I do not know if he felt the same way but at the very least he did not elbow me in the face, which I will take as a good sign.

He had in him a streak of great madness, by which I do not mean ‘much’ madness but a madness that could lead to great things.

There are people like that in the world, and you know within seconds when you meet one. Their madness bends them to different winds but ours took us both to war.

In it there is the potential, sometimes, most certainly in Will, for incredible things. To change the universe we live in, the course of humanity itself and the prisms through which we understand the world. But it comes at a price, and— most unfairly of all—that price is only borne by those who through dumb luck do not live to see their madness bloom.

They die. They must pass through the fire to become who they need to be—they are drawn to it like moths— and it is not a test of fortitude or courage but only of chance to determine whether they emerge from the other side alive.

Charisma

If they do, the world awaits. But most do not. Many die in the first moments of their descent; Will was so close to emergence that he could feel the daylight warming on his skin.

Will was a rarity among service members. Young and wise is nothing new to the military, but his intelligence and charisma made him something special. Had it come to it I do not doubt that the Corps would have done everything in their power to convince him to stay.

He is the sort of man you would want commanding your troops, analyzing a million pieces of data

to save a few extra lives, beloved by every man beneath him though none truly knows him.

But I do not think he would have taken the offer. He had too much else to do. Too much of the world to change. Had he gone to the CIA they would have been only a stepping stone, because for all their mystique the agents of the world’s most overhyped spy agency are ultimately impotent to alter the course of events that surround them.

Will had it in him to remake continents. Of those that do, too few live to do so. It is the reason that the worst leaders of the world are invariably the ones who never took any risk themselves, who never allowed themselves to be forged in the fires of danger and death and horror.

Will entered those fires knowingly, but it is still an insurmountable pile of fetid horseshit that he did not survive to the other end. I can understand the use of IEDs as a tactic in asymmetric warfare; I can even understand the motivation of insurgents in the context of what limited and misleading information they have. But if I were in a room with the men who planted that bomb, I would murder them with

my bare hands, and feel no regret for having done so. But Will’s death should not be about—is not about— anger or wasted potential. Because what he had, for the 23 years he had it, he used to its utmost extent. He saved lives. He helped turn Now Zad from a scarred hell to a place where hundreds of children can walk to school every day.

He brought sanity and compassion to a place sorely in need of both. He loved and was loved by a beautiful and unyielding girl, from high school on through five long deployments, and whose email address he laughed as he gave to me because he had to say ‘Kimmy’ three times in a row, and I could see that just saying it made him glad.

Tragedy

He brought something human to the world, an attribute in remarkably short supply for all the humans there are. His soft-sandpaper, young Clint Eastwood voice doled out insight and kindness to the men he led and the people he met.

Among all that, he was an ordinary and relatable human being who gave me a sharpie to ‘fix’ my smiley-face patch and whose Facebook picture is just him, standing in a crowd, holding a can of beer. His life ended in tragedy, but it was lived in grace.

I still owe him that beer. I’ll owe it to him until the day I die. I’m not religious, and I don’t believe in heaven, but I’ve always had a romantic fling with reincarnation.

So be sure that if and when I am born anew in another body, my soul will seek out Will’s, and I will take him to whatever the local equivalent of a bar is, for whatever the local equivalent of an alcoholic beverage may be.

I’m looking forward to it.

Photography | LARS DABNEY

April 2012

| 41

traveller’s tales: Nairobi to Durban — Epic Safari - P64 ISSUE No. 0003 April 2012

Sculptor of the human condition people

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Destruction of Wildlife: The Bushmeat Trade P48

Sammy’s Suzuki P72 April 2012

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Contents April 2012

East African Flyer |

Editorial: .................................................................. 47

Cover Story |

Cover Story | Conversation Harvard Comes to Africa............................................54

Features Environmental Notebook: Bushmeat Menace......48 Traveller’s Tales: Nairobi-to-Durban.........................64 Foreigners: The Wonder Stove................................ 69 Big Idea Forum: Sammy’s Suzuki............................ 72 Events: Safaricom Classic Concert..........................76

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Welcome April 2012

THE REGION’S AVIATION LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE

A Supplement of Aviation East Africa

Editorial

By Aviation East Africa Board Member Samuel Kahiga

How to Solve Africa’s Problems without Reinventing the Wheel

A

A lot of the problems facing the region, whether in health, infrastructure, energy, you name it, can only be solved through relevant research. There is a valid debate on how Africa’s problems will be solved, whether the solutions are to be home-grown or to come from outside Africa. In this issue of EA Flyer, we present a unique case of a third way, a partnership between one of the world’s great universities, Harvard, and an African nation, Botswana, that has never had a problem with good governance.

The story of this symbiotic partnership is told and explored in a wide-ranging conversation between Dr. Myron (Max) Essex, the Chair of the Harvard AIDS Initiative (HAI), the Lasker Professor of Health Sciences at Harvard University, and Chair of the Botswana-Harvard AIDS Institute (BHP) and EA Flyer Commissioning

Editor Wycliffe Muga.

Prof. Essex makes it clear that such innovative and high-impact collaboration involves no re-inventing of the wheel. Partnering with global centres of excellence and learning and allowing them to set up centres of research and solutions in our own countries makes eminently good sense, giving Africans all the benefits of a leg up so that they avoid the pitfalls suffered by others in the process of inventing the wheel. In other words, we save valuable time and resources learning from the mistakes of others and going straight for best practice.

As the case of Botswana shows, such collaborative efforts cut to the chase, focus on solutions and deliver big time.

Our Big Idea feature this month, “Sammy’s Suzuki”, tells the eyeopening story of Sammy, the Community Warden in the Olare Orok Conservancy. Prof. Terry Anderson details the ways in which the local Maasai communities are responding

to economic incentives, showing how, for instance, giving up their grazing land for wild animals provided a better return than the traditional grazing of large herds of livestock.

With this issue we introduce a new regular feature, “Personalities”. The inaugural column, headlined “Sculptor of the Human Condition”, is devoted to the award-winning Kenyan sculptor Gakunju Kaigwa. Watch this space for more Kenyan achievers and leaders in their chosen fields.

Special Correspondent Audrey Wabwire brings us “Nairobi to Durban, an Epic Overland Safari” in our Travellers’ Tales section, the story of a truly scenic drive from Kenya to South Africa.

Based on the reading public’s response and the advice of our distributors, beginning next month EA Flyer will be a separate stand-alone magazine from Aviation East Africa.

Welcome to region’s highest-quality magazine on People, Places and Ideas.

Environmental Notebook |

Open Letter

The

Destruction of Wildlife

Poaching and poisoning kill both predators and prey in Kenyan forests as rural folk, feeling no ownership of flora or fauna, increasingly make the bushmeat trade their main means of extracting value from wildlife, writes SARAH EDWARDS

T

he bushmeat trade is rampant in Kenya. Indigent and hungry people, who for a few hundred shillings will snare an animal to sell to a middleman, do not augur well for the future of wildlife – this we all know; but when blatant disregard for the law and unmentionable cruelty to animals is practiced by wealthy, educated landowners who cannot use poverty as an excuse, as per the example below, it becomes truly shocking.

In a less populous corner of Lake Naivasha, a landowner, anxious to prevent wildlife from invading fodder grown for his dairy cattle, has legitimately erected an electric fence as a deterrent.

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But this is no ordinary electric fence, this is illegally connected directly to the mains electricity and thus provides a maximum voltage; the amperage (the strength of the electric current), which is enough to kill both animals and people. At night the wires actually glow with the force of the current.

Electrocuted It is obviously intended to kill; not just to deter wildlife, and it is fortunate that no human being has yet been killed as far as we know.

Several eyewitnesses have seen the numbers of hippo, giraffe and buffalo that have been electrocuted and killed. It is suspected that the meat from these animals

is being sold in the nearest village and it is suspected that this has to be with the connivance of the authorities. The manager of this farm has fled, as well he might.

We go back, as usual, looking for answers from the custodians of wildlife in Kenya – the under-resourced and underperforming Kenya Wildlife Service – which was voted the top most successful government parastatal for 2010 and whose CEO has recently had his contract renewed for another three years. One assumes both of these facts are intended to corroborate the excellence of the Service.

KWS, the Police, and the local Administration should all be involved in pursuing this case.

Photography | Courtesy

The vulnerability of all Kenya’s wildlife is due to the ever increasing human population which reduces the resources of water and grazing available to the animals but also predates on the wildlife by poaching and poisoning.

For a Kenyan, it makes sense to eat the wildlife and kill the predators because they gain nothing from the presence of wildlife which damages their crops and eats their livestock.

The owner and managers should be arrested and prosecuted. It is illegal to trade in bushmeat in Kenya. Any official who is either involved in or condones this practice should also be prosecuted and lose his job, whatever his status.

Responsibility As the State in the form of KWS bears all responsibility for wildlife, there are no community wildlife management initiatives so nobody feels that they own the forest, bush or wild animals, thus wildlife is considered “fair game” to the person who gets there first and pays the biggest price.

Bushmeat trade Our inadequate Wildlife Policy ensures that rural people resent wildlife instead of profiting by it. The bushmeat trade is their primary means of extracting value from wildlife. Most of Kenya’s wildlife can currently be classified as being “vulnerable” – one of the seven categories of endangered species published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

East Africa hosts the greatest number and diversity of wild animals in the world.

We have a priceless heritage which brings considerable revenue into government coffers but at the rate we are decimating this natural resource, there will be nothing left in 10 years.

Once wild animals and their habitats are gone, you can forget tourism as the second largest foreign exchange earner in this country, and numerous jobs will be lost, increasing the poverty cycle.

As long as the culture of impunity reigns and those responsible for the loss of wildlife remain unfettered and unpunished and until uncontrolled populations are checked, wildlife and the environments that sustain them are seriously endangered.

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Feature |

Flying Green

There is also need to establish how revenues generated from such a scheme would be used to address climate change. By SAMuel KAHIGA

Taxing the Negative Consequences of a Market Activity Climatic change awareness around the world has created a platform for nations and individuals to come up with innovative ways to fight for Mother Earth’s very survival. It is crucial that climate politics is not allowed to deflect global attention and lead us to forget why we need to focus on the problem in the first place.

The recent introduction of the carbon tax in the European Union is in itself one way of protecting the environment. A carbon tax is an environmental tax levied on the carbon content of fuels. It is a form of carbon pricing. Carbon taxes offer a potentially costeffective means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. From an economic perspective, carbon taxes are a type of Pigovian tax (a tax on the demonstrably negative consequences of a market activity). They help to address the problem of emitters of greenhouse gases not facing the full (social) costs of their actions.

The EU carbon tax aims to reduce the growing volume of climate-changing gases from the international aviation industry, whose emissions remained totally exempt from any regulation until the recent European initiative.

It has however sparked a lot of debate, and even court action, with the US and China threatening to stop flights into Europe and other nations threatening trade retaliation.

Opposition to increased environmental regulation such as carbon taxes often centers on concerns that firms might relocate and/or people might lose their jobs. Many large users of carbon resources in electricity generation, such as the USA, Russia and China, are resisting carbon taxation.

