I have always been intrigued by sub-Saharan trade. In the interest of understanding caravan journeys better, I made trips to Mali and Morocco to observe their most famous routes. Goods such as gold, ivory – and regretfully, millions of  slaves – were moved from sub-Saharan Africa to Timbuktu, then through the desert and over the Atlas mountains to Marrakech and onto the port of Essaouira, which served as Morocco’s principal port, offering the cargo of the caravans to the world.
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My journey from Casablanca airport to Essaouira was a 400-kilometer ride that passed along the Atlantic sea coast and then inland along plateaus dotted with argan trees endemic to the region and known the world over for its use in producing aromatic oil. It was late in the night when I arrived in Essaouira, an Arabic/Berber medina contained within a European fortress with winding alleys and streets. Finding my seafront hotel was an adventure in itself, in a town with many dead-end alleyways.
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It was a moment of great excitement when I opened my windows, illuminated by the Maghreb sunlight, and realized my room was right on top of the ramparts of the fort overlooking a broad seafront. Later, while walking along the crenellated ramparts of the cannon-lined fort, I could see the city wake up on one side while the finest fisheries off the waters of Morocco were coming alive with boats and attendant gulls on the other. Upon reaching the port, I caught a glimpse of the lives of fishermen who were unloading their large catches of sardines and conger eels; a haul big enough to sustain its economy.
The historic charm of the UNESCO World Heritage listed city is evident in every twist and turn in the maze of pedestrian-only streets that make up the medina. Broken facades and decorative doors open to reveal ancient Kasbahs lined with courtyards and fountains. Essaouira has been in existence in recorded history since the days of imperial Rome, where the purple stripes of the senatorial toga (garment of ancient Rome) came from a dye factory, made from sea snails found here. Ruled by Romans and then by Berber kings, it was swept up under the influence of Islam in the eighth century and ruled by Arab kings until the Portuguese captured it in the 16th century. This was followed by French occupation and it finally came under Moroccan rulers in 1777 when it was declared an independent nation.
This rich history of occupation has provided Essaouira with a French-designed fortress, Genoese-designed port citadels, a classic Arabic medina complete with a royal Kasbah, Jewish mella or quarter and a European enclave.
Walking through its winding streets I could see Arabic, French and Spanish influences in the architecture.
Essaouira’s real beginning as an import-export center came in the 1770s when the sultan of Morocco appointed families from Casablanca, Marrakech and other northern cities to settle here and become official royal traders to conduct trade with Europe and the Americas. It has been noted that seven of the town’s leading families in the 19th century were Muslim, while 25 were Jews, who once comprised 40% of the population.
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The homes of former Jewish traders and the synagogue reveal themselves through Hebrew carvings on the door lintels.
The souk area was quite interesting with many shops selling spices, wood carvings and cabinetry. Unlike the bustle found in the souks of Marrakesh, the pace here was very relaxed under the warm sunlight and a steady breeze from the ocean. The fort area has more upscale shops while the souks had a classic Arabic atmosphere. The delicious seafood available in restaurants around the harbor was absolutely amazing and at very reasonable prices. I found men here wearing the classic djellabas and women walking around in colorful qmis (long jacket) covering their baggy pants.
Essaouira is best reached from Marrakesh by road and can be covered as a day trip. Emirates Airline can fly one to Morocco from any big African city via Dubai.
With its unspoilt beaches, luxurious hotels, wonderful cafes and seafood restaurants, Essaouira is fast becoming a must-visit destination. Morocco has a lot to offer. In this context, Essaouira is often ignored. But for the intrepid traveler, it offers a special place where the caravans of the Sahara finally emptied its wares for the world to consume.

137-Forbes

Where Africa’s Caravans Were Headed

Somalia’s coast, famed for piracy, is fast becoming tamed. Hundreds of miles of beaches with hardly a soul on them. No parrots, peg legs or pieces of eight. No Black Hawks down.
I flew in over a deep, deep blue ocean, flecked by white horses. A visible reef guards Mogadishu, the capital. There is the bright glare of white sand and dust everywhere, especially when you enter the Mogadishu International Airport (MIA), which is the ‘green zone’, a secure zone within which lies MIA.
Now here’s the thing, I’m writing about this country and all I’ve really seen is the MIA. But there is much to tell.
To even begin to understand what’s happening, you need a few basic acronyms. UNSOM and UNSOA, AMISOM and&#8230; oh, to hell with it.
Suffice to say, seven armies in Somalia are trying to subdue the dreaded Al-Shabaab and restore government to a country that hasn’t seen one for 22 years. In true African fashion, the politicians are still stuffing around, bickering between President and Prime Minister, fiddling while the country continues to smoulder.
Yet the fire of Al-Shabaab has been curbed from its rampant deadly destruction. There are successes for the armies of good, but the gains are fragile. Luckily the military presence is not wracked with the same kind of interminable arguing about who is in charge.
The African Union (AU) is really in charge of the military, but the AU sort of reports to the United Nations (UN), which has about 22,000 foreign troops in the country. That’s quite a lot of soldiers. Not enough, says the Force Commander, but he would, wouldn’t he. Sadly, many have been killed fighting – not for their own country but fighting for Somalia to become governable.
Vast tracts of land have been recaptured from Al-Shabaab’s influence, and in this year the soldiers are valiantly trying to keep militants away from this recaptured territory. The Force Commander says his forces now control 70% of the country.
Unfortunately Al-Shabaab does not play by the rules. It strikes with car bombs, suicide bombers, rockets, IEDs and general terror tactics. But the good guys are winning. On the ground that is, not necessarily in the political, global or African arenas.
Armies who have sent troops include Uganda, Kenya, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Nigeria and they deserve praise for the sacrifices they have made. It is said that the UN has lost more troops here than in all their other operations combined. If true, it is a very disturbing statistic.
Things are still dangerous. On Christmas Day, the very place where I am typing this was attacked and two soldiers died. Yesterday, a car bomb exploded in Mogadishu, a literal stone’s throw away and an innocent shoe shiner died. But on the plus side, the day before, 23 Al-Shabaab people were killed by the armies in one firefight. Few people mourn the dead fanatics, and nor do I.
It is infuriating that armies are needed to restore basic human rights to people: the right to food, shelter, the right of girls to go to school, the rights of freedom to worship, freedom of speech. Al-Shabaab is wicked; it certainly does not represent Islam in the same way as the barbaric Spanish inquisitors did not represent Christianity.
The African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) has brought the first fruits of peace to Somalia, and Somalis are beginning to tentatively taste the fruits. Much remains to be done, but there is already much to celebrate even if the world has not yet recognized the changes.
I spoke to some important people, the AU’s Ambassador in charge, the Force Commander, the Director of the UN contingent. All are hopeful, all cautiously optimistic.
My glimpse of the tame coast along the south central area of the country made me believe victory is possible. A very small victory, one of simply restoring government, but an important victory for Africa and especially the long-suffering Somalis.

