lions made of stone

"It was fit and decorous that the lions should come to Denys’s grave and make him an African monument. Lord Nelson himself, I have reflected, in Trafalgar Square, has his lions made only out of stone." These are posts documenting my 5 months in Nairobi, Kenya. For my geekier side, go to mefn.tumblr.com.

[nationalpost-blog]

First pictures of blasted out Kenya mall emerge, several floors of the car park collapsed

Four thunderous explosions rattled Nairobi’s upscale mall Monday, part of a battle between Kenyan troops and al-Qaida-linked terrorists. Now the results of some of the blasts are becoming apparent.

Photos released by the Kenyan Presidency show the mall’s destroyed parking garage. The car park is missing at least three floors, with several cars showing smoke damage.

The Islamic extremist group that killed scores of people at a Nairobi mall has now attacked two Kenyan towns near the Somali border, killing three people. The leader of the Somali group affiliated with al-Qaida said the attacks will continue until Kenyan troops are withdrawn from Somalia. (Photos: AP Photo/Kenya Presidency)

[nationalpost-blog]

‘You’re a bad man’: Astonishing story emerges of how a British boy, 4, stood up to Nairobi terrorist

A four-year-old boy confronted one of the Westgate mall terrorists in Kenya telling him, “You’re a bad man.”

Astonishingly, the terrorist told Elliott Prior that he was not a monster, gave the boy and his sister a Mars bar and allowed him and his family to leave.

Elliott, from Windsor, England, was in the mall with his six-year-old sister, Amelie, and his mother, Amber, a film producer, when the terrorists struck. (Photo: Goran Tomasevic / Reuters)

[theatlantic]

Is the Nairobi Mall Carnage Bigger Than Kenya?

The weekend’s horrific al-Shabaab attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall is still not over, and the context and consequences of the attack are uncertain. Despite Kenyan authorities’ claim of “full control” of the building, at last report the militants were still “hiding” and many hostages remained unaccounted for. Westgate is upmarket, and the victims are also up-market, including the nephew of President Uhuru Kenyatta and his fiancé.

There are also many unanswered questions, such as:

-Who exactly are the attackers?  There are competing twitter feeds with lists of names that are promptly withdrawn or repudiated by al-Shabaab in Somalia.

-Was the attack directed from Somalia, or did it originate within the large Somali community in Kenya, some of whom support al-Shabaab?

-Presumably the motivation for the attack was the presence of Kenyan troops in Somalia.  But were there other motivations as well, such as an attack by the poor and dispossessed from the Nairobi slums on the rich?

Read more. [Image: Reuters]

[shortformblog]

In a confirmation of earlier speculative reports, al-Shabab has taken credit for today’s violent shopping mall attack in Nairobi. At least 50 people have been injured in the attacks, including American citizens. (The above tweet is from “the press office of the Mujahideen Youth Movement,” which is better known in the western press as al-Shabab.)

[shortformblog]

Kenya's new president wins despite facing charges of crimes against humanity

50.07% the percentage of votes that Uhuru Kenyatta took in Kenya’s presidential election. Kenyatta, who is facing indictment International Criminal Court over violence in the wake of the 2007 presidential election, had his win verified Saturday. He is the second sitting world leader, after Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, to hold power despite facing potential prosecution from the ICC over alleged human rights abuses. source

[guardian]

A Masaai woman casts her vote in the Kenyan general election in Ilbissil.

Latest:

Demand for clichés is expected to reach a peak as foreign correspondents fly in to cover the election. “We anticipate a run on ‘hotly contested’ and ‘neck and neck’” said an unemployed militant.

Every reporter will be issued with an election package as they step out of the plane and are greeted by the tropical heat of Africa.

Non-government organisations are understood to have teams on standby, ready to supply quotes about rampant corruption, grinding poverty, and soaring unemployment.

Photograph: Riccardo Gangale/AP

[guardian]

A Masaai woman casts her vote in the Kenyan general election in Ilbissil.

Latest:

Demand for clichés is expected to reach a peak as foreign correspondents fly in to cover the election. “We anticipate a run on ‘hotly contested’ and ‘neck and neck’” said an unemployed militant.

Every reporter will be issued with an election package as they step out of the plane and are greeted by the tropical heat of Africa.

Non-government organisations are understood to have teams on standby, ready to supply quotes about rampant corruption, grinding poverty, and soaring unemployment.

Photograph: Riccardo Gangale/AP

[condenasttraveler]

11 Incredible Animal Migrations | During the summer, flamingos travel between the alkaline lakes in eastern Africa’s Rift Valley. Pictured here at Lake Nakuru in Kenya, the flamingos feed on algae abundant in the lakes.