The European Commission estimated that aviation emissions made up about 3% of the EU’s total greenhouse gas emissions, and that emissions had doubled since 1990.

This percentage appears modest, but the commission estimated that the new trading scheme could lead to an overall reduction equivalent to double the entire annual emissions from Austria. The aviation sector alone was forecast to become the second largest emission sector in the EU, leading them to take the drastic action and introduce the carbon tax.

All airlines which land or take off from European airports are required to join the scheme, which provides for progressivelystricter costs and penalties for airlines which fail to reduce emission levels. Though the precise cost implications vary according to the performance of each airline, the EU argued that the scheme’s effect on ticket prices would be minor. This is arguable, owing to the fact that any extra cost inflicted on an airline would be passed to the passengers, as the airlines have to guard their profitability. The impact of the carbon tax on air travel is almost an obvious one. Airlines would have to spend more and

this would mean a rise on ticket prices and cutting down on costs which could further have an effect on employment.

As the Air Transport Action Group and other aviation industry lobbies have argued, the net effect of the scheme is to tax flights, not just for the portion of time spent in EU skies, but also as they pass through the sovereign territory of non-EU countries. What if every country or region were to pass their own regulation or related schemes, what would be the effect on air travel?

There is also need to establish how revenues generated from such a scheme would be used to address climate change.

The main reason why this measure by the European Union has been met by a whirlwind of confrontation is mainly because many countries see it as a unilateral action by the EU. Does it mean then that harmony can be reached if the stakeholders were to come together and come up with a common regulation that is overseen by an independent body? An equitable global carbon emissions scheme could be implemented under the auspices of the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization, which is the only body mandated to set global regulatory standards for civil aviation.

The scheme itself is far from a bad idea, thus, with independent oversight effecting such a scheme globally, Mother Nature would have yet another important weapon in her arsenal, not only in controlling the level of emissions caused by air travel, but also putting the proceeds specifically into addressing climate change.

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Conversations |

Professor Max Essex

VISIONARY: Dr. Myron (Max) Essex, the Chair of the Harvard AIDS Initiative (HAI), the Lasker Professor of Health Sciences at Harvard University, and Chair of the Botswana-Harvard AIDS Institute (BHP).

Harvard Comes to Africa How the World’s Most Famous University and one of Africa’s Greatest Democracies Made History in the Fight against AIDS

By WYCLIFFE MUGA

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W

hen the world marked Africa Malaria Day back in 2007, at the time when I first met Professor Max Essex, Chair of the Harvard AIDS Initiative and Co-chair of the Botswana-Harvard Partnership, an influential website dedicated to highlighting issues of science, agricultural, health and technology in developing

countries, featured an article by a Ugandan biotechnology entrepreneur.

The gist of his article was that the search for a malaria vaccine should be led

by African scientists and not by scientists from the West. He insisted that Africa should seek a “home-grown” malaria vaccine. And he argued that if African governments cut down on corruption, and

on lavish spending on presidential luxuries, there would be plenty of money to pay for such research.

Anyone who has spent time talking to African intellectuals will probably have heard similar arguments many times. It is an article of faith among many of them that funding scientific and technological research is a sacred duty for all African governments, as this – and this alone – holds the key to what is generally defined as “catching up with the developed world”.

But not everybody agrees.

Re-inventing Critics accuse African scientists and researchers of having a vested interest in re-inventing the wheel, and point out that the new African research institutions would only duplicate work which is already being competently tackled in European or American laboratories.

As one such critic, I would ask this: Given that malaria currently kills an

African child every thirty seconds, how can it possibly matter whether the malaria vaccine is “homegrown” or developed abroad?

A compromise is possible, however, between these two opposing viewpoints.

And an example of this is provided in the Botswana-Harvard Partnership.

Between its launching in 1996 and the present time, the Botswana–Harvard Partnership has undertaken a series of vaccine trials, including one which involved a detailed genetic characterization of the participants.

This involved the same level of sophisticated equipment and expertise as would be required for a kidney transplant, for example.

And it was all done on-site by local experts.

The results of this ongoing research have provided new ways to prevent and treat AIDS, and Botswana is now generally regarded as having the most successful

treatment program in Africa.

And of the 200 employees at BHP, 80%, including the director, are citizens of Botswana. Most of the rest are from other African countries, and only about 5% are Americans. In total, more than 8,000 local nurses, physicians, and pharmacists have been trained by BHP in AIDS clinical care fundamentals.

Partnership The significance of this goes well beyond the effective treatment of AIDS: This partnership provides a model for all who wish to see Africans having more and better opportunities to contribute to ground-breaking research that addresses local problems.

What follows is a transcript of just one of many conversations that I have had with Prof Essex on my visits to Cambridge Massachusetts over the years.

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Conversations |

Professor Max Essex

Photography | Richard Feldman

STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP: Prof.Essex and President Mogae confer.

Turning the Tide The Botswana/Harvard Partnership WYCLIFFE MUGA: Many of the people who read this will not know who you are. So I’d like you to answer this: How did you get into HIV research? Why AIDS and not something else? What have been your trials? What have been your moments of despair?

Just say as much as you can.

PROFESSOR ESSEX: Well, I got into AIDS research actually in a fairly different way…I started out – I was trained – as a virus expert. I was trained to understand how viruses cause disease, period.

And the virus group that I specialized in was Retroviruses and at that time, of course, no one knew what caused AIDS; this was before anyone knew AIDS even existed as a disease. But at about the same time, I was looking at human leukemia and a bunch

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of viruses had been discovered that were retroviruses, one of which caused a type of human leukemia. These viruses were contagious from person to person and they do exist in Africa but they are not such a big problem.

They were a bigger problem in places like Japan; North Eastern and North Western South America; places like Colombia and the Caribbean; and in those places, the virus, called human T-cell leukemia viruses type 1, causes a vicious type of leukemia and also some neurological diseases.

Those viruses turned out to be distant relatives to the HIV virus; and we have found that those viruses also infect the same cell – the CD4 cell, or the T-cell – and the leukemia that occurs is the leukemia of that cell. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s such a bad leukemia, and people die rapidly from it.

Now, in the same time when I was studying those viruses, I also became very interested in Africa. So I was a virologist studying cancer, as it were, and the reason I became interested in the possibility of these viruses in AIDS in Africa was because one of the other things I was studying was Hepatitis B virus in liver cancer.

And, as you probably know, Hepatitis B virus occurs all over the world, but it has a higher rate of infection in Asia and Africa.

I’m sure the rates are high in Kenya but it’s probably highest in places like Mozambique and they are really high in southern Africa in general but West Africa too – a lot of parts of Africa.

So I was studying the Hepatitis B virus and I was studying it in Africa because I was intrigued by the higher rate of infection in Africa and the association with liver cancer,

primary liver cancer; and then while I was doing those things, people in the US discovered AIDS clinically as a disease. They didn’t even call it AIDS initially; they called it the GRID – Gay Related Immune Deficiency – because it was clearly an unusual outcome of these combinations of lethal pneumonias with Pneumocystis and opportunistic things like Kaposi’s sarcoma and tuberculosis in gay men.

So I was interested in the possibility that a virus related to human T-cell leukemia virus might cause that. I was interested in that possibility because it was clear earlier on that the main reason for AIDS in gay people and injection drug users subsequently and in hemophiliacs, etc, in this country, was a loss of those same cells that the human T-cell leukemia virus was causing an overgrowth of cancer in - and then full leukemia.

So putting that together with the fact that I was interested in the Hepatitis B virus liver cancers in Africa, as soon as we did some studies that found an association with AIDS and this group of viruses in this country, one could look at the possibility that viruses like this were in Africa.

The place where we were working most closely in Africa at the time was Senegal.

Botswana came quite a bit later. It came quite a bit later because it was clear then that there was a higher rate of both AIDS and that virus that we were looking at, in Botswana, and that is how we connected the two together.

I was doing cancer research with viruses like this. I was doing Hepatitis B work in Africa and that all sort of came in together as the reason to look much more carefully into these things.

Botswana came because it was clear by then that there were high rates of HIV and AIDS in Botswana and we wanted to know what was different about the HIV in Botswana. That was by then the middle ’90s, but the history I was giving you before was really the early and mid and late ’80s.

Below: Prof.

Essex and Harvard President Drew Faust.

Q: Why Botswana? True it has the one of the highest incidences and prevalence of AIDS...

A: It was very simple about Botswana at that point. And it was simple because, at that point, a group like the World Health Organization had done these countryspecific surveys in a lot of countries in Africa and had said what is the fraction of people with HIV, period.

And, by that time, they could say the rates were really high in Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and they are pretty high in East Africa too. But they were even higher in southern Africa. In fact, had it been done earlier, they probably would have been equally high in Uganda.

But by the middle of the 1990s it was highest in southern Africa and so the same approaches we had used for other studies in Africa were based in part on the extent to which we could get political cooperation from high-level officials.

And I had a friend in New York who had worked with us earlier to help us get started in Senegal, even when we were studying Hepatitis B. He was a kind of diamond trade and exploration guy; not as big as the Oppenheimer family and Debswana and DeBeers.

Well, the next level in the diamond

Photography | JUSTIN IDE

world. He has a lot of connections as I am sure a lot of businesspeople do when they have industries like that in association with Africa.

And he happened to help us get started in Senegal by introducing me to his lawyer who negotiated business agreements for us, and his lawyer in turn introduced me to the President of Senegal, Abdou Diouf.

And I asked him which countries would be easiest to work in and where we would get high-level acceptance by the government. And he gave us two or three examples and said either Botswana or Namibia and he said he could introduce me to officials sometimes even the heads of State of these countries.

And it so happened that not too long after the conversation with him, there was a dinner in Washington put on by the State Department for the visiting Head of State of Botswana, who was in before the immediate former President, Festus Mogae.

This was President Khetumile Masire and this was a dinner put on for him by the State Department, in a fancy hotel in Washington, and this friend told me he could get an invitation for me – which he did – and so I went to this dinner and there were maybe about 100 people.

I was obviously one of the least important people and I was seated on one of the last tables. And then in the reception line he began to introduce me to President Masire – who, as it turns out, is still a good friend of mine; he’s about 83, and he’s still in good shape.

During the dinner, when everybody was eating, there were a few introductory speeches by the Secretary of State or somebody like that, and after the dinner the president would be called on to speak.

And during the dinner, President Masire actually came back to my table and tapped me on my shoulder and told me he’d like to speak with me about the situation we face in Botswana.

And I said ‘I’d be delighted’ and he said ‘What about tomorrow morning? Can we meet for breakfast’ and I said ‘You wouldn’t believe it but I’m scheduled to teach at Harvard and they would get very upset if I am not back in time to teach’, so I was scheduled to take the first flight in the morning.

And he said ‘Well OK, maybe tonight we can meet after the dinner’. So after the dinner, we made arrangements that I actually rode back with him to his hotel in his car and he asked me if the physician who was traveling with him – he had an entourage of about 15 people with him, one of whom was his physician – and he asked if he could have Turn to P56

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Conversations |

Professor Max Essex

Photography | JUSTIN IDE

From P54

him join us, and I said ‘Sure’.