Taming The Wildest Coast Of Africa

He is a master of disguise and a brilliant impersonator. Within seconds, South Africa’s most-loved satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys changes from playing an Afrikaans aunty, into Adolf Hitler and a little later into the country’s political enfant terrible Julius Malema. Right on stage, right in front of the audience’s eyes.
In a hilarious yet sharp-witted kind of way, Uys is most of all one thing: politically incorrect. No wonder he has been a thorn in the side of many government officials, especially during the racist apartheid regime.
During a career that spans more than 45 years, the internationally-acclaimed performer, author and social activist has written and performed more than 20 plays and over 30 revues and one-man shows throughout South Africa and abroad.
Today, at the age of 68, the workaholic not only continues to write, direct, act and produce, he even makes his own props and dresses.
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It all began pretty much in the cradle, says Uys, who grew up in a musical family in a suburb near Cape Town. Both his parents were pianists – his mother worked as a piano teacher, while his father, a musician at heart, earned money as a civil servant in the provincial roads department. On weekends, Uys played with his toys on the dining room floor, while his parents entertained an artistic circle of well-traveled, cultured friends.
“Mozart was a friend,” Uys says jokingly. “My whole life was geared with a soundtrack in my head. Mad people hear voices, I hear music.”
Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, just after the National Party was beginning to institute apartheid in South Africa, Uys lived in a house where politics was not discussed, despite the fact that his father’s cousin was the first Afrikaans prime minister, DF Malan. Little did Uys know back then that he would one day become an entertainer who was loathed and feared by repressive politicians.
“I didn’t decide to follow this career. It chose me,” he says.
Uys planned to become a teacher. He studied English, history and German – his maternal grandmother was a Jew from Berlin – at the University of Cape Town where, rather than spending most of his time in the library, he says he learned to smoke a cigarette and twist.
His life changed forever when he received a ticket to visit London and Germany for his 17th birthday. He discovered his love for performance when family friends took him to the theater for the first time. Uys was smitten.
At the end of the trip, he traveled to Rome to track down the apartment of Italian movie star Sophia Loren, whom he had been in love with since he was a schoolboy. He located the flat based on a magazine photo and knocked on the door. To his great disappointment, an assistant told him Loren was in Paris. Uys left behind a letter and was surprised when he received a reply from the actress a few weeks later. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
“It was one of the greatest lessons in my life that a world star would take the time to write to a nobody. We became pen pals. Eventually I met her. She came to one of my shows. I wrote scripts for her. We talk to each other at least once a month,” says Uys.
With that, he dropped his teaching ambitions and signed up for drama school. When Uys got his degree, he first became a stage manager and later started writing plays.
Uys slowly managed to build a career in England although he never quite felt he belonged. He longed for South Africa, where he felt rooted even though he abhorred the apartheid regime. So, he left London to work with famous South African playwright Athol Fugard at Cape Town’s Space Theatre. It was here that he discovered the power of satire.
“I understood how it could make people angry without hurting them, but also hurt people who needed to be twitched a little bit. You don’t laugh because it’s a joke, you laugh because you’re in charge of your fear,” he says.
He also discovered his urge to be political, critical and controversial. He even broke the law by allowing black people to sit in the audience with whites. The government responded by banning the plays, raiding the theater and threatening him with arrest.
“I didn’t see the point in getting angry because anger doesn’t transfer itself into positive energy. Instead, I decided to fight them. I pissed off all the people I wanted to piss off. Humor is a great weapon of mass distraction.”
Living in a homophobic society, Uys, who is gay, also started experimenting with gender. He put on a dress on stage and played women’s roles. It was the first step towards developing what would become his most successful character, Evita Bezuidenhout.
“That’s where it started. At the time it wasn’t planned, but in retrospect there is a red line running through my career,” he says.
Uys’ alter ego is a white Afrikaner socialite and a political activist, at least in her own mind. She is a mixture of a right-wing, glamorous white woman from the American South, he says, a touch of Margaret Thatcher steel, a bit of Imelda Marcos, if only in her shoe choice, and even Hitler’s wife Eva Braun.
Evita challenges her audience through gentle humor and purposeful irritation, always maintaining a balance between entertainment and social commentary.
“She’s my most successful clown. She came at the right time, when society needed a tannie (aunt). But she must never be preachy, reflect the fear of the audience or trash all expectations.”
With grand-dame Evita as his main character, Uys’ performances soon received attention throughout the country. Building on his reputation as a playwright and actor, he put on his first one-man show in 1981, which he called Adapt or Dye.
It included impersonations of then South African President PW Botha, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a selection of apartheid politicians and white liberals, as well as Evita. The show became South Africa’s biggest comedy success ever.
Uys also managed to break the international cultural boycott of South Africa by performing the show overseas.
A year later, Adapt or Dye came out on video and South Africans began to make illegal copies, especially the poor. They did so with Uys’ encouragement and led to his large multiracial fan base.
“That was the greatest audience investment of my life,” he says.
Eventually, the videos made their way into prisons, including Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated.
“The government thought I was an idiot, a drag queen, a clown. So they thought it was safe to let the prisoners watch the shows. They didn’t realize the prisoners would through the shows learn what’s happening in the country.”
Evita lit up Mandela’s dark prison days. When Mandela was elected president in 1994, Evita became the jester he took with him wherever he went. Mandela even allowed Evita to interview him live on television.
“Mandela used humor to unify and reconcile people, to deflate fear and prejudice. He knew that loving your enemy will ruin his reputation. And making Nelson Mandela laugh was one of the best reasons to do my work,” says Uys.
For a short while, Uys feared he would run out of material in the new, democratic rainbow nation.
“I thought I would have to get another job,” he laughs.
He adjusted Evita’s persona to someone who mocked democracy to make South Africans aware that it’s not a given.
But in 1999, when Mandela handed over power to Thabo Mbeki, Uys’ honeymoon with South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress, came to an end, although his honeymoon with the ANC’s legacy never did.
As the country’s new president, Mbeki questioned the link between HIV and Aids and refused to make antiretroviral drugs available through the public health system. For Uys, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He once again became a ruthless government critic – and has made the ANC the keystone for his satire ever since.
“I’m afraid the new generation of politicians just wants cars and money. It’s grim. And the only way to change this is to realize that we, the people, are in charge. The politicians are civil servants who are supposed to be working for us,” he says.
Uys is at least delighted to still have a government that on a daily basis writes his best material. In recent years, he has written scripts that sow serious topics like greed, corruption and crime into the fluff of entertainment.
“It’s a wonderful way not to get stale, not to get angry or bitter about being so disappointed in the rainbow nation. I don’t think of it as work. I’m not doing this job for my pension. I think of it as my life. It’s also my therapy.”
At the beginning 2014, Uys’ performed Adapt of Fly, a sequel to his critically acclaimed 1980s show. Once again, he forces his audience to take a long, hard look at South Africa’s stumbling democracy, think about issues that have come full circle since they first reared their ugly heads 30 years ago and, most importantly, to laugh heartily at their fears.