[woodendreams]

 (by Stephen Oachs)

[fotojournalismus]

In Uganda, gay people are being forced into exile. If a new bill becomes law, homosexuality will be punishable by death – which means many people are choosing to leave and seek asylum elsewhere. With the vote on the country’s anti-homosexuality bill set to become public in the coming days, photographer Mathias Christensen met gay people in Uganda who fear the changing of the law.

Gay people in Uganda: love on the run 

by Rasmus Thirup Beck 

(via Guardian)

“Five police officers force three young men out of their one-room slum dwelling in Kampala, with no explanation. As they are dragged down the slum’s main shopping street, their neighbours’ hateful shouts make their “crime” all too clear: “Beat those gays up!” “Kill those monsters!” “Give them what they deserve!”

Threats were also issued – threats they had heard before:

“We’ll burn down your house!”

After two days in a small, dirty prison cell they are released. Now they’ve gone underground, and hope to gain asylum in another country.

“We don’t dare to live here any more. We have felt unsafe for a long time and it only gets worse. It’s all the talk about that law that agitates people. If it is passed I am sure they will burn down the house,” says one, a 23-year-old transsexual who prefers to be called “Bad Black” for safety reasons.

The law he refers to is the so-called “Kill the Gays” bill, which is set to become reality in Uganda within days. It is already illegal to commit a homosexual act in the country, but a unified parliament now supports a tightening of the law, which, among other things, will make it punishable by death to be a “serial offender”.

The parliamentarian behind the bill is David Bahati. He describes homosexuality as an evil that has to be fought. He also says that he and his peers “do not hate the homosexuals but the sin in them”.

Bahati’s reference to sin reveals the direct connection between Uganda’s politicians and a group of very influential pastors. One of these pastors is Moses Solomon Male, who travels the country presenting his talk, Understanding the Challenges of Homosexuality (Sodomy).

“Those homosexuals … They call it anal sex. It ruins the anus. And they say they enjoy it,” said Male in a recent speech to Sunday-school pupils in a Kampala suburb. He also described the cornerstone of both the pastors’ and the politicians’ argument against homosexuals: That they are “recruiting” innocents to their side – especially children.

LGBT rights advocates are doing their best to challenge these views – and the bill. One of these, transsexual activist Pepe Julian Onziema, has courageously come out with his message as well as his sexuality. Homosexuality is not something you become, it is something you are, he stresses.

“The only thing we can do is to try to inform as many people as possible about how we’re human beings just like them – just with different sexual preferences,” he explains.” 

All photographs taken by Mathias Christensen.

[vicemag]

Is This the Century of Africa’s Rise?

For decades, the dominant African narrative in the media was of famine, war, and disease. Recently, in light of a perceived economic upturn and a relative reduction in famine and disease across most of the continent, the narrative has changed to one of thrusting progress. The Economist and TIME magazine have both published big articles in the last two years called “Africa Rising,” complete with positive economic statistics and photos of children flying rainbow kites in the shape of the African continent.

We have moved from pictures of starving children with flies crawling across their faces to pictures of young men in big cities talking on mobile phones. Of course, neither narrative is correct. No narrative that attempts to take on something so large and diffuse can ever be correct. But there is something about these conveniently totalizing stories that fires the passions of believers and cynics alike. Believers point to fast-growing economies and fragile but intact democracies, non-believers refer to what the Kenyan writer and investigative journalist Parselelo Kantai told me was an “insidious little fiction manufactured by global corporate finance.”

The idea of Africa’s rise comes from a straightforward interpretation of high growth rates and increased foreign investment in parts of the continent. As The Economist’s piece pointed out, “over the past decade, six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were African.” According to McKinsey & Company, real GDP in Africa grew twice as fast in the 00s as it did in the 80s and 90s. Suddenly everyone has a mobile phone and that mobile phone has great reception.

Renaissance Capital’s Charles Robertson, author of The Fastest Billion, drew my attention to annual growth rates of “around six percent across sub-Sahara since 2000. Some say rapid growth is inevitable from a low base. This is nonsense. People got poorer in sub-Saharan Africa from 1980 to 2000.” Recent growth in Africa and rapid increases in Asia-Africa trade and investment have taken place against a backdrop of global austerity. As people struggle desperately in southern Europe, gas and oil resources are enriching a new generation in Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia and even—if proposed exploration occurs this year—Somalia and Somaliland.

The problem, though, is that most of this wealth is extractive. There is, as Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential, told me, a “lack of value added on the African side.” “The energy companies are seeing massive domestic demand from Asia and they are capitalizing on that,” he said.