And he actually called him in his room and he woke him up and he came in his bathrobe and all, and it was kind of funny – and he’s been a very close friend now too, Joe Makhema, who works closely with us.

And we talked for about an hour to an hour-and-a-half about what could be done, and he asked me to come to Botswana as a consultant as soon as possible and I did. I went there about 4-6 weeks later.

And when I went, we made arrangements through his physician so I could collect blood samples so I could characterize the virus. That was a month or two after the dinner in Washington. And that was how it all started after that.

It was clear those samples had an interesting virus. It was distinguishable from the other viruses we had from Senegal and from the US, and from other places, and we wanted to know why. Then we started going back after that, and went quite often and started to set up studies there.

President Masire was stepping down a year or two later, and President Mogae was in his party and widely expected to replace him. And he asked me to stay in consultation the same way and he arranged for me to meet with him virtually every time I went to Botswana.

Later it got so that if I went there maybe six times a year and I’d meet with him three times a year. So that’s how it started with Botswana.

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Above: Prof. Essex and Harvard President Drew Faust

About ‘Saturday is for Funerals’ Q: So why did you and Justice Unity Dow do this book?

A: I teach a course here at Harvard on AIDS in Africa for students who have a real interest in doing something, in developing countries, especially in Africa; and we accept about 16 students into the class but we also have a great excess of students applying and I can select the ones I want. And I always take some students who are not just into science but a lot of them are pre-medical students.

Some of them are in social sciences or economics or something like that; and some of those areas are important for the future of AIDS and so I have a schedule of topics that I want to cover.

They range from the epidemic – from how it started and when it started, to how it expanded, and how different parts of Africa are different; when it started in relation to the epidemics in the West and all those kinds of things. And then all the questions about transmission; how viruses are transmitted from all routes from between adults and mother to infant or blood. And then there are all the questions about drugs and what you can do with them to treat people and problems you run into with toxicities and drug resistance and which kind of clinical outcome you get.

Each one of those is sort of a different topic that I teach and so my goal was to have a story from someone who is from the country and in the situation where she has been observing the epidemic all along just

by virtue of living there, and to try and have a story that would help people to appreciate the importance of each of these topics and subtopics. So that was the goal of the book overall.

Now there are a few topics I wanted to talk about where it was harder for her to find a story to fit that; like vaccine research because that’s not something that impacted people’s lives yet. The way to approach that was to introduce her to some people who have participated in vaccine trials, and that would allow me an entrée to talk about how important it is to make a vaccine and how research goes on to do that.

And then, in our selecting of these topics which are primarily from the class schedule which I’ve used for the last several years, one of the problems we always ran into was how to avoid too much overlap because the question of how people infected each other is going to come up in a large number of stories but you can’t be too repetitive.

Well, Unity Dow said she knew many people who had such tragedies among her family and friends, so that got us a start. The only problem we ran into I think was how I could modify my own comments to avoid too much duplication so that I didn’t repeat the same things in too many chapters. And there is a bit of repetition on infection and methods of transmission, but hopefully not very much. That’s the story behind it and how and why we did it. But obviously we wanted something that wouldn’t just be used for these college students. We wanted something that could be used to educate the public at large and could be interesting enough for the public to read to make them more interested in AIDS in Africa.

Some of the publishers ask these very precise questions about how wide the readership could be and how specifically you can define the audience. And if you could say the audience would just be students or the audience will be people who are already interested in AIDS or in Africa they are not so interested. But if you could say that the audience might be people who would read all the books that people like Alexander McCall Smith write about Botswana, about social dimensions of past interactions in family problems in Africa anyway and all that, then you are looking at a larger audience and they can relate to that. So, our challenge was to make the stories interesting enough so that people who read books – like Alexander McCall Smith books – would get interested enough to read this and learn about the epidemic as a result.

Q: I’m not presuming to know more than your publisher but would you not agree that the one place where this

But it’s so similar. Even the cultural practices, the paying of the bride price, the burdens of the extended family it’s all there. I could relate to it very easily. So books from West Africa are in the school syllabuses all over eastern and southern Africa for the reason that it is considered important that young people should understand how their ancestors lived, and there is no evidence left now except for what can be found in books.

So what I was trying to tell you is that if someone in the West reads this book, they learn more about Africa, they learn more about AIDS in Africa and that’s it. But if someone from Africa reads this book, it may save his life. It may save the life of the person to whom he will talk. So I’d almost disagree with your publisher. The really important thing is that people from Africa should read this book. I speak as someone who’s read this book.

A: Yeah, well that’s good to know.

book desperately needs to be read is in Africa.

A: Yes. Q: Do you know what is the bestselling African novel ever? It’s the book Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian.

A: I didn’t know that. I’ve heard of Achebe.

Q: Okay. It is said he was heartbroken when another Nigerian, Wole Soyinka got the Nobel Prize.

A: I know much more about Soyinka because I know his brother personally. His brother, Femi Soyinka, is a physician.

Q: Is that so? That’s a very clever family. Well I personally think that Achebe is a better writer. But still that’s just personal. The point is the reason why the book has proved so popular is because, all over Africa, it is a standard textbook for secondary school. Kenyans who are growing up now – some in desperately poor conditions, but others in cities not much different from Boston – the only way they know about African traditions is from books. So, African governments, as a matter of policy, make sure some books which talk about Africans of the past are included in the school curriculum.

Chinua Achebe’s was the best, though it is based in Nigeria. Just like when I read your book – I’m from Kenya but your co-author was from Botswana.

Let’s talk: Prof. Essex in conversation with EA Flyer’s Muga

Q: It’s something which was long overdue. I’ve got a feeling that you are not the only one who is working on this. Anyone who has looked indepth at the AIDS epidemic must have wondered, over and over again, ‘How do you educate people?’, ‘How do you get them to understand?’, ‘How do you inject some part of this into the learning process?’

So that the understanding of what AIDS is and how its spread – and a little biology at least to explain it Photography | Kim Morrisseau

properly. And I don’t think anyone has come up with the formula that you and Unity Dow came up with of two parallel accounts, one scientific, one narrative and so many different examples of so many different people.

And you can see why people behave the way they do. Let me give you an example: If this was Kenya right now and you and I were in a bar, and your young assistant in the other room was in the same bar; and two or three really pretty girls walked in; they are more likely to come and chat us up than to chat him up. That’s how it is in Africa. Because both you and I have got grey hair, and it suggests age; it suggests prosperity. It happens like that. And in your book there is a story like that, about a very pretty girl who always goes out with older men who could buy her things which her poor family could not afford. I forget her name now. Well, the young women in Africa, who come from poor families, need to read and understand that this is happening everywhere and what the consequences are.

And as for a young American undergraduate, if she walked into a bar where the three of us were, she wouldn’t even notice that you and I were there. She would head for the younger man. So if such a young woman in America were to read that story of the very pretty African girl, who used to go out with older men, she would merely say, ‘That’s very interesting’ while an African girl would understand precisely how it is: that if you are from a lower-income family, and you’ve got looks, chances are you are going to end up going out with much older men.

About PEPFAR Q: Okay. So at some point we have to bring in the President’s Emergency Programme for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

So tell me, in your experience how crucial was PEPFAR as a programme for Botswana because I gather there was money there – it’s a middle income country not like some poor African countries. Did PEPFAR play a big role?

A: PEPFAR was not quite as important in Botswana as in the other African countries, but it was a very important programme for Africa and an extremely important programme for a lot of other countries.

Turn to P58

April 2012

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Professor Max Essex

From P57

But the decision to treat patients with anti-retroviral drugs was a very important decision. Actually it was just before PEPFAR, in the case of Botswana, it was around late 2001 and early 2002, but everyone in Botswana and PEPFAR in the US wanted Botswana to be included in PEPFAR. And Harvard was one of the original four applications that were successful for PEPFAR programmes, where you had to have evidence that you had experience in at least three countries in Africa. And Harvard had such experience. And Phyllis Kanki, who was a student of mine and is a professor here still – she has an office just down the hall – she is the one who organized the PEPFAR application that included Botswana, Tanzania and Nigeria.

Well, her programme was in Nigeria – it still is in Nigeria – which was started with a Gates [Foundation] grant. We did it in Nigeria because Gates felt that there wasn’t enough going on in Nigeria, and she volunteered to do that, and the dean of the school supported her. Another faculty member, Wafaie Fawzi, an epidemiologist, who was originally from Sudan but he spent time in Tanzania started the Tanzania programme.

And I had obviously started the Botswana programme. So these three countries were together in that. Ric Marlink, another former student, actually ran the Botswana PEPFAR programme.

Now in Botswana, we decided to do what you may call more advanced kinds of things for their programmes, which was monitoring and evaluation, which was training physicians in doing monitoring and evaluation of the treatment programmes that were ongoing to make sure they were working okay. But partly because they were a smaller country, and partly because they were a more advanced country, PEPFAR activities in Botswana were not nearly as big as they were in Nigeria and Tanzania.

The usual annual expenditure was like $4 million or something like that in Botswana. It was $50 million in Nigeria and $20 or 30 million in Tanzania. The fact is we as a group at Harvard who worked in Tanzania, Nigeria and Botswana all knew each other very well, and we had worked together in research collaboration before that, I think this also helped the programme to keep growing more rapidly. And in fact I was also involved in Tanzania in research, and in helping the epidemiologist who ran the programme – who still runs it – to get started and establishing laboratory facilities and expertise and such. So that’s sort of how the connection was made.

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Prof. Essex and President Masire

Q: Okay. Now the reason I ask you this is maybe I’ve missed something – and please correct me if I have – but there seems to be a shift in donor funding of HIV prevention and education and treatment and all that, toward other diseases as well. In other words, it’s like they said ‘All right, when AIDS came and threatened the whole world, we reacted this way. But just a minute: far more children die of malaria or waterborne diseases which are easier to treat; and also much cheaper to treat; and in fact your colleague whom you introduced me to (back in 2007) Professor Dyann Wirth – she said as far back then that AIDS had received a disproportionate amount because

it afflicted the articulate and the influential whereas when you come to diseases like malaria, well a grownup African technocrat does not fear malaria. Even if he gets malaria, he will just take a tablet or get a drip.

But the poor child out there in the village whose mother does not have a dollar or two with which to buy that tablet, that child dies before their fifth birthday for want of two or three dollars. She said it’s difficult to dramatize malaria in the same way that you can dramatize AIDS. Like when I was reading some of the descriptions that Unity Dow wrote (in the book you co-authored with her) of some people in their last stages of AIDS – when their mouths are all

slimy, skin all scaly, etc. I have seen cousins and nephews in that terminal stage. And that can be dramatized as this terrible thing which must be prevented. But some child, who nobody really knows, dying out there in the bush – no one really cares.