A Weapon Of Mass Distraction

Johann Georg Winklmayr, an Austrian leather craftsman, was making a leather luggage case for a Bentley car in Moscow. The 82-year-old died in 2008 before he could finish the work. It was left to his youngest son Georg, who inherited the family factory in Vienna, to complete the work but, he was not interested. Georg shipped the incomplete job 8,340 kilometers to his elder brother Hanspeter Winklmayr, in Roodepoort, south of Johannesburg, who was busy with crocodile skins.
“My brother sent me all the stuff. I finished it and I sent it back to him and then Moscow. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever done, but it was fun. I prefer doing small bags, it’s my speciality; you cannot be the jack of all trades. But this was in honor of my father,” says Winklmayr.
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This is a story that stretches back from Africa to three centuries ago in Europe. The first in line was Johann Kammerer, born in 1670, in Vienna. Trailblazer Kammerer made leather saddles from home, and this skill transformed into expensive leather elegant accessories for the rich.
Winklmayr, the fourth generation of the Kammerer clan, spent his childhood in the family factory learning the craft from his grandfather and father.
“Before I could read and write, I knew what the hammer, scissors and knife were,” says Winklmayr.
Wanderlust shone, like leather, in the eyes of the young man.
A 21-year-old Winklmayr landed his first job as a designer and manufacturing manager at Dolphin Leather Crafts in South Africa, in 1981. He had a master’s degree in the manufacturing of leather goods.
“When everyone was going to Paris, London or San Francisco, I said I am going to South Africa. I really had no idea what I was putting myself into. I had a very strong patriarchal father, so I wanted to show him I could manage on my own,” says Winklmayr.
Winklmayr spent eight years at Dolphin Leather Craft where he trained staff.
“I couldn’t speak a word of English when I came here, but in two years I was getting better and better,” says Winklmayr.
In 1989, Winklmayr quit Dolphin Leather Craft to partner with a fellow Austrian furniture-maker Walter Hauser, in Roodepoort.
The 56-year-old, grey bearded and ponytailed Winklmayr works in the grimy industrial world of Roodepoort. He co-owns the company Via La Moda, situated in a three-storey red brick building in a factory flanked by used car dealers.
The second floor is where FORBES AFRICA found Winklmayr in a white sleeveless coat with pencils in his chest pocket. He complains about his tennis elbow. The years of cutting and stitching are taking their toll.
Fresh from the kitchen where he had a tea break with his 48 staff, he retreats to his air-conditioned office, full of sketches, scissors and leather cut-offs.
It’s been a long day. At 5AM, on weekdays, he pedals at the crack of dawn. Then Winklmayr drives five kilometers from home to begin the day on his computer exploring the latest patterns from Italian and French designers looking for inspiration.
Turning crocodile skins into these designs is how Winklmayr makes his living.
Via La Moda’s designer handbags are carried by European princesses, they include Princess Caroline of Hanover and Princess Charlene of Monaco, the former Olympic swimmer from Benoni, Johannesburg, who married a prince. The South African-born Hollywood actress Charlize Theron, also from Benoni, has one with her initials engraved on it.
It is the fruit of collaboration that began in February 2014 with entrepreneur Stuart Brand. The former hotelier turned crocodile farmer, in the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe, came to Winklmayr with a bag full of crocodile skins. Before, Brand was shipping all his tanned leather skins to the United States, Italy and France. But he wanted Winklmayr to help him create luxury items under the brand Zambezi Grace.
“We sold most of our processed crocodile skin in the boot market in Texas. But we wanted to go all the way from egg to final product on our own. We wanted to come closer to the consumer. We needed to do everything by ourselves. That’s why we created our luxury brand, Zambezi Grace. A lot of Africans will leave Africa to buy European brands because they think it has to be good if it’s European. That’s why we needed to create a strong African brand, created by Africans, and make sure the conservation is in order. We want a strong presence in Africa,” says Brand.
It all started when Brand was running The Grace Hotel, a family business in Rosebank, Johannesburg, in 2002. He got a call from an anxious friend who had lost his farm to land invasions in Zimbabwe. He wanted Brand to join him in buying a 20-hectare farm with 5,000 crocodiles near the north Zambezi River. It was not your everyday request. It took little persuasion for the adventurous Brand to head for uncharted territory.
“To me it didn’t make good business sense to breed crocodiles and make profit out of their skin, but this was a good friend from university. I trusted him. We bought the farm and he managed it well and he is a shareholder… In Africa we have the skills, the skins, the labor and the conditions, but until now we’ve been supplying overseas brands rather than creating our own,” he says.
Risk runs in the family. Chippy Brand, his father, was an entrepreneur. He was the first farmer in South Africa to grow grass for sale in Westonaria, 45 kilometers from Johannesburg. Chippy was also the founder of Grace Hotels – Mount Grace, west of Johannesburg; the Rosebank Grace and the Cape Grace at the Waterfront in Cape Town, which won the title of best small luxury hotel in the world in 1999.
Between 2004 and 2007, Grace Hotels was sold and Brand invested his money in Zambezi Grace.
Thirteen years on, on the farm in Binga District, in the north of Zimbabwe, the crocodile population has grown to 40,000 and has its own tannery factory. Zambezi Grace is worth $25 million.
“We added more and more capacity to the farm since we bought it. In 2013, we built a tannery to process the animal leather skin. This has created more work for the local people who lost jobs before we came,” says Brand.
“In today’s world you need to develop your own brand. There are very few recognizable African luxury brands. With the Cape Grace hotel business we managed to do it and I am transferring the experience to Zambezi Grace. It will be difficult because people’s perceptions of Africa are negative. If it is from Africa, it is not luxury,” says Brand.
Brand praises the work of his 400-strong staff. They see 100% of their crocodile eggs hatch compared to less than 70% in the wild.
It’s not easy to separate a ferocious crocodile from its skin but Brand says there has been no fatality yet. Before slaughter, the animals are stunned.
“I made a pact with the crocodiles that I won’t eat them if they do not eat me. That’s why I don’t eat crocodile meat,” says Brand.
So, crocodiles, an African entrepreneur’s know how; blended with hundreds of years of European leather expertise, has snapped up a multi-million-dollar business.

A Business Of Crocodiles And Princesses  Making Millions

There is a rowdy crowd at one of Lagos’ busiest commercial centers – the Idumota market on Lagos Island. High pitched hawkers shove their goods at customers, motorists struggle for space on the narrow roads, and hundreds of stalls, with music blaring, lay out their merchandise. Today’s hustle is no different from any other and no one knows this better than Paul Orajiaka, the entrepreneur who has spent years in this hub.
From running a little store out of a dilapidated building in the market, to owning a colossal outlet within its vicinity, Orajiaka is no stranger to the nooks and crannies of his business address.
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Orajiaka’s company, Auldon Limited, manufactures African-themed toys which promote the continent’s cultural heritage to children. The company recently launched the Unity Girl Dolls Project, with multi-cultural dolls in different Nigerian traditional attire. The dolls can be found in countries including Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya and some parts of Europe.
Auldon Limited was founded 17 years ago with less than $100. As a determined young man, Orajiaka’s dreams were shattered when he was repeatedly denied an American visa after finishing high school in Benin City. He wanted to study business management in the United States to market his father’s business. Orajiaka’s father was a renowned African carver and staunch entrepreneur in Warri. Orajiaka, and his siblings, helped with the carving work but Orajiaka wanted to take his father’s craft to a more structured market.
“I was about 16 years old. I was denied a visa at my umpteenth attempt primarily because of my age. I had frequented Lagos to follow up with the American embassy at each application stage. I decided to remain in Lagos, where my sister also lived, after my ambitions to go to the States didn’t work out. I didn’t want to be mocked by my friends back in my hometown. I had no idea what my next move was going to be,” says Orajiaka.
He decided to work at the Idumota market.
His brother-in-law was an importer who traded in a large variety of merchandise. Orajiaka helped his in-law and was impressed by the large amount of money the business made.
“I was learning a lot about the business environment and couldn’t believe the volumes of goods we were pushing into the market. The returns were fascinating and I soon began to get excited about my new activity.”
Orajiaka proved a valuable resource to his in-law’s business and was generously rewarded. The money he was earning made up for his previous disappointments, but Orajiaka was soon advised to return to school.
“While working for my in-law, I enrolled as an accounting student at the University of Lagos after which I proceeded to get a Master’s in Business Administration from Lagos Business School. This reinforced my gusto for the business world now that I had my professional qualifications. I decided to start thinking of my business seriously.”
While seeking new markets to supply merchandise to, in highbrow areas of Lagos, he visited a new store. He admired the toy section and was fascinated by the range and variety on the shelves.
On his next visit, he noticed that the section was almost empty and immediately asked the store manager if they needed new supplies. After getting the green light from the manager, Orajiaka scouted the length and breadth of the Idumota market for a toy stockist. The toys he found were a lot cheaper than those in the fancier stores.
“I was going to make huge margins on this product if I succeeded in getting the manager to place an order. I delivered the samples at a 300 percent markup price. The store manager ordered a few dozen immediately. I never expected this. I approached my in-law… to purchase a bigger order from the supplier for the required number of samples. This is where it all started. Today, a humble beginning which started as a small venture is a leading company, importing and supplying a diverse range of educational toys to both retailers and wholesalers in Nigeria,” he says.
“We started out with a capital base of about $30 now have a turnover of well over $7 million as at last year.”
The dolls’ visibility has grown in leaps and bounds over the years. Social responsibility is an area the company has also focused on with the Unity Girl Doll Project.
“I was not happy that most of the toys sold in Nigeria didn’t promote any cultural relevance. I wanted to promote the dark-skinned and African-featured girls and women as beautiful and their culture as diverse and admirable.”
One of the challenges Orajiaka faced was a lack of support from financial institutions in Nigeria. A school renovation program was part of the tasks that accompanied the project.
The Unity Girl Doll Project is a collection of 14-inch dolls that represent Nigeria’s three major tribes – Hausa, Ibo and Yoruba – with the aim of promoting the country’s cultural diversity and relevance to the younger generation. The dolls also have booklets outlining details of the culture, languages and backgrounds of the three main tribes.
With the dolls available in leading retail outlets across Nigeria, Orajiaka has proved that business can be child’s play.