Parselelo Kantai put it more bluntly: “What is happening on the continent economically is a new era of massive resource extraction, catalyzed mostly by Chinese domestic demands. And because it is almost exclusively extraction without on-site value addition, it’s a process where the continent’s elites, the Chinese and Westerners, are the only people who benefit. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be called by its real name: the Second Scramble for Africa.” 

What both Smith and Kantai are referring to is a system in which an elite minority, often not from Africa, benefit extraordinarily from the natural resources the continent has and the world needs. The outsiders may not wear pith helmets and long for a proper cup of tea any more, but it’s colonial business as usual.

Continue

[guardian]

Nairobi, Kenya: A demonstrator rolls on the ground in celebration after he and others burned mock coffins outside parliament

Photograph: Ben Curtis/AP

[mefninafrica]

Sweet photog.

[crisisgroup]

Kenya’s 2013 Elections

Nairobi/Brussels  |   17 Jan 2013

Preparations for elections in Kenya turn into high gear today as the parties in the three major coalitions nominate their candidates.

Kenya’s 2013 Elections, the latest report from the International Crisis Group, examines the run-up to the 4 March 2013 elections. The disputed polls in 2007 triggered horrible political violence, in which more than 1,000 died and hundreds of thousands were displaced, and tensions are especially high this time around. Competition for land and resources, youth unemployment and reliance on ethnicity are only a few on a long list of serious problems. Ethnic campaigning and horse-trading as alliances form have deepened divides.

“Conflict drivers underlying the 2007-2008 violence remain unresolved and may be cynically used by politicians to whip up support”, says EJ Hogendoorn, Crisis Group’s Africa Program Deputy Director. “Attacks blamed on the extremist Al-Shabaab movement and clashes over land can cloak political violence. Police reform has lagged and the security forces look ill-prepared to secure the polls”.

Forthcoming trials before the International Criminal Court (ICC) of four Kenyans for their alleged role in the 2007-2008 post-election violence look set to shape the campaign. While the cases aim to erode impunity long enjoyed by political elites and may deter bloodshed, they raise the stakes enormously.

A new constitution, a fresh election commission and a reformed judiciary should help reduce the risk of political violence. But the vote will still be a high-stakes competition for power, both nationally and in 47 new counties, each of which will elect a governor, senator and local assembly. Devolution, for all its benefits, introduces new conflict dynamics, as competition becomes fiercer between groups for power and local resources.

To prevent a spiralling deterioration of the current security situation, politicians must stop exploiting grievances and stoking divisions through ethnic campaigning. Religious leaders and civil society should demand a free and fair vote; so too should international partners, including Kenya’s neighbours. They must make clear that those who jeopardise the stability of the country and region by using or inciting violence will be held accountable.

Voter education will be crucial for the first general election under the 2010 constitution, with new and complex rules. Limiting confusion and misunderstandings could help reduce conflict. Ensuring adequate security is also important to deal with election-related disputes, but police reform has lagged and the security forces look ill-prepared to secure the polls. These challenges are surmountable, given the remarkable determination of most to avoid a repeat of 2007-2008, but they require concerted action by Kenya’s institutions and their supporters to ensure a credible outcome.

“The people deserve better”, says Comfort Ero, Crisis Group’s Africa Program Director. “To put the horror of five years ago behind them, Kenyans need the chance to vote without fear and elect leaders committed to reform and ready to serve society as a whole rather than the narrow interests of its elites”.

FULL REPORT

[breakingnews]

Record haul of smuggled ivory seized in Kenya

Reuters: Police in Kenya have seized two tons of ivory worth $1.15 million, the biggest haul on record in the country, officials say.

Poaching is a growing problem for sub-Saharan African countries reliant on rich wildlife in their game reserves to draw foreign tourists. Criminals kill elephants and rhinos for their tusks, which are used for ornaments and in some folk medicines.

Photo: Kenya Ports Authority workers record a section of elephant tusks recovered from a container on transit in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa, Jan. 15. (Joseph Okanga / Reuters)

[mefninafrica]

Late afternoon bike ride through Hell's Gate National Park. July, 2012.

[mefninafrica]

I love your tumblr!!! It makes me miss Kenya so much

Ohhh, Asante Sana! I also miss Kenya so much. There are just so many less giraffes and avocados here.

[npr]

Kenyan rap, often called Sheng after a specific dialect, occasionally slips into the American mode, but generally sticks to Swahili. Muthoni (The Drummer Queen) and Octopizzo are formidable in both languages, lunging and stalking over a smeary, funky-drummer, triphoppin’ groove, jazzed with psychedelic synthesizer stabs.

Some more music for your Monday. Check out the rest of “The Drummer Queen Who Runs Nairobi Dancefloors” by Vivien Goldman on NPR Music. -L

Photo courtesy of the artist.