I see a time coming when Western donor nations will no longer be giving large sums for HIV and meantime there are still plenty of people in Africa who are superstitious about AIDS and therefore will not take the measures which would prevent them from getting infected. So, here is, on the one hand, the budget of these poor African countries that cannot support what we could call a serious public health programme. On the other hand, the donors are now spreading their money a little more thinly. Where do you think all this will lead?

A: Well, you know, we can look at this in many different ways and one argument is, some people would say ‘Why did they put so much into AIDS, while saving people with AIDS cost much more than saving people with malaria?’ as you’ve said. But another way of looking at it is, ‘Do we really think this country (the US) and most Western countries would have put as much into healthcare and health improvement and prevention of disease in Africa at all, if it wasn’t AIDS?’ Because malaria is much older than AIDS, but people don’t say ‘Why didn’t we do this 50 and 100 years ago?’ Because malaria and TB were just as bad then, and they were around then. They did it because they only appreciated the dilemma of these infectious disease problems in general being disproportionately in Africa, after AIDS pointed it out to them. But they realized that it was because they had seen firsthand the suffering from AIDS in those countries that they learned more about the suffering from infectious diseases in general, including malaria, TB and everything else as a result of AIDS. And it is arguable that were it not for the education that AIDS provided, the donor countries would still not be doing anything, or very much of it. They should have been doing more of course: they should have been long before. But it’s arguable that they wouldn’t, were it not for the way in which their eyes had to be opened around AIDS. That is still another way of looking at it.

A: Absolutely. That’s one way of looking at it, yes. The other way of looking at it, however, is that there’s all of these confusing emotions about HIV/AIDS in relation to sex or promiscuity or whatever else (lack of responsible sexual behaviour, etc) but the other fact is it’s really impossible, even now, to reproduce and to have subsequent generations of people in Africa or any other place, if you’re HIV infected and you don’t do something to control the HIV or treat the disease. That is not so with TB or with malaria. Meaning, if you use condoms in preventing transmission of HIV between sex partners, they can’t conceive because you prevent sperm too. But that’s not an issue with malaria or TB in and of themselves.

So there are differences. You can prevent reproduction for all the right reasons; you could be a very religious Roman Catholic and not have sex except to have children, but you still don’t use condoms. So how can you prevent transmission of HIV if you don’t prevent transmission of sperm to impregnate a woman and have a child?

So there are differences with HIV also.

And I think these paradoxes go back and forth in many different ways because one of the realizations now, I think, is that prevention itself has to become more important for sustainability in relation in AIDS. And there was all along great hope Turn to P60

Q: Okay. So you’re saying that it required something as new and as dramatic as AIDS to focus Western attention on the public health problems in Africa.

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From P59

Photography | Martha Henry

and excitement that the vaccine would work better and sooner and then we wouldn’t have to invest as large a budget on drugs as we have had to invest. And even though drugs are a lot cheaper now than they were in the past, they could be made quite a bit cheaper if people just had reasonable discussions and debate. But if it still costs $300 for drugs or $200 for drugs…

Q: For a year?

A: Yes. And $200 or $300 for other things around the drugs like medical testing and kits, nursing and physician care and whatever it takes to get started. These are unsustainable for many poor countries that have incomes of $300 or $400 per person per year. And that is causing people to think more carefully and conscientiously about prevention mechanisms again. And I think in what we might call “donor fatigue.”

Some of these larger organisations like the Global Fund or the Gates Foundation would say that we are running into problems with donor fatigue and the world economy being down and therefore sustainability for treatment programmes is decreasing. But at the same time, I think you’ve now got a lot of researchers involved and a lot of donor organizations involved in addressing the costeffectiveness of new prevention methods even in the absence of a vaccine.

And one of the things I learnt a long time ago is that as medical research improves for any treatment and prevention of disease, you learn a lot that has cross-benefit like a polymerase chain reaction methodology to diagnose exactly who is infected when you just can’t do it with antibodies those same tools work across diseases. You develop them for one disease and you can modify them quite well to fit other diseases. And that approach, I think, is proving its value for malaria, TB and a bunch of other things.

And I think that one can look at these things in a very optimistic and constructive way as to how investigations and donations and activations of political organizations, and so on, will help other diseases as well. Or one can look at it in a very narrow sense and say any value spent on AIDS is taken away from malaria or infant care or something else. And I have found it’s not very productive to do that.

You can even argue that some of the critical facilities and some of the physician, nurse and healthcare worker education in general, even though it was built around AIDS, it’s proving to be valuable for providing antenatal care in general. And everyone is now aware of ways to prevent transmission of HIV from mother to infant and yet, to do that, you have to have sufficient antenatal care to find out whether or not the woman is 60 |

Journey of a thousand miles: Prof.

Essex teaching his Freshman Seminar, “AIDS in Africa”, at Harvard

HIV-positive. Therefore, you build a structure that primarily exists to identify women when they are pregnant before they just come into the clinic on the day of birth and if you’re doing that, you’re helping them in general in relation to decreasing infant morbidity and mortality.

And so I think when people only focus on parts of how AIDS research and treatment might have been taken away from the rest of healthcare, they are not being realistic, unless they recognise the ways that AIDS research has added to the rest of healthcare in general.

The Failure of Communication in the Fight Against Aids Q: Let’s go back to your book briefly, because, over and above the actual medical treatments such as the one you’ve described, one of the great failures in the fight against AIDS in Africa is the failure of communication.

Every African mother knows that your child should ideally sleep under a bed net if you have one. They may not know that if a child is feverish, that doesn’t mean its malaria, and they may not know about Oral Rehydration Therapy which is a very easy way to treat cholera, but they do know about bed nets.

So, my question is in two parts.

First, why was not a bigger effort made to just bring about a clearer

understanding of AIDS because the focus has been on treatment and yet prevention has to be rooted in understanding? And second, going back to your book, do you have a strategy as of now for ensuring that it is widely read in Africa? (The book Saturday Is For Funerals came out in paperback in September 2011) A: Well, unfortunately for the Part Two, we don’t know how to make it better read.

And to expand on that a little bit, I and several others edited this book called AIDS in Africa and that book we specifically decided that we would make it free in Africa to all libraries and medical faculties and any place where physicians would congregate. And nobody had any profits from it or anything like that.

And I could never tell to what extent that worked. We worked with several agencies and distributed it. All I know is that it’s available in a lot of medical schools and libraries.

That’s not the people we’re talking about at this instant. So I don’t know who to go to for any kind of distribution in a situation like this, or if it is the Internet or some other way or Kindle.

So, it’s not the same kind of distribution, it’s not easy to make that kind of distribution, but I would be very curious to get your opinion because maybe in a year or less there will be a paperback version, and maybe there is a way we could do something with that, or some mechanisms that I’m not sufficiently familiar with. And there is some discussion about Francophone countries and a French

translation but even then it might not be the best thing. Then there is Swahili, but I know languages could be just as important in passing a message.

Q: Could I interrupt you? But what you say about the importance of local knowledge comes in, the largest selling Kiswahili paper in Kenya barely sells 10,000 copies a day, whereas among the English language papers, the highest selling one sells about 150,000200,000 copies daily whereas the next one sells about 80,000 copies; the next one sells about 50,000 copies.

So in Kenya, Uganda and, increasingly, Rwanda, English would matter far more than Kiswahili. And secondly I’d like to see the translator who would manage your section of the book – the scientific explanations about polymerase this and that etc.

The English language edition is more than enough for most of Anglophone Africa and the French translation would be more than enough for Francophone Africa.

A: In relation to communication in the context of prevention, I think that’s something that should be raised at a high level in the Gates Foundation. Maybe somebody else, maybe the Gates Foundation and maybe other groups and I’ll tell you why I say that. As you may know, if you talk to the Gates Foundation or Bill Gates himself

Below: Prof Essex with Dr. Joseph Makhema in Botswana

– a week or so ago there was an interview with Bill Gates Junior and Bill Gates Senior on Larry King Live. And he started out with the first question everybody always asks Bill Gates, which is, ‘How do you decide which foundation needs help?’, And he said, “Well, we have made a very clear distinction: In the developing world it is healthcare; in the US, it’s education”.

And nobody said, “Well, in the developing world, how much of that healthcare is education? Or, at least, prevention education?”

Nobody got into that but in reality I suspect it’s very, very little. I think it’s important that they appreciate something like this and how much of prevention is education and not just purchasing that medicine. And I think that’s something that’s a very important point, that hasn’t been appreciated adequately, and has to be appreciated more as time goes on, with this paradigm of donor fatigue, and having to switch more maintenance of treatment to prevention.

Let me just give you one other anecdote or explanation I sometimes use in the context of Botswana: I probably mentioned this before, but one of the dilemmas of a situation where treatment is so successful is afterwards people underestimate how successful it has been. If we take the usual life charts of those in the US, somebody being treated for AIDS is going to live for 20 to 25 years. In Botswana, you already have 25%

of your population infected. You treat it as a disease and after they have the disease, they can live for another 20 to 25 years and, therefore, you’ve got these poor people being treated for 20 to 25 years.

At the same time, you’ve got more people growing into the age category – we think we have ways to prevent the motherto-infant transmission for the most part – but you’ve got this pool of people growing into sexual maturity where they can still get infected. And so if you consider all the people infected with HIV and on treatment as a vat that is 25 per cent and the out-spout to the vat is death; and the in-spout to the vat is new infection.

If you cut down deaths by three-quarters, or 80 per cent, then you have to cut down new infections by 80 per cent or 75 per cent just to stay even on the vat. If you cut down deaths by 80 per cent and you cut down new infections by 50 per cent or 60 per cent, you say ‘Wow! That’s pretty good’. You’ve reduced the infection by 50 per cent, but the total number of infected people continues to go up. Even a good vaccine may only reduce it by 75 per cent or 80 per cent. So that’s another illustration of how people have to learn the importance of prevention.

The other anecdote that I often mention, is when President Mogae – he really does deserve the credit for this – started the optout programme of convincing people and Turn to P62

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Professor Max Essex

Photography | Ryan Louis Hurley

From P61

convincing the government (and he took some flack for it initially), to adopt an opt-out programme, which says that anybody who comes to the government for any reason in relation to healthcare, whether for an emergency or non-emergency or whatever, be asked if they refuse to have an HIV test: Not if they would like to have an HIV test, but if they refuse to have a HIV test. If they say, ‘Yes, I refuse to have a HIV test’, the health workers say ‘OK’, period. They go on anyway and provide them with whatever healthcare of other things they would have had. But that in a sense reverses the stigma argument.

It says ‘If I say, ‘No’ I’m not going to have an HIV test’ it makes some people even more suspicious.

It says they are living in fear because they are HIV-positive or because they don’t want people to know about their lifestyle or something else. And I think that in itself had a huge effect in raising the fraction of adults who get themselves voluntarily tested to 6070 per cent in Botswana now, which is going to have a significant impact on prevention.

But one of the other aspects of that is there clearly is evidence of reduced cases of new infections among younger people who are sexually active in Botswana – the cohort is 17-25. The problem is that when they get

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Co-authors: Unity Dow and Prof.