This Business Is Child’s Play

Ten years ago, Victor Ochen, was a cobbler, fish monger and charcoal burner. This year, the 33-year-old is the first Ugandan and youngest African to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Ochen spent most of his early childhood at an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp in Abia at the height of a bloody war perpetuated by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda. He is now the director of the African Youth Initiative Network (AYINET), offering medical and psychological rehabilitation to the thousands of victims of the conflict.
Ochen, who was nominated with AYINET, says he can’t believe he will be competing with global personalities like Pope Francis; Edward Snowden, who leaked details of American electronic surveillance; and Novaya Gazeta, a Russian investigative newspaper critical of President Vladimir Putin.
“I was born in war, raised in war, a life no child should live. I can’t believe the work I did for the good of my people, a local struggle, has taken me to the international level,” he says.
Ochen has seen the horrors of war. He watched his mother die in 1996 because the conflict barred the way to malaria drugs.
“We tried to carry my mother on a stretcher from Abia to Lira (about 20 kilometers away) but the rebels had set up so many traps around the area. After carrying her for some time, she told us to take her back home and instead take care of ourselves.”
Later, Ochen’s mother died, which led to his father wanting to commit suicide. With his brother, Ochen managed to convince his remaining parent to live.
Before their mother died, Ochen and his brother vowed to never shoot a gun.
“Up to now, I don’t know how to fire a bullet,” he says.
After relocating to an IDP camp, life became rough. Ochen would dig other people’s gardens and burn charcoal to earn money for food.
Around 1995, at the age of 13, Ochen formed a youth peace club that was against the recruitment of child soldiers.
“I remember being called by some elders and asked how I could talk about peace yet I had never lived a peaceful life. They also told me I would be killed by the army if they got to know I was preaching against war,” says Ochen.
Living with war has left Ochen with an aversion to violence.
“I don’t celebrate when I see a rebel being killed. I believe there are conditions that forced these people to fight. But again committing crimes against humanity with impunity cannot go on.”
Ochen believes that former LRA commander, Dominic Ongwen, currently at The Hague facing war crimes, should be punished.
“He was such a vicious commander who oversaw the abduction, rape and murder of tens of thousands of children and women. He should answer for his sins. Let him at least tell us where some of the women and children are. We know they must be somewhere.”
Ochen witnessed an operation led by Ongwen in 1999 when he was burning charcoal to try and earn money to register for national examinations.
“We watched them open our charcoal and spoil it. They only crazy thing I have done in my life was throwing stones at the 100-plus gun-wielding rebels to try and stop them from spoiling my charcoal. I cried silently, cursed Ongwen and ran back to
the camp.”
Whereas other children go to school to get jobs, Ochen’s story was different as “I have always done all kinds of jobs so that I can go to school.”
The year he joined secondary school, Ongwen worked as a fish monger to raise money to buy a box and pay fees. Throughout his life, Ochen never put on shoes until he was chased out of a senior two lesson for wearing lugabile (sandals made from old car tyres).
“I remember becoming a cobbler in school and raising 8,000 Ugandan shillings to buy my first shoes. However, I did not put on these shoes as they were stolen the same night I bought them. I never saw them again and up to now I’m still looking for my first pair of shoes,” says Ochen with a smile.
He was able to finish Senior Four and went on to work as a cleaner, receptionist and radio presenter. Ochen was voted the best radio presenter in Lira.
His first attempt to join university in 2003 was thwarted by a lack of school fees. His family relied on him for income.
“I was later lucky to get a job with Straight Talk Foundation where I got some money and studied a bachelor’s degree in Leadership and Development Studies from the little-known World University of Leadership (the university has since stopped operations in Uganda),” he says.
While at Straight Talk, Ochen decided to form his own organization. He wrote several proposals that have now helped him to run a budget of $1 million.
Top on the list of activities is helping victims of the LRA war. Those whose lips were chopped off, those who were amputated and the returnees who need to be helped back into the community.
His greatest belief is that his story represents the African youth who has suffered at the hands of what he calls greedy
war mongers.
“The youth are being used as tools of injustice yet they should be used as tools of justice. It is good we have helped strengthen the understanding of foundations for justice such as the International Criminal Court.”
Ochen says the trial of Ongwen should be a wake-up call for all those involved in war crimes.
This year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on October 9, the day Uganda celebrates its independence.
“My prayer is that as we celebrate Independence Day, my effort will be rewarded so that the African youth living in IDPs can see a bright future ahead of him.”