Essex wrote the book Saturday is for Funerals, a study of people living with AIDS

to 25 or 26, the mentality of prevention seems to wear off.

And my possible explanation for that is, when they are younger they are more often having sex for fun or whatever else; and when they are a little older and they really want to have kids, they know they can’t use condoms because they want to have kids.

And so this points us back to another need for research in prevention to address this issue. It would have been great if we had a 95 per cent efficacious vaccine but we don’t – and most likely won’t have it for the next 10 or 15 years – and so we have to have some other approaches to that problem.

Q: Okay, but one thing you did not effectively answer is “Why wasn’t communication given more emphasis from the start? Why was it, ‘Let’s find a vaccine’, or, say, ‘Let’s treat those who are ill’, or ‘Let’s have some sort of prevention?’ As in Kenya, in every place there’s a VCT (Voluntary Counselling and Testing Centre).

It’s got a purple background, yellow color letters, and everyone recognizes it. And, initially, the counselors would just sit and wait; but later on they started going door-to-door; but still the number of Kenyans who know their HIV status is statistically very

small. And the reason for this is there’s still stigma first and foremost. But over and above that, I’d say there’s superstition. I know I’ve met enough HIV people to know that it’s not a death sentence anymore but, at the back of my mind, I’m really wondering, ‘What is HIV?’ And I’ve heard this, I’ve heard that, and all sorts of rumours which will flourish if there isn’t enough clear information.

For example, any woman whose child is protected from malaria by mosquito net knows and believes in her heart that malaria is spread by mosquitoes. It’s not a curse; it’s not an evil eye but it’s mosquitoes. It’s not a myth, it’s a scientific fact.

Now, there are some scientific facts about HIV. Why wasn’t a bigger effort made to explain this to ordinary people? I consider your book to be one of the first serious attempts to reach ordinary people with narratives they can relate to, with an explanation they can understand. You don’t need to have a PhD in virology to understand it.

A: I think it is because behavioural interventions in general in this country have not been so successful. And most researchers who are serious researchers doing quantifiable studies, are not doing

behavioural research in Africa. And they are not doing it either because they don’t know how, in the same sense that I didn’t know how to reach enough people with some of the science without having Unity Dow draw them in with real-life stories. Or, because they are afraid of repercussions from the political establishment in the countries, I think it could be either or both. And I think there are not enough Africans who are well trained in quantifiable behavioural sciences.

The Africans trained in the US and Europe, the few who have gained enough knowledge and expertise in AIDS, very, very few of them are going to gain that expertise in educational and behavioural sciences and go back and practice this. I think that an increasing number of people are being educated about medical practice and what to do.

Even some of them about voluntary testing and counseling techniques and that sort of stuff. But I think it requires something like a political link and political commitment by some regional if not continental organization like, for example, the Southern Africa Heads of State and parliamentarians have their regular meetings.

And I think if some of them were to endorse some mechanisms for this, it might work whether or not there were analogous groups in eastern Africa and western Africa who do that sort of things, I don’t know.

Centre of excellence: BotswanaHarvard Partnership building in the grounds of Princess Marina Hospital in Gaborone, Botswana.

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Epic Safari

Nairobi-to-Durban, an Epic Overland Safari

By AUDREY WABWIRE

T

he beauty of the African continent remains breathtaking. Driving down from Nairobi, Kenya, to South Africa and watching how the landscapes flow in a scenic rhythm of rocky hills to yellow savanna, and down onwards to the most surreal baobab forests, which seem like a 3D setting in an unsettling hallucination.

The sparkling Lake Malawi and slow rural countryside of Zambia grow into the mighty Zambezi, breaking into the Kalahari

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in Botswana and the organized ranches of South Africa. The Valley of a Thousand Hills pours you into Durban, South Africa An African safari is every sightseer’s dream. I jumped at this opportunity to travel 3,205km by road and camp all the way to South Africa last year with a group of 160 young activists from around the world.

Climate change These youth were on a campaign mission to gather support for climate justice in the run-up to COP 17, the official annual UN climate change meeting, which was hosted in Durban. I was on a fellowship

by UNDP’s Africa Adaptation Programme to cover climate change stories during this trip with the young environmentalists.

All these youth were fitted into six converted Mercedes trucks. These powerful four-wheel-drive vehicles are in use by many overland tour companies for road trips across Africa as they easily maneuver the challenging road network.

The travel company we used provided a cook, driver and tour guide for each of the trucks. All the cooking and cleaning was to be done by the cook, with help from the respective truck ‘members’. The cleaning of the truck was to be done on rotation.

The drive from Nairobi to Arusha is not long, or perhaps it was the beginning of the journey and all the enthusiasm kept me from sleeping. Non-Kenyans snapped away at the Kenyan countryside, and camera shutters punctuated every conversation as we tried to get to know each other, and get comfortable.

This trip took us deep into Maasai country in Namanga, where political borders separate Kenya and Tanzania, although the Maasai live on both sides of this border. As we had our passports stamped entering Tanzania, we enjoyed buying Maasai jewelry from elderly Maasai women who did not speak English or Kiswahili. To be fair, they counted all their money carefully and would not be cheated by any tourist who felt too-clever-byhalf just because they spoke a different language.

The roads in Tanzania are smooth. I say this because this was the first time I could doze off that day. Kenyan roads do not give you such small pleasures. I enjoyed my sleep, but only after spotting Mount Kilimanjaro towering majestically in the horizon. It is sad that the snow on this mountain is no longer as thick as postcards and old movies boast.

My first camping experience was in

the Meserani Snake Park, Arusha. This is a conservation park for all kinds of indigenous snakes and reptiles found in the locality. From black mambas to pythons, to chameleons to various species of lizards. It is a great place to learn about reptiles and engage with locals on the horror stories of how snakes are found in every nook and cranny in the area. These are not the best bedtime stories if you are camping and happened not to carry a torch, though I highly appreciate the fact that this park plays a noble role in protecting a part of the ecosystem that is easily forgotten.

This park has a vast space for campers, with a cozy homely bath area, save for the lack of hot water. Do not expect hot water from these showers, it is wiser to ignore all the instructions on the intricacies of turning the taps. The experience is better if you walk in with a clear understanding that the water is cold. As a novice camper, I did naively expect a few luxuries as found in hotels, but, as you will see later, hot water soon became the last of my worries. Any opportunity to splash water around is invigorating after an 11-hour drive.

This stop was short and the drive quickly started for Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s commercial capital, at 3am the next morning. This drive took us through the rural countryside, and although it was 16 hours long, spending 3 more hours in traffic in Dar made the group agitated.

Dar is slower than Nairobi, but harbors a Turn to P66

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Epic Safari

From P65

port. This means that trucks are constantly loading and off-loading, driving in and out of the city.

The humidity and exhaustion was forgotten as soon as we got into Kipepeo Beach Camp. This is a campsite by the Indian Ocean, cooled by the sea breeze and carpeted by the soft white sand of a seemingly endless beach. A swim in the salty ocean and a cool shower is a heavenly feeling after being cooped up sleeping in creative positions in the truck.

The short stay in Dar is memorable.

Sitting by the beach sipping tropical juice and being hypnotized by the waves frothing and crashing as they close their journey when they get ashore elicits a therapeutic, calming effect. But the trip

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had to continue, and swiftly since we aimed to be in Durban in 16 days. Our tour guide John explained to us that these trips normally take much longer to ensure a better tourism experience. For example, the tourists are allowed 5 days or more at each campsite so that they can explore the vicinity and catch up on rest.

Tanzania is much bigger than Kenya, thus the drives were much longer. We had to drive on, bearing the African summer heat which was particularly ferocious in 2011. Moving further south, we entered the Mikumi National Park. This park is famous for its various species of antelope, which we were lucky to spot during such a hot time of day. I saw elephants resting under the scant shade of trees that had long lost their leaves.

We went on through the baobab forest in Ruaha. A single baobab tree is fascinating to behold. It is also known as the upsidedown tree, as its stem tapers upwards growing towards branches that often have no leaves. This makes it look like a tree

that has been planted in an upside-down manner. Surreal.

The hot air filled the truck and pushed us to reduce clothing, scramble for a sip of the now-warm water which disappointed and quenched thirst at the same time.

Organic farm The long drive came to a halt in chilly Iringa, where we camped at The Old Farmhouse. This is an organic farm in the south of Tanzania that serves delicious organic meals from produce cultivated on the premises. This was a one-night stop and we proceeded to Malawi at dawn.

Karonga is the first region you see as you enter Malawi from this route. It is a rural agricultural area which had also suffered from the raging drought. The landscape remained the same until we spotted the breathtaking Lake Malawi. This freshwater lake bears sparkling blue waters that stretch on and on, and I remember the tour guide being asked if he was sure that this was not the sea.

That night, we camped at Chitimba Beach Camp. This camp sits by the lakeshore and enjoys a cooling breeze in the evenings. Even though villagers brought their cows to drink and did their laundry here, the beach remains impeccably clean.

This is a good spot to shop for curios, enjoy the beach, and interact with rural folk all at once.

The drive from Chitimba to Lilongwe was adventurous. This is an uphill climb on a very narrow road overlooking Lake Malawi and mud huts, little farms and shrubs in the valley. The huge trucks had to go extra slow on the numerous tight and blind corners as some of the travelers squealed in fear and thrill. Thankfully, we got to Lilongwe safe and sound and pitched camp at Mabuya campsite, which is located suitably just at the end of the city.

This campsite has a bar that is popular with the local expatriate community, possibly because it is in a serene vicinity. However, as a camper, the recurring water shortage makes one apprehensive. Blocked toilets

Livestock is one of Botswana’s main income earners.

So on entering the country, all wheels and shoes are disinfected for Footand-Mouth disease”

and water going off mid-shower are the memories we took from Mabuya as we forged on to Zambia.

We stayed in Chipata – the bicycle town, Lusaka, the capital and Livingstone, while in Zambia. My favorite experience was at The Waterfront. This site and hotel overlooks the mighty Zambezi River, with a small pier where lovers cuddle as the sun sets. Cheeky monkeys fill the green bushy site and will be mischievous with unwanted guests if you leave your tent unzipped.

Livingstone is also home to Victoria Falls, the mid-point of the Zambezi and a wonder of the world. These falls are both terrifying and enchanting. While driving to the falls, you see some smoke in the distance and assume it is some bush fire.

But as you come closer, the thunder of the falls greets you and dares you to come and look if you will.

We visited the falls during an off-peak season. This means that there was not much water to see, or so the guide said.

Apparently, in some seasons, the waterfalls are greater in Zimbabwe, and in other months, in Zambia. I was amazed anyway.

The crashing sound, the foaming white water as it fell into the river was enough to make me forget I had a camera.

We stood dazed for a while before we remembered all our friends on social media

sites who were eating up the photos of the trip as we uploaded them. Some brave ones enjoyed bungee jumping. I am not airborne, and feel most comfortable with my feet confirming the firmness of the ground.

Foot-and-Mouth After two days, we crossed into Botswana via ferry. On this particular day, only one ferry was working and it only carries one vehicle per trip, so we knew we would be at this border for at least 6 hours.