The Man Of Peace Who Wept As He Threw Stones At Rebel Soldiers

There can’t be too many days when you start work climbing down a ladder, with a government spy, into a dingy underground shaft in search of a torture chamber. This was how the meandering road of journalism took me to tunnels and bunkers deep beneath Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, on a sunny day in September 1995.
A few hours earlier I had been sitting at the presidential palace with the diminutive former President Frederick Chiluba. He assured me, with his peculiar trademark expression of rolling his eyes so all you could see was their whites, that we would see shocking evidence of torture in the days of his predecessor Kenneth Kaunda.
At the time, Kaunda had been a thorn in the side of Chiluba and was staging a political comeback. To give Chiluba his due, the union leader had ousted Kaunda, fair and square, at elections on a wave of votes of people fed up with food shortages and autocratic tendencies from the old man. It ended Kaunda’s 27-year reign since the day Zambia won independence on October 24, 1964. KK or Super Ken, as they called him in the copper belt, was determined to fight back at the 1996 elections and was going to wring out every bit of popularity he had as well as making a nuisance of himself to the people in power.
<div id="attachment_3519" style="width: 215px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3519" class="size-medium wp-image-3519" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Par1766006-1-205x300.jpg" alt="" width="205" height="300" />Zambia&#8217;s former president Frederick Chiluba gives the thumbs up outside the Magistrates Courts on Febrauary 15, 2008 in Lusaka after the court ruled today that Chiluba should face a corruption trial in May. Chiluba would have to show cause why he should not be convicted on charges of theft of public funds and abuse of office, prosecutor Mutembo Nchito told AFP after the ruling by Lusaka Magistrate Jones Chinyama.</div>
In response, Chiluba threw mud at Kaunda from every angle. He tried to deport the old man to Malawi with a bizarre claim that the former head of state was not a Zambian – his father, a Church of Scotland vicar, was born in Malawi. In 1998, there was a misprision of treason trial where Kaunda was charged with failing to inform authorities of a treasonous act. Kaunda, who spent nine months in prison during the independence struggle, was to spend many more months behind bars on remand and grew a bushy Father Christmas white beard in protest. Appropriate, since he was arrested on Christmas Day.
“These are frightened little men trying to hurt me,” was one of Kaunda’s phrases of the time.
This was the scene on the surface on that day I walked into the dim tunnels built by engineers from the former Yugoslavia in the days when Lusaka was under attack for sheltering guerrillas from neighboring Zimbabwe and South Africa.
It was a bit like walking down a mine as the shaft led downward, in a gentle incline. There were lights here and there perched in the rock; every now and then there was a room off the main tunnel. We had the camera ready to get shots of the torture chamber; we found… nothing. If there was a torture chamber it was well hidden.
We scoured the underground bunkers and all we found was a radio station with a five-kilowatt transmitter, lots of damp carpets and rotting wood, what looked like a council chamber and rooms filled with bunk beds; little else.
We emerged at the other end of the long tunnel, which came out at the presidential palace, puzzled. Why had Chiluba sent us on a wild-goose chase? There was anecdotal evidence from a Major Ronald Chansa who told of being held and tortured in the tunnels for 21 days in 1981.
Afterwards, we headed for Kaunda’s home in Lusaka to ask the question about torture.
“If I see a spider in the bath I will take it out before I put my water there,” says Kaunda in denying the charge.
“Maybe there were one or two over-zealous policeman, here and there, but I can say I know nothing of torture.”
Maybe.
Chiluba faced corruption charges after his term in office and died in June 2011. Chansa, if there was such a man, never spoke out again. Kaunda, who famously grabbed the microphone to make a tribute at Nelson Mandela’s funeral in December 2013, is alive and well, living in Lusaka. He pulled out of the 1996 election at the last minute and never stood again and was acquitted of misprision of treason.
Maybe between the three, lies the truth about the bunkers deep below Lusaka.
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Deep Under The Earth  In Search Of A Dark Secret

Throughout the years that Greg Etafia has been between the poles for South African club Moroka Swallows, he has become one of the most valuable players in the Premier Soccer League (PSL). The Nigerian’s performances have been consistently high since he signed for Swallows in 2002 and he remains Swallows’ first choice goalkeeper. He feels he can still offer more.
“I am very happy that I am still active, doing well for Swallows whenever I am in action. For all the years that I have been playing for Swallows, I always gave my best and it is good that the team has been stable. When I arrived at Swallows from Nigeria, I was aware that I [was] going to participate in a highly competitive league that is well organized, so I always prepare myself well for any challenges that I come across,” he says.
Etafia has an impressive track record. In Nigeria, he performed with flying colors for Lobi Stars while they were in the CAF Champions League. He helped Stars reach the semifinals and quarterfinals of Africa’s most prestigious football competition. He also played for Plateau United in Nigeria for a brief period.
“While I was playing for Lobi Stars, I had good communication with my teammates and I was always determined to deliver for the team wherever we played. Whether it was a local league game or in the African Champions League, it was very important for the whole team to get good results. Playing in Africa in the Champions League was a good experience for the team because there were so many things that we learned from playing in different countries under different conditions,” he says.
Etafia represented Nigeria at the Under-17 and Under-23 levels. He was also part of the Super Eagles’ senior team. He credits the coaches he played under at youth level for getting him where he is now.
“Whenever I represented Nigeria, no matter at what level, I always felt honored. Playing for my country means a lot to me and I did my best whenever I got the opportunity to wear the national team jersey.”
Gavin Hunt, one of the top coaches in South Africa, discovered Etafia and brought him to Swallows. At the Soweto club, he was rated highly by many coaches from different backgrounds, including Julio Cesar Leal of Brazil, Rainer Zobel of Germany, Ian Gorowa of Zimbabwe and Gordon Igesund of South Africa. All appreciated his ability to deal with the crosses and organize his defence, but what really makes him stand out are his spectacular saves.
“All the coaches that I played under at Swallows had something to offer the team and I learned from them,” says Etafia.
He has won three major trophies with Swallows – the ABSA Cup, the Nedbank Cup and the MTN 8 – and feels there are more on their way.
“I remember my first cup that I won with Swallows was when we were playing against Manning Rangers in Bloemfontein. We had prepared well for that particular game. We had a good game plan and we approached that game well and we ended up winning. The other final was when we were playing against University of Pretoria (Tuks) in the Nedbank Cup final. Even though we were more experienced than Tuks, we took that game very seriously and we emerged victorious. The other glorious moment was when we beat SuperSport United 2-1 in the MTN 8 final at Orlando Stadium. It was a tough game as SuperSport had many quality players. We played good attacking football and eventually it paid off for us,” he says.
“We were very excited with our victory against SuperSport; you could just see the energy and happiness we showed as we were celebrating. It really feels good winning trophies with the team and I will carry on working very hard so we can win something again.”
Swallows, one of the oldest clubs in South Africa, has a rich history and has recently signed top players which Etafia feels proud to team up with.
The current season started on a high note when Swallows beat South African giants Orlando Pirates, however their form faded and they began losing games. It led to head coach, Zeca Marques, stepping down and Fani Madida taking over as caretaker coach. A 1-1 draw against high-flying Kaizer Chiefs in a league match boosted morale and Etafia is confident they can turn the corner and improve their position in the PSL standings.
“The spirit is very high in our camp at Swallows. It is a matter of taking each game as it comes. It is very important for us to get the good results. No matter who we play against, whether it is a small or a big team, we need to go out there and perform. It is very important for us to be consistent. I know there are so many games that we can play in a short period but we are professionals and we should be able to deal well with the tough situations we face.”
The 32-year-old goalkeeper keeps in touch with his fellow countryman Williams Okpara, the former Orlando Pirates goalkeeper. He grew up supporting Manchester United but his favorite player is Vincent Enyeama, the Nigerian goalkeeper who plays for Lille in France.
Being around fellow Nigerians and following other sports has helped Etafia settle in South Africa.
“I just love sport. I enjoy basketball; it is also a very interesting sport. I communicate with other Nigerians in South Africa and we discuss soccer and other important things in life. In Africa, we have the talent and it is therefore very important to use our skills right and do well at the highest level.”
It certainly takes a man with a big heart to stay far away from home and manage to remain his club’s first choice.

The Nigerian Swallow Soaring In The South

He is the political cartoonist who was sued by his president and won. He has made a name for himself by being outspoken and critical and he’s not about to slow down.
Jonathan Shapiro has been publishing his annual collections of drawings in the Mail &amp; Guardian and Sunday Times newspapers for 19 years. In 2014, his book, It’s Code Red, features left-wing, overall-clad opposition party leader, Julius Malema, marching into South Africa’s Parliament on its cover. Inside, it’s a record of 12 months in a country weighed down by political scandals and high-profile murder trials. On page 87, however, is a ray of sunshine: an illustration depicting a conversation between two children – one white and the other black – discussing how far South Africa has come since the first democratic election 20 years ago. It’s playful and a bit silly and it sums up the man who draws South Africa’s news for a living.
“There is a difference between scepticism and cynicism. I am a sceptic and that means someone who reads between the lines and doesn’t take things at face value. The cynic doesn’t believe that anything’s good. I am not cynical about South Africa. I’m a patriotic sceptic,” says Shapiro.
“The whole idea of being a critical cartoonist is that my drawings will start a debate and hopefully something good can come out of that.”
Shapiro, known to those who read him as Zapiro, grew up in Cape Town and worshipped at the altars of Tintin creator Georges Remi and Charles Schultz of Peanuts fame. Pursuing cartooning as a career however was not on the cards and a teenage Shapiro enrolled in a seven-year architecture degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
“I lost confidence in my abilities and I didn’t think I could make a career out of being a cartoonist. I was lacking the vision to pursue my dreams.”
Shapiro’s university career in the late 1970s and early 1980s overlapped some of South Africa’s darkest years under the apartheid regime. His political views were progressive but Shapiro struggled to fit in with the student anti-apartheid movements which were simmering – and occasionally boiling over – at the university. Things changed in 1983 when Shapiro’s mother, Gabby, became involved in the political party the United Democratic Front and recruited most of her family to the cause within months.
Shapiro’s political awakening coincided with more time spent cartooning.
“The first time I did a political caricature was in my second year at varsity. The subject was the head of the architecture department at UCT. The picture showed the duplicity of his personality and the way he ran the department. He flew off the handle and that was when I first realized that my cartoons – these pictures that I drew – had a potential to be powerful. Definitely more powerful than anything my architecture work could accomplish,” he says.
Shapiro changed majors from architecture to graphic design after a month of backpacking through Europe as a fourth year student visiting, mostly unannounced and uninvited, the art studios where some of the world’s best loved comics such as Asterix were drawn.
“It was a shot in the arm. I came back to South Africa and told my parents I wanted to change my degree to graphic design. They were unbelievably supportive.”
Shapiro’s first fulltime cartooning job was at the now defunct South newspaper in 1987. He has spent almost three decades since then depicting the fall of apartheid, the country’s transition to democracy and the travails of the various presidential administrations.
“What gets me really down is when things get really bad politically and trying to find the glimmers of hope is not easy,” he says.
His cartoon depicting the rape of Lady Justice – a metaphor featured repeatedly in his work – by President Jacob Zuma was met with outrage by the ruling party and many members of the public. Shapiro’s only concern around the picture’s publication was that it may be interpreted as insensitive to women.
“Critical cartooning is the foray into the taboo as well as the pushing and the prodding which breaks down boundaries and creates discourse in society.”
Shapiro’s work is increasingly critical of Zuma – who has been immortalized into South African consciousness as ‘shower head’ on account of Zapiro’s work.
“I am not anti-ANC but I am against the corruption and the complacency prevalent in the ruling party. It is actually unbelievable to do cartoons in this environment because you become part of the moment, part of that political discussion.”
Shapiro works from a home studio in Cape Town. He has no plans to give up cartooning and doesn’t anticipate running out of material in the foreseeable future.
“Sometimes reality in South Africa is weirder that anything I could ever dream up.”

The Satirical Thorn In  The President’s Side

Some say it walks like a drunken Velociraptor, tail out and claws curled against its chest. Others think it looks like a scaly anteater. Most ask what on earth is it? This is the little known and misunderstood pangolin, a disappearing mammal seen rarely in the African wild, even by game rangers. Its scarcity gives it a high price on the black market; so much so it faces extinction faster than the rhino. The pangolin can end up as a soup – $300 a bowl – or is used in traditional medicine in Africa and Asia.
“The best description I have come across is a pangolin looks like an artichoke with armor. It comes from the cretaceous era. Its tongue is so long it curls in its belly. It has no teeth and has powerful front claws. In Africa alone, we estimate an excess of 10,000 a year are traded. It is the most illegally traded mammal in the world,” says Ray Jansen, a professor at the University of Tshwane and Vice-Chair of the African Pangolin Working Group.
The 80-million-year-old mammals can eat 200,000 ants and termites a day and are so elusive it’s almost impossible to say exactly how many of them are out there. Jansen’s rough estimate is that there could be anywhere between 37,000 and 44,000 in Southern Africa alone. All eight varieties of this ancient species (three in Asia; one in India and four in Africa) have been flagged on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. The issue, fears Jansen, is that because so little is known about the pangolin, blocking the illegal trade is hard.
<div id="attachment_3480" style="width: 209px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3480" class="size-medium wp-image-3480" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Ray-July-2009Kenny-Pinnock-199x300.jpg" alt="" width="199" height="300" />Ray Jansen</div>
“In April 2014, six tons of pangolin scales were confiscated in China. The amount when put into perspective is frightening; it is the equivalent of 2 million pangolins. It’s such a fascinating animal and as the awareness has grown so has the mapping of the illegal trade. We had cases where until recently; officials in America were confiscating scales thinking they were from a tortoise. The demand from the Asian market is also new. The pangolin in Asia have virtually been hunted to extinction, you can expect to pay $300 dollars for pangolin soups. So now we are expecting the demand to gravitate toward Africa,” says Jansen.
The tall wiry Jansen is every inch a professor. It’s harder to find a pangolin than his office, which is tucked away on the fourth floor of the University of Tshwane’s Pretoria campus. When you do find him, he is buried under a mountain of paperwork and animal skeletons. Jansen is no stranger to animals. He grew up hunting guinea fowl on the open school grounds of St Stithians Boys College, in Johannesburg, before moving to Port Elizabeth to complete a PhD in ornithology. He is also a trained falconer, was part of the dog tracker unit in the army and was a teacher.
Jansen took up the plight of the pangolin in June 2011. It was the day he held a mother pangolin and her dead pup, curled in her pouch, on the verge of being smuggled out of the country.
“To hold that small dead pup in your hands and see for the first time what these fascinating creatures look like. It was so emotional. But you have to move that emotion and anger into something else; I knew at that moment that I had to do something. You could say this pup essentially started the whole project.”
The university called on his skills as an expert in genetic mapping to do more research.
“It was the first mammal work I had ever done, but I found it was fascinating. The pangolin was a mystery to the scientific world. There had been no real data on its genetics or proven scientific research on its habits. We were the pioneers. It was the first time I was seeing a baby. We wanted to take the body back to the bio-bank in Pretoria to analyze its genetics. At the time no one knew what the physiology of a pangolin even was,” says Jansen.
Months later, Jansen released the mother of the dead pup in a game reserve in the Waterberg.
On this summer’s day, Jansen is ecstatic, virtually jumping with joy. He’d just heard of a pangolin rescue by Jen Guyton, a conservationist, in the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. One more mother and its baby safely returned to the wild. He digs into his drawers and pulls out his cell phone.
“This is an example of the problem we were facing,” he says handing over the phone.
On the phone is a screengrab of an advert for a pangolin for sale on Alibaba, the $231-billion Chinese e-commerce company; a lesson that the pangolin is never far from the consumers mind. Jansen removed the advert.
Since 2011, Jansen has breathed life into the topic. His efforts have caught the ear of the famous.
“The pangolin runs the risk of becoming extinct before most people have even heard of them,” says Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, who lent his voice in a video blog campaign against wildlife trafficking in November.
Closer to home, South African-born Nicky Oppenheimer, whose family is worth $6.8 billion and is the third richest man in Africa, according to Forbes, has thrown his weight behind the cause. His philanthropic interest is in finding a solution to the largest killer of pangolins in South Africa – electrified game fences.
“Pangolins walk on their hind feet so when they make contact with the lower wire it’s at their belly height. They then curl instinctively around the wire. In the end they are pulsed to death,” says Jansen.
Along with the poachers, electricity could kill off the pangolin before the next sale on Alibaba.
“What is a pangolin? The research we did revealed that the pangolin is most closely related to a cat. It’s not even on the same genetics as an armadillo,” says Jansen.
Jansen and Oppenheimer hope the pangolin, like the cat, will have nine lives.