Livestock is one of Botswana’s main income earners. So on entering the country, all wheels and shoes are disinfected for Footand-Mouth disease.

This was a curious experience as we were required to take out all our shoes and clean them on a gunny sack soaked in disinfectant which left a white residue which easily comes off when rinsed in water. The trucks had to drive into a shallow pool of disinfectant.

These delays set us back and we did not make it to our intended campsite for the day. We drove on into the Kalahari and instead settled for the Savute Elephant Camp as dusk approached. This is a site where herds of elephant can be viewed Turn to P68

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From P93

as they cross the bush and come to the watering hole each evening.

A dining area is built strategically to allow guests to view the elephants as they come to the watering hole by dusk.

I spotted elephant dung in the campsite earlier during the day and tried to imagine how an elephant would look up close, but my imagination did no justice to the magnificent animals I saw later that evening.

The salty waters at this campsite require one to be careful during cooking – no salt is required. But if you do prepare tea or coffee, that is for caffeine addicts like yours truly, then you must endure the salty taste.

This was a beautiful site, next time I must to carry some fresh water for my coffee.

We were running late and swiftly moved on to Gaborone, capital of Botswana. This clean city is watered by the man-made lake created by Gaborone Dam. We set camp here for a few days.

These waters harbor crocodiles and many signs warn campers to view the seemingly peaceful waters from afar. The site overlooks the city and, by night, the city lights up the horizon in a spectacular pattern of colored lights. The site sits in a valley among rocky hills in the distance.

There are no bathrooms as such in this

campsite. Instead, there are plastic portable toilets. Inside they look very much like the toilets in the planes, only here you have to be careful not to fall over since these toilets do not have the magical flushing mechanism.

Tarpaulin sheets The showers are innovative. You have a choice between tarpaulin basins filled with water after each bath, or an overhead tarpaulin shower which can only hold so much water at any time. Either way, you are sheltered within tarpaulin sheets that flap away freely when the wind blows. It is a great idea to shower at night here.

There is a big bird and game population around the campsite which roams freely into the campsite when they sense silence.

In the absence of human noise, the birds sing so beautifully. The silence also draws prancing antelopes out of the bush and into the site.

Gaborone City is quiet, with virtually no night traffic. By 7pm, the streets are quiet save for one or two cars zooming on the smoothly carpeted roads. The city oozes with affluence with the malls and shopping streets. Very much like South Africa, which we drove into soon after.

As we entered South Africa, we could

sense that we were in a different land.

There were no scrubs, bushes, villages as we had seen in the rest of the countries. The road ran smoothly alongside vast fenced tracks of land belonging to ranchers as the tour guide informed us. We spotted stately horses and cattle on some farms, probably being bred on the best of everything. The fences only stopped in towns and began again outside the suburbs.

The Valley of a Thousand Hills, right after Bergsville, cannot be fairly described by words. These are green hills, rolling on and on, dipping and cresting with intermittent forest and vegetative cover.

The hills do seem endless, they give you a full comfortable chance to appreciate the beauty of a natural carpet flowing as far as the eye can see. This was the best welcome into our final destination, the coastal city of Durban.

Durban boasts sandy beaches which host concerts and water lovers all year round, but especially from September to February. Though not as quiet as some of the beaches you would find in East Africa, these beaches are still a great African coastal experience and do not get uncomfortably crowded.

The security was heightened of course, during the COP 17 in Durban. Still, it is only in South Africa that the group of youth had to abide by stricter security guidelines, returning to the campsite before dusk and keeping in groups. We had no incident of violence or crime involving any of our group members.

We camped at Nature’s Haven in the Bluff area. This is an eco-friendly campsite in a serene high-end neighborhood.

The area is green and highly vegetated, giving off clear air which is relieving after a hot, sweaty day in town. The grass is well trimmed and is maintained regularly.

The bath area is awkwardly situated near a kitchen area, but it is clean and has a constant supply of warm water. This is a great place to stay for people who prefer to have a green but comfortable camping experience.

Camping and traveling by road for 20 days is exhausting, fun, challenging and daring. This is a great way to experience Africa – if you can make the time.

Audrey Wabwire is a freelance writer and a journalist.

68 |

Foreigners |

Eric Reynolds

Photography | JONATHAN KALAN

Serial entrepreneur with global brands to his name launches the LuciaStove, an environment-friendly household wonder with vast money-making potentials, reports JONATHAN KALAN

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ric Reynolds has either gone off the deep end, or he’s on to something big - really big.

His mission? To make Rwanda the first “carbon-negative” country in the world.

His method? A cookstove, a for-profit energy company, and four years of serious planning.

At 59 (though going on 19, he says, and with his level of energy and enthusiasm, I can attest to that one), he’s one of the most “veteran” social entrepreneurs I’ve met. Founder of three successful environmentally-minded companies in the US, including the rugged outdoor gear company Marmot, and Nau clothing, he’s done his fair share of building markets and capturing customers.

Cookstove Yet his newest venture, Inyenyeri, a “Rwandan Social Benefit Company”, may be his most radical and toughest challenge yet.

In late August 2011, the company launched its initial operations, manufacturing and distributing the LuciaStove, an innovative cookstove invented by Nat Mulcahy of World Stove International, in two small areas in northwestern Rwanda. As Reynolds puts it frankly, the LuciaStove is “a stove that can pay for your children’s school fees”.

US Millionaire Out to Make Rwanda the First ‘Carbonnegative’ Country The beginnings of Reynolds’s entrepreneurial streak can be traced back to an Alaskan glacier in April of 1971, when as a Geology student at the University of California Santa Cruz, he and a few friends conceived the idea of the “Marmot Club”.

In a nod perhaps to what would become Reynolds’s sort of Ghandian egalitarian ideology and beliefs, everyone in the club was President. To become a Marmot, you simply had to climb a glacial peak with another Marmot. For the next few years, Reynolds and his buddies

tinkered around in their dorm room, creating prototypes of down jackets, vests, and eventually sleeping bags – basically to help fund and improve the quality of own climbing endeavors. In 1973, at the young age of 21, Reynolds dropped out of college to found Marmot Mountain Works, a tiny retail and rental shop in Grand Junction, Colorado.

In less than 10 years, as CEO of Marmot Inc., Reynolds transformed $3,000 in Turn to P70

April 2012

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Foreigners |

Eric Reynolds

From P69

funding into a multi-million dollar brand, known for rugged and high performance clothing and equipment. Marmot was one of the first companies to market GoreTex fabric for shelled sleeping bags and rainwear, and soon the company became a household name.

After Reynolds sold off his share of Marmot in 1989, he became CEO of Sweetwater Inc., another successful company which made potable water filtration and purification products, eventually selling it off 1997, and working for a few years as a freelance consultant while serving on the board of countless companies, from Swiss Army Brands to a venture capital fund. All of this begs the question – how did an American apparel entrepreneur end up in Rwanda?

In 2007, through friend and author Terry Tempest Williams, Reynolds began getting involved with the global nonprofit Barefoot Artists and their Rwanda Healing Project, based out of Gisenyi. The organization works through a series of art, health, community, and economic development initiatives to transform the “physical and human environment” for survivors of the tragic 1994 Rwandan Genocide.

Solutions After a few visits, Reynolds fell in love with the country, its people, and its story, and began researching what more could be done to bring some serious change. He stumbled upon the enormous failings of the energy infrastructure, and the negative health, economic, and environmental impacts of cooking, and was determined to find a solution.

As Eric and I sat in the living room of his new home in Gisneyi in late November, poring over endless financial spreadsheets, models, videos, and his zillion gigs of TED talks that have helped re-shape his idea of business and led to the birth of his newest venture, he didn’t speak too much of his past. There were low moments, he told me, and high moments, but his move to Rwanda in 2010 has been one of the highest points in his life. “I feel like I’m 21 again” he’s told me.

His intensely focused existence in Rwanda is the lifeblood of Inyenyeri, with which he hopes to build an entire energy infrastructure to serve the majority of Rwanda’s energy needs while “eliminating extreme and persistent poverty”.

He’s going for broke on this one, already investing $300,000 of his own life savings, and shipping his entire life over in a 40ft container, to make it happen. To ensure it is 70 |

The pellets option: At 5075% the price of charcoal, the pellets are economically sensible

a “Rwandan owned” company, he’s simply decided to get Rwandan citizenship. He’s not leaving anytime soon.

The LuciaStove, which Inyenyeri is essentially built off of, is an incomegenerating cookstove. It might be hard to believe, but bear with me while I explain . . .

‘Biochar’ The stove burns small biomass pellets, which by both the precise design of the stove itself and the biomass makeup of the pellets, heat at such a high temperature that the stove produces a clean blue gas flame.

No smoke, no indoor air pollution, no blackened walls, no blackened lungs.

The LuciaStove then transforms the biomass fuel pellets into something called “biochar”, which is allegedly 80% carbon, can be registered for carbon credits, and used as a soil amendment to agricultural land, resulting in increased crop yields.

Biochar has been praised widely from many environmentalists and according to one study has the potential to decrease greenhouse gas emissions by 12%

worldwide.

In working towards the Millennium Development Goals, one area that the country is deeply struggling with is energy.

Some 86% of the energy balance of the entire country is biomass for cooking – things such as wood, charcoal, and assorted dried plants and brush.

Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars that Rwanda has invested in electrification efforts, by 2020 the grid is only expected to reach just 35% of the country. In addition, according to the Rwandan Ministry of Health, more than 34% of the rural medical clinic visits are related to acute pulmonary illness – a direct result of indoor air pollution.

Inyenyeri hopes to solve both problems, simultaneously.

Since rural families are already collecting this biomass anyway, and because of the efficiency of a LuciaStove, families will need to collect significantly less biomass than they are currently collecting. And, because of the biomass type required for the pellets, they won’t need to cut down any trees or

Profitable This sounds like a lot of “free”, and it is; but Inyenyeri is dead set on becoming an extremely profitable energy company, not just another charity selling cookstoves.

They believe that the rural customers are doing their part in collecting the biomass, and thus receive the free pellets.

Urban customers, on the other hand, won’t be collecting biomass, and will therefore have to pay for the pellets. Even so, the pellets are 50-75% the price of charcoal for an urban household, making it an economically sensible option for them, and, of course, a smoke-free option.

According to recent tests by Inyenyeri, as little as 400 grams of fuel can burn for about an hour and a quarter, bringing three liters of water to a boil in hardly 16 minutes.

Reynolds’s plans for Inyenyeri are aggressive – his vision is to see over 300 Inyenyeri hubs across the country by 2020.

The whole model, research, and strategy for Inyenyeri is far too complex for me to explain here; yet spending several days and nights with Reynolds over the past few months at his new home in Gisenyi, Rwanda, my barrage of questions were never left unanswered. He’s dedicated the past four years of his life to making sure the business plan has not a single loose end – in

Photography | JONATHAN KALAN

plants in the process. People will simply collect the fallen biomass near their homes, and drop it off at an Inyenyeri hub.

Their ambitious hope is that 80% of Rwandan households would need to travel no further than 2-3 km to reach their closest Inyenyeri hub. When they turn in the biomass, they will receive the fuel pellets for free. After using the pellets to cook, they return the leftover biochar, and receive “credit” at the Inyenyeri hub, which can be used to purchase solar lights, rechargeable batteries, water filters, school vouchers, and other “socially beneficial” products.

Reynolds’s plans for Inyenyeri are aggressive – his vision is to see over 300 Inyenyeri hubs across the country by 2020”

the same way he went about launching his successful retail companies in the US. If all goes according to plan, with just 40% of Rwandans using this technology, Rwanda could actually become the first “carbon-negative” country with the amount of carbon captured through these stoves.

If it doesn’t, Reynolds may need to find another way to save the world. His track record as a serial entrepreneur demonstrates his ability to develop a product like GoreTex and make it a hit for extremely rugged explorers and middle-class outdoorsy folks alike. Income-generating cookstoves for the poor, however, might be a different sell.

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Big Ideas Forum |

Innovations for a Changing World

Meeting Sammy the Community Warden in the Olare Orok Conservancy opened Prof. Anderson’s eyes to the ways in which the local Maasai communities are responding to economic incentives. Giving up their grazing land for wild animals provided a better return than the traditional grazing of large herds of livestock

Sammy’s

Suzuki

By PROF. TERRY ANDERSON

W

e sat in the “lodge”, a huge tent which housed the dining room and sitting room, discussing with Sammy how Ol Kinyei Conservancy came to be.

Sammy is a Maasai and chief warden for the conservancy located near the border 72 |

of the Masai Mara National Reserve, best known for scenes on the Discovery Channel of wildebeest by the thousands migrating to the Mara’s vast grass plains, but first having to swim the Mara River filled with crocodiles.

As we talked, impala, baboons, warthogs, and giraffe grazed peacefully in

our wilderness view. Sammy explained his motivation for helping to create the Ol Kinyei Conservancy. It wasn’t his oversized uniform which he wore proudly or the pay which allowed him to purchase more cattle, the store of wealth for Maasai; it was the prospect of having a Suzuki motorcycle to patrol the land.

Game veiwing Having seen what a neighbouring group was accomplishing by leasing some of its grazing land for game viewing, Sampson was ready for his maiden voyage as an environmental entrepreneur.

Sammy’s teammate is Jake GrievesCook, an entrepreneur with tourism experience in Kenya whose company is Porini Camps. Their idea was to set aside 8,500 acres out of a total of 200,000 acres being grazed by Maasai cattle and to build a wilderness “tented camp” to accommodate guests. Achieving their

Photography | Courtesy

vision, however, required more than just throwing up some tents, providing guides, and serving food.

They had to attract wildlife to the land and that required removing the livestock, which are a way of life for the Maasai. As a village elder later explained, they believe that god gave them the livestock and the land, and, on the heels of a major drought, god had also taken thousands of livestock from them.

Culture Sammy’s first challenge was to convince the elders of several villages that setting aside a small percentage of the total was a way to diversify their portfolio.

Needless to say in their culture, he faced an uphill battle.

Jake’s entrepreneurial talents laid the foundation for convincing the elders that they could “do good while doing well”.

His proposal was to pay a fixed fee per acre plus a percentage of the tourism revenues in return for the communities’ commitment to keep livestock off the conservancy. In this way the Maasai would get some certain income and have an incentive to meet their side of the bargain Turn to P74

Jake’s entrepreneurial talents laid the foundation for convincing the elders that they could “do good while doing well”

April 2012

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Big Ideas Forum |

Innovations for a Changing World

From P73

because tourists don’t come to see cows grazing.

It took Sammy nine months of meetings with the elders to convince them that this was worth a try, but ultimately he got his motorcycle. Initially, the elders agreed to stop grazing 8,500 acres in the Maasai ecosystem near the Mara National Reserve.

One need only step off the plane at the Mara Siana Springs dirt airstrip and drive a few miles to see the spectacular results. Initially, the route is dotted with cattle, sheep, and goats, each group herded by a Maasai cloaked in his traditional redchecked shuka. There are no fences so it is these herders who must ensure that the livestock does not venture into Ol Kinyei Conservancy.

Overgrazing An occasional village consisting of huts plastered with cattle dung and a kraal (or corral) made of thorn bush attest to a way of life that has existed for centuries (see http://www.kent.k12.wa.us/ staff/DarleneBishop/kenya/masai/masai. html). Because of the recent drought the land is punctuated with skeletons of dead livestock. Rains have brought back the grass, but overgrazing is still obvious.

Initially, the drive is disappointing to the tourist coming to view wildlife because there are none, nada, zilch.

After a little bouncing on two-track dusty roads, your four-wheel-drive, openair touring vehicle comes to a wooden, hand-painted sign—Porini Camp—and the road deteriorates even more. The driver and guide stop the vehicle at a stream crossing that is washed out by the rains. Across the gap spanned by a suspension bridge is a similar vehicle ready to take you to the camp.

Immediately two things are obvious— the grass is tall and wildlife abound. Impala and gazelle with long, graceful horns run in herds of 10 to 20; giraffe tower above the mopani trees sometimes in groups as large as 20; gangly topi kick and run off in all directions; and Cape buffalo show their menacing presence looking at you because there are none, nada, zilch, as Africa author Robert Ruark described them.

Trained guides take you on game drives where it is common to see four of the ‘Big Five’—Cape buffalo, elephant, leopard, and lion (only missing rhino) and all of the ‘little five’—buffalo weaver birds, elephant shrew, leopard tortoise, lion ant, and rhino beetles.

At the end of an afternoon game drive, the guides stop in the perfect spot, set up a table and chairs, break out the refreshments, and offer you a chance to 74 |

take in the spectacular African sunset while letting the entire experience soak in.

The camp itself is ‘tented’, but the tents are far from the back-pack tents found in outdoor catalogues. Six 15x30 feet, two-room tents built on platforms with toilet and shower in the rear and a lanai on the front facing the ‘hippo pool’ accommodate up to three people each.

A crew of 18 Maasai men (the women remain in the village to care for their homes and children) cook, serve meals, do laundry, sing and dance around the campfire, and guard the tents, an important job in a place where the silence of the night is broken by hippos grunting and lions roaring and where

Photography | Courtesy

elephants can easily toss you into the air and then stomp you into the ground.

A long drive but not far in distance from Mara Porini Camp is Porini Lion Camp, on Olare Orok Conservancy, also leased from the Maasai. Again Jake GrievesCook pays the Maasai a fixed fee for not grazing the land and a share of revenues from tourists.

Porini Lion Camp has even fancier tents and more spectacular wildlife viewing because it actually borders the Mara National Reserve. There you

might see a lioness nursing her cubs or a lion pair mating, a cheetah with cubs feeding on a fresh gazelle kill, and elephants with tusks weighing 80 pounds each. With no fence to separate the two, sighting rhino is even a possibility.

Because Olare Orok is 20,000 acres, there are two camps (one owned by another company) on the conservancy, but still there is a sense of wilderness. Unlike the Mara National Reserve, where white minivans swarm like ants on the plains and flock to a lion, leopard, or cheetah sighting, game viewers on Olare Orok are treated to a private show.

These examples of private conservation show the importance of entrepreneurship

Overcoming the Maasai resistance to not graze the land required innovative contracting on the part of the entrepreneurs”

and property rights. People such as Sammy and Jake have visions stimulated by rewards, in Sammy’s case the Suzuki motorcycle and in Jake’s profits.

Overcoming the Maasai resistance to not graze the land required innovative contracting on the part of the entrepreneurs.

Though the land is mostly held communally, the rewards are sufficient to entice leaders to add to the conservancies. Indeed, Olkenyei has grown from 8,500 acres to 10,000 acres in two years.

Prospects Jake estimates that it takes about 700 acres per tent so this growth has him considering a second camp on Olkenyei with the prospect of more profits for him and more revenue for the Maasai. Secure property rights ensure that other tourists will not invade the space and keep the experience as pristine as possible. Granted the camps are expensive, but who says that saving the environment is cheap.

And in Kenya where per capita income is $1,600, sustainable conservation depends on rewarding the people who must live with the wildlife and bear the cost of providing the habitat. On Olkenyei and Olare Orok Conservancies, entrepreneurship and ownership are proving the old Western rancher adage, “if it pays, it stays”.

Terry Anderson is the executive director of PERC and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Anderson’s work helped launch the idea of “free market environmentalism” with the publication of his book by that title, co-authored with Donald Leal. Government subsidies often degrade the environment, he points out, and private property rights encourage resource stewardship by harnessing market incentives to individual initiative for protecting environmental quality. Anderson is the author or editor of more than 30 books including Environmental Markets: A Property Rights Approach with Gary Libecap (forthcoming) and The Not So Wild, Wild West with P. J. Hill. Anderson has published widely in both professional journals and the popular press. He received his B.S. from the University of Montana and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Washington. Anderson is an avid outdoorsman accomplished at big game hunting, bird shooting, fishing, skiing and hiking. He visited Kenya in 2009 and again in 2010 to give seminars at Strathmore University.

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Events |

Safaricom Classic Concert @ the Micheal Joseph Centre

Kenya’s Musical Salute to the Queen on her Diamond Jubilee

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Kenyan choral group, the Nairobi Chamber Chorus, one of the star attractions at this year’s Safaricom Classic Concert, has landed the rarer than once-in76 |

a-lifetime opportunity of being invited to perform at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Pageant this May. The choir will be part of an event to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s 60 years on the

throne. The event will take place in the grounds of Windsor Castle on May 10, 11 and 13 and will be graced by the Queen herself on May 13. Windsor is the largest and oldest inhabited castle in the world and holds treasures from 900 years of Royal Family history.

Dubbed “Around the World in 60 Years and 90 Minutes”, the pageant will bring together several Commonwealth countries in a 90-minute performance of song and dance. Commonwealth Day 2012, celebrated in mid-March, had the theme and focus “Connecting Cultures”.

Audition The Nairobi Chamber Chorus landed the invitation after an audition by the pageant director, Simon Brooks-Ward, who visited the country last year and listened to several musical groups and dancers.

Kenya, being the place where the

Dubbed “Around the World in 60 Years and 90 Minutes”, the pageant will bring together several Commonwealth countries in a 90-minute performance of song and dance.

Commonwealth Day 2012, celebrated in midMarch, had the theme and focus “Connecting Cultures”.”

Main & Inset: Members of the Chorus at the Michael Joseph Centre auditorium entertain guests at the Safaricom Classical Concert Bottom Right: US Ambassador Scott Gration, Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore and other guests are enthralled by the choral music

Queen learnt of her ascension to the throne, will have a strong representation at the pageant, with the Nairobi Chamber Chorus as the main choir and a host of dancers from the Maasai, Samburu, Kikuyu, Luo, and Giriama communities.

The Kijani Kenya Charity Trust, charged with the task of bringing the Kenyan participants to Windsor Castle, is already raising funds to enable them to meet the expenses of the trip.