The Shy Scaly Animal That Could  Curl Up And Die

Imagine if the next time you needed to toss together a salad, spice up a meal or garnish an after-dinner treat, you only went as far as your balcony, rooftop or garden to source the ingredients. If you are a city-dweller in sub-Saharan Africa, that is more possible than you think.
Urban farming is mushrooming on the continent, almost as quickly as the rate at which people are moving into cities. Around 40% of the African population (around 375 million people) are metropolitan residents and that number will grow to 60% by 2050. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that 150 million of those people grow their own food.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3476" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/shutterstock_33409384-300x201.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="201" />
A handful of them are hipsters who nurture herb gardens while practising yoga and preaching about organic eating and low carbon footprints. Hundreds of thousands more are after more than just a feel-good factor. Just as urban farming became part of the recovery after the First World War and is being used by Cubans to combat crippling sanctions, in Africa it is solving some of society’s most severe problems. Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s most under-nourished region and is rife with hunger and unemployment.
The FAO cited Malawi, Cameroon and Ghana, where up to 50% of households have vegetable gardens, as three countries with successful urban farming programs. South Africa is not far behind, with steps being taken to encourage urban farming in a country where around 20% of the population does not know where their next meal is coming from.
“Urban agriculture projects strive to reduce food security and create economic upliftment. Growing food in the backyard of your shack can be the difference between going hungry and having a healthy meal on the table for your family,” says Catherine Nicks, the Project Manager of Tyisa Nabanye, a non-profit urban agriculture organization which runs a farm on the slopes of Signal Hill in Cape Town.
Tyisa Nabanye occupies land on ERF 81, one of the original sites of agriculture in the Cape that dates back to the 1700s. Although it is historically farmland, these days it is not an ideal place to grow crops. While the clay soil remains nutrient rich, the area is often lashed by heavy rains and strong winds which destroy a harvest overnight. But Nicks and a team of seven others have found a way of working with the elements instead of fighting them through an ideology of permaculture.
“We practice companion planting in our garden, where certain vegetables are planted together with certain herbs and play different roles. Some plants feed or fix nutrients in the soil, others repel or attract insects that perform specific functions,” says Nicks.
“We find that kale and spinach do well in our garden, partly because they need little attention and they grow year round. And partly because they sell well, people cannot get enough of the very limited kale in the city.”
Kale is the new ‘it’ food and is often used in green juice where it is blended with spinach, cucumber and apple to create a healthy brew. One-Juice, a company that specializes in selling these drinks, buys some of its kale directly from Tyisa Nabanye. By doing that, they have created a direct connection between customers that are conscious of where their food comes from and the producers who supply that food.
People who drink One-Juice’s products only have to ask where the raw materials come from to be directed to Tyisa Nabanye. There they are welcome to see for themselves how the crops are grown. Nicks meets many of them personally, answers questions, introduces them to the gardeners and invites them to
come back.
“Urban farming is largely about reducing the distance between farm and fork, about increasing ones understanding about where our food comes from. We now know the name of our farmer as well as our doctor,” says Nicks.
“It’s about knowing what a gooseberry looks like before it has been dehusked, washed and placed on a layer of bubble wrap in a plastic container, what the leaf of a watermelon plant looks like and how tall a tomato plant can grow. We use our garden to share our knowledge about where our food comes from and how we can be more sustainable.”
But it’s not as simple as that. The 8.2–hectares, of which Tyisa Nabanye does not even occupy a tenth, is owned by the South African National Defence Force and run by the Department of Public Works. The farm does not have a lease to operate and there are constant bureaucratic battles to overcome, despite a policy in place which promotes urban farming.
In June 2007, the City of Cape Town drafted an urban agriculture policy in which stated its vision to create a ‘prosperous and growing urban agriculture sector,’ which would center on poverty alleviation and job creation. By encouraging agriculture in the city, the government hoped to take steps to increase food security and provide people with a sustainable income source.
More than five years after the document was tabled, the city reached an agreement with the Oranjezicht City Farm (OZCF) to turn a disused bowling green into a bowl of greens, literally. The farm uses that phrase as its slogan now. It was the city’s first pop-culture urban farm and quickly captured the attention of Capetonians because it was promoted as a community space.
OZCF connected itself to locals through a weekly market which sold fresh vegetables grown on the farm and grew to include a variety other stalls. It became the place to be on a Saturday morning for socializing, sipping on fair-trade coffee or craft beer or even trying a hand at farming as one of the OZCF volunteers. But the quaintness did not last.
The farm is situated on a heritage site and city officials require certain safety requirements to be met to accommodate the foot traffic and a proper market licence to trade. In early December, news broke that the market would stop until those boxes were ticked and the young and beautiful were outraged. They had grown to think of OZCF as a public property and exerted enough pressure to move the market to the official residence of the province’s Premier, Helen Zille, from where it continues to operate from.
The fracas over OZCF remains unresolved but it achieved something the community wanted most; it created awareness. Residents cared enough about where their food was coming from to go to where it was being grown. They watch it flower and flourish, buy it unwashed and unpackaged, cook it themselves, eat it and share it with others. If that sentiment lasts, urban farming will continue growing in Africa and could become as commercially viable as it in Beijing, where half the vegetables consumed in the city are in grown in urban farms.
With that in mind, go on and grow
a little.