The newly-refurbished Treetops Hotel – where the Queen stayed the night she received the news of her father King George VI’s passing, going up the tree as Princess Elizabeth and coming down the following day as Queen – will be giving all its room sales for May 10, 11 and 13 towards this endeavour.

Windsor Castle They are also planning on having a live link to the hotel from Windsor Castle on these days. Capital FM is also one of the main sponsors.

This is a great achievement for the Nairobi Chamber Chorus, widely regarded as the most outstanding in Kenya today, having shared the stage at the Kijani International Festivals with worldrenowned musical companies, including the Guildhall Ensemble, London Adventist Turn to P78

Photography | anthony njoroge

April 2012

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Books |

Serialization

Gas Cookers, Dried Eggs and Snow! Pat’s First Trip to England

EA Flyer’s first book serialization features excerpts from Dappled Sunlight, subtitled “Memoirs of a Safari Life”, the late Patricia Mary Cottar’s memoirs. Mrs. Cottar, better known as Pat Cottar, of Cottars 1920s Camp in the Mara fame, is synonymous with the longest serving name in the safari business in Kenya, a brand that is world-famous for providing the adventure, comfort, security and variety that clients expect from a quality safari experience. Pat and her husband Glen, who predeceased her, formed Glen Cottars Safaris, a hunting company where Pat would run, at times, six camps in a number of African countries. Pat and Glen were the first to set up a permanent tourist tented camp in Africa, in the Tsavo East National Park.

The camp was sold in the 1970s and Pat and Glen began Cottars Mara Camp, which they ran successfully for 15 years. Bushtops, a small family home in the Mara, was where Pat and Glen spent many years enjoying the Mara. Pat continued to be involved in the next generation in the family safari business with the Cottars 1920s Camp in the Mara and spent many years collecting and sorting through safari history pertaining to the family and to East Africa. Pat finished writing her life story in 2010. She died on December 9 that year. Dappled Sunlight is the story of her life.

84 |

Photography | thinkstock.com

A

t the time the school moved, Julie and I were accompanying Mum, Dad and Nan to England, for six months leave which was their first journey “home” to England in twenty years, and our first outside Kenya.

We sailed on the Mantola in November 1946, which was quite an old vessel – I do not know how new it was when Osa and Martin Johnson sailed to Kenya in it in the 1920s! – and it was not very big.

But once I had overcome the three days of sea-sickness which started before we had even manoeuvred through the reef into the open seas from Mombasa, it was so interesting to see Aden, the Red Sea, and the Suez Canal.

Particularly the canal, so soon after the war, where the barbed wire was still festooned along it, and damaged ships everywhere.

Sailing along the coast of North Africa was very beautiful in the evening sunshine, gold on the purple shoreline, and then the huge rock which is Gibraltar was fascinating.

Travel sickness The Bay of Biscay in November was rough, the ship not only rolling, but pitching, and surprisingly I was able to walk around the decks quite happily with Julie (who has never had a moment’s travel sickness in her life) and not feel a thing!

There were very few other passengers walking around those decks.

England was very, very cold, mostly grey, and the early evenings were strange to us.

Where we live, virtually on the Equator, the time difference between sunsets all year round is hardly one hour; the earliest sunset is at 6.30 p.m. in August and the latest is at 7.30 p.m. in February, and it is sunlight until the sun actually goes down, with no twilight,

just sudden darkness.

Also, we were brought up in a country of very wide open spaces, even in the towns all the houses were on plots of minimum one acre in those days, and the fences were around very large farms. In Nakuru there were some apartment blocks of maybe four or six flats in a block, but Julie and I just had to ask Mum why the houses were so close together in England.

And when the boat docked at Portsmouth we had to take a train to the Midlands, so we found the right train and while Dad was dealing with getting luggage on board we ladies found somewhere to sit, and were just about to tell Dad where we were when the doors clanked shut and Dad was left on the platform as the train started off.

We were too used to Kenya’s unhurried trains, but of course it was no problem for Dad to get another train. We girls were reassured that this was not like Kenya where trains are few and a long time between, and he would soon be with us in Leicester.

Disused We stayed with Dad’s two sisters in Loughborough, Sybil and Ethel…Four miles from Loughborough town was a disused wartime air-force base called Wymsewold, and it registered the coldest temperature of the winter while we were there… For Julie and me there was so much that was fascinating and new, such as the first snow, and how cold one’s hands could get without gloves in a three-minute walk to the Post Box! Gas cookers and dried eggs, small fenced fields, our first real English pantomime, and their gooseberries were not the same as ours. We drove to Llandudno in North Wales to see one of Dad’s brothers, and everywhere was all very neat and tidy, so organized, so very different [to what we were used to in Kenya].

April 2012

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Books |

Serialization

She has to be the ONLY person ever to be up a tree when she became monarch! By PAT COTTAR

TheThe Arboreal Arboreal ‘Coronation’ ‘Coronation’ of Princess of Princess Elizabeth Elizabeth 86 |

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arly in February 1952 the heir to the British throne, Princess Elizabeth with her husband Prince Philip, visited Kenya at the start of a long tour that was to take them to Australia.

She was to review the Kenya Regiment troops in the grounds of their headquarters on a Saturday afternoon so Pat [Cottar, Glen’s sister] suggested that we come to see her from the balcony of their flat which was directly opposite the Regiment Headquarters, literally across the road. So we had a wonderful view of the Princess.

It was on the 6th February that I was desperately trying to get the Company’s calls through to Nairobi, but I just could not get through on any of our lines. As the day wore

It was a hushed little group as we all imagined what she must have been feeling, so sad at the death of her father and awed by the responsibilities that lay ahead of her…”

on, the news came through – the reason for the phone congestion: the King had died. Of course we all knew that his daughter, Princess Elizabeth, and her husband Prince Philip had just spent the night in a tree [at Treetops] looking at wildlife at Nyeri, so of course we listened to our wirelesses for the rest of the day, to hear that she was being flown home that evening.

Photography | thinkstock.com

Hushed In 1952 there were very few aircraft in our skies, and we knew that Nakuru is directly en route between Nairobi and Entebbe, so we all happened to be standing outside our home on Prairie Home Farm at Lanet that evening when we saw the DC3 taking the new Queen back to England.

It was a hushed little group as we all imagined what she must have been feeling, so sad at the death of her father and awed by the responsibilities that lay ahead of her…I don’t think nearly enough is made of this – she has to be the ONLY person ever to be up a tree when she became monarch!

April 2012

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Essay |

Radio Tanzania

Blast from the past: Bruno and Rebecca listen to some of the digitized recordings in Bruno’s office of the Tanzania Broadcast Corporation building.

50 Years of Analogue Audio History Rest in Just One Room Radio Tanzania’s decades of ethnographic recordings, afrojazz dance music, and key political speeches are chronicled in a treasure trove that must be digitized for posterity, reports JONATHAN KALAN 88 |

O

n the far side of Dar es Salaam’s railroad tracks, withering away in a locked room of a nondescript office building, rests some of the most important artifacts chronicling 50 years of Tanzania’s independence.

Over 100,000 hours of unreleased reel-toreel tapes holding decades of ethnographic recordings, afro-jazz dance music, and political speeches used to fuel support for Africa’s independence movements, line the dusty shelves.

The recordings have languished in some cases for over 50 years, exposed to the heat,

humidity, and natural elements.

Yet with the help of a small group of committed individuals called The Tanzania Heritage Project, a cross-cultural and crowd-funded preservation effort, this could all change.

The group has recently raised over $17,000 from 235 musicians, music lovers, preservationists and cultural enthusiasts in a campaign to digitize, restore, and preserve the entire Radio Tanzania archive collection with MP3 downloads, a ‘best of ’ compilation CD, and eventually a documentary film.

Photography | jonathan kalan

Above: For years, the Radio Tanzania Dar es Salaam building held the only recording studio in Tanzania. Musicians from all across the country, like the legendary King Kiki, or “Kitambaa Cheupe” — socalled for his habit of wiping the sweat from his brow with a white handkerchief when he performed — and one of the most famous ‘muziki

wa danci’ (dance music) bands, the Mlimini Park Orchestra, have countless recordings in the archives.

Below: Bruno Nanguka, known as “The Librarian”, joined Radio Tanzania back in 1974, slowly working his way up to the role of Head of Library Services for the Tanzania Broadcast Corporation.

His knowledge of the archives, and the groups who recorded them, is unmatched. Despite most of the archives not being catalogued, he knows where to find every last recording. Yet he is the only one.

“My colleagues, they have died or gone away. It’s just me”, he says, highlighting the pressing need for preservation.

Photography | JONATHAN KALAN

April 2012

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Essay |

Radio Tanzania Photography | JONATHAN KALAN

<< The Radio Tanzania archives, now stored in two jam-packed rooms of the Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation, hold a wealth of history on their shelves. The 100,000 hours of recordings are an “audio-musical history of Tanzania’s struggle for independence and its birth as a modern African nation”, claims the Tanzania Heritage Project.

It wasn’t just “popular” music that was recorded. Arabic taarab musicians, traditional Ngoma drummers, and other ethnographic recordings are stored there as well.

In many cases, these are the only copies that exist. Like this one, titled Ngoma 539 – the first track is called “Ngoma wa Wazaramo,” meaning “Music of the Zaramu Tribe”. The song titles are listed, along with their duration, and three paragraphs of “Historia”.

<<

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<<

From P115

Bruno shows Benson Rukantabula, a young Tanzanian who also helped found the Tanzania Heritage Project, how the inlays and designs on the reel labeling are a hallmark of who archived the recording. Benson hopes that the country can preserve its heritage and inspire young Tanzanian artists through the music of the past, by digitizing the archives.

<< Rebecca Corey, a young American who fell in love with Tanzanian music, culture, and history as a volunteer in Dar es Salaam several years ago, launched the Tanzania Heritage Project after a devastating motorcycle accident in Dar es Salaam left her recovering for nearly a year. “When I started taking my first steps, I wanted them to be back towards Tanzania, back towards this music.” When the doctor told her she was free to go, she packed her bags and headed back to Tanzania.

<<

“The Late Aga Khan’s Speech at the Weighing against Diamonds Ceremony,” recorded on August 10th, 1947, was the first reel to be archived in the speeches section.

Jonathan Kalan is an internationally published photojournalist, journalist and blogger specializing in the intersections of business, innovation and social development in emerging markets. In just 24 years he has traveled to over 35 countries, worked in South Asia and Africa, and collaborated with NGO’s, social enterprises, technology start ups, and media companies.

His work has appeared in The Guardian, Financial Times, Boston Globe, GlobalPost, The Huffington Post, The Star (Kenya), Stanford Social Innovation Review, Destination Magazine EA, How We Made It In Africa, The Christian Science Monitor, On The Ground (New York Times blog), and many others. He was a Finalist for the 2011 Diageo Africa Business Reporting Awards.

Jonathan is currently based in Nairobi, Kenya, freelancing and documenting stories of social enterprises, entrepreneurs, and innovations for The (BoP) Project.

April 2012

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