Farming Coming  To A Town Near You

If South Africans had more electricity, they could see him on TV. Chris Yelland, the electrical engineer turned energy journalist entrepreneur, is the scourge of Eskom, South Africa’s nationalized power utility. His voice is critical, outspoken and more consistent than the electricity supply from Eskom.
“When I started Energize magazine [1997], a lot of doomsayers said to me ‘what the hell do you want to start a new magazine for?’ they also said ‘what more can you say before you run out of hot stories?’. Energy at that time was a boring subject. There was not a lot of interest. People just assumed when you switched on the plug and flicked the switch, electricity would come out the wall. Fortunately for us, and by chance, energy has become a hot topic. It actually affects everybody. Not just industry, not just commerce, but the man or woman in the street. We’ve had to learn that behind the plug lies a multi-billion-rand industry,” says Yelland.
Yelland has had a lot to talk about over the last 10 years. Eskom has the capacity to provide 41,194 megawatts (MW). Its aging fleet of power stations, many built 30 years ago, runs at 33,000MW, and cannot match the current demands of 38,000MW.
For many years South Africans have been smug towards electricity. A common joke told locally was: What did Zimbabweans use before candles? Electricity. Now, that joke, and the smugness, has come home to roost.
The short term solution is ‘load shedding’; in English, this means scheduled power cuts. They are words that mean shops close, mines shut down and computer nerds cringe at losing their unsaved data. According to Yelland, load shedding is a vicious circle; as the power utility pleads with the country to use less energy, it hampers its operations.
“Electricity consumption at this moment is at a seven-year low. Ever since 2008, [when load shedding first was implemented], it’s been going down. This means Eskom’s sales are going down. Their revenue is going down but their costs are going up. In the last six months of 2014, Eskom declared a profit of R9.3 billion (around $800 million), but that was over the winter period, when their prices are nearly double the summer period because demand for electricity is high. In the second six months of 2015, their projected profit is going to see a loss of R9 billion ($780 million). It’s going to wipe out the entire profit for the first six months of the year. Why? “Because they haven’t got enough electricity to sell. They are throttling the economy telling people to use less,” says Yelland.
A four-year delay in coal power plant projects Medupi and Kusile has made matters worse. The projects which were due to be completed in 2013 and 2014 were expected to bring around 10,000MW to alleviate the grid. The delays mean their price tags, estimated at R69.1 billion ($6 billion) and R80.6 billion ($7 billion) in 2007, have now nearly doubled to R154.2 billion ($13.3 billion) and R172.2 billion ($14.9 billion). Alone, they amount to an annual loss of R30 billion ($2.6 billion) in electricity sales.
“All 12 units will be online by 2020 at the earliest, if nothing further goes wrong. They are not a short term solution to South Africa’s needs,” says Yelland.
The power crisis has also meant Eskom spends around R1 billion ($86.7 billion) on diesel every month to run open-cycle gas turbines. Ironically, the country doesn’t have the infrastructure to run on gas, which the turbines are designed for and which would be a cheaper, cleaner alternative to diesel, says Yelland.
There is light in the gloom. A thousand megawatts is generated by renewable energy projects, built by private companies and then sold back to Eskom at set tariffs.
“The success stories are not government success stories, they are private: private capital; private technology; built, owned and operated privately; and then generated into the grid,” says Yelland.
What’s more, a study by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa, found that the cost of the renewable energy projects was less than the cost of the blackouts, and didn’t cost the tax payer a cent.
“In fact, it’s contributed towards reducing costs, meaning we had to spend less on diesel. Of course that’s only valid on shortages like the wave we have had at the moment. If we weren’t using diesel, if it was a normal country with a surplus of energy, [renewables] would cost us,” says Yelland.
Renewables do have a downside and are not the solution to Eskom’s crisis. The sun and wind are not constant. At any given time the 1,000MW of energy supplied will most likely produce 250MW.
“This is rated output, that is what is expected when the sun is blowing full blast and when the wind is blowing full ball. For every 100MW of renewable energy of capacity, you have to build an equal amount of conventional, mid-merit plants, to back up and provide power when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining. If you are trying to deliver 100MW and the sun goes behind a cloud, you can’t just switch off half of your customers,” says Yelland.
In the short term, Eskom’s crisis is further threatened by a R3-billion ($260 million) bailout to enable it to purchase diesel for the next month. Yelland believes Eskom needs to restructure.
“Eskom’s structure is the same structure as when it was set up 80 years ago. The world has changed since then. Other organizations like Sasol are not state-owned enterprises any longer. I believe if Eskom took on strategic equity partners, and listed on the stock exchange, it would raise significant capital resources without the need to raise tariffs. We need to inject new blood into something that is currently something akin to that of a dinosaur. [Eskom] is slow moving, ponderous and unable to adapt to the changing environment. If things carry on like this, it will go extinct just like the dinosaur did,” says Yelland.
You could argue that dinosaurs, when they were around, had more power.

The Scourge  Of The Dinosaur  In The Dark

Coal mines are the rock upon which South Africa’s power parastatal, Eskom, has been built. They mine 120-130 million tons for Eskom to burn every year. In 2015, the rock that supports 83% of South Africa’s power is crumbling.
The power utility is facing a dim future, through a decline in coal investment.
A senior coal analyst at XMP Consulting, Xavier Prevost, says at least six big coal mines could close down or decrease production by 2020.
“A decline in coal production calls for creation of more mines and failure to do so means all coal-fired power stations will have to close down which will affect electricity output,” said Prevost.
Prevost, who has more than 30 years experience in the coal sector, says too much coal in the market has driven down the prices as demand has fallen.
Countries, like the United States, exporting coal into the international market has also brought down prices, he adds.
Some of the big coal companies in South Africa include: BHP Billiton; Xstrata Coal; Glencore; Anglo American Thermal Coal; Sasol Mining and Exxaro Resources. Their costs rise as coal prices fall.
They supply Eskom with low-quality coal known as middlings, a by-product of the coal washing and beneficiation process. This coal contains about 35% of ash, resulting in low energy output.
Last year, South Africa’s Minister of Mineral Resources, Ngoako Ramatlhodi, said there was coal for export and coal of a lesser quality, which stays in the country.
“[The low-quality coal] we would want to keep for our power stations,” said Ramatlhodi.
Ramatlhodi, however, does not seem to acknowledge that cheap coal means lower electricity output.
To make matters worse, new mines are scarce. In the past six years, there have been fears over mining legislation, the decline in prices, increased competition from the United States, Indonesia, Australia and India and also lingering political rhetoric around nationalization.
Prevost says it’s not too late for South Africa to avert the coal crisis.
“Government has a 90 percent chance to make this better or worse through collaborative efforts between the departments of energy, finance and mines,” he says.
Addressing the media at the Eskom offices in Johannesburg in January, the new Chief Executive Officer, Tshediso Matona, painted a bleak picture saying the power utility can’t cope.
“New generating capacity and other levers are needed in order to ease the pressure on the system,” he said.
Matona says Eskom is like a car running on empty.
“We have arrived at a point that does not allow us to ignore the health of our plants. Our reserve margin is so thin, that every incident creates a major systems issue and could also have safety implications for the plant.”
According to Matona, the problem with Eskom is delayed maintenance and he says most of its ageing power stations face breakdowns.
“We know the problem and we know the solution,” he says.
The big question can be put in one word: When?

The Coal Hole

There were fewer miners at the Mining Indaba this year and more mining service companies to make up the numbers among 7,000 delegates. Everyone is trying to cut costs as commodity prices tumble.
“It’s been a lot quieter this year,” admits one of the organizers.
“The investors are there, but the group is getting smaller and smaller,” says one delegate who asked not to be named.
“I think the opportunities are like the gold rush of 1849 in America,” says Robin Saunders, the head of Clearbrook Capital, an investment company looking to sink billions into African mining on behalf of rich families in Europe and the Middle East.
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There were plenty of strident young mining nations from across Africa selling their minerals. This optimism couldn’t disguise the pain of the hosts; decades of battering and disinvestment leaves South Africa, where once 40% of the world’s mining was carried out, struggling to cling onto 5%, according to KPMG.
Investors are fighting shy of South Africa because of three big problems: power, rather the lack of it, strikes and fears over regulation.
The power shortages that have plagued most mines in South Africa has cost Harmony – the country’s third largest producer – 50 kilograms of gold in the last quarter to December 31,  worth around $1.87 million, according to CEO Graham Briggs. It meant production at Harmony fell 10%, in the last quarter of 2014, to 271,963 oz.
“What happens is we have communication from Eskom that we have to cut our consumption by 10% or sometimes as much as 20%. This means we have to stop milling and hoisting, which impacts on our production,” says Briggs.
Like most large South African mines, Harmony is in a cleft stick. It consumes 2,600MW at its South African operations – enough to power a city and more than half the output of a large coal-fired power station. This means, like most mines in South Africa, it can’t risk the capital to build a generator or power plant large enough for its needs.
South African mining minister, Ngoako Ramatlhodi, just over a year into the job, sees himself as riding to the rescue. Even so, he brushed over the glaring power problem; merely talking about private power producers and getting power from the Grand Inga dam, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 2023. It could have been 2093 for all the difference it makes to the mines.
Ramatlhodi’s speech was full of reassuring words for foreign investors: the rule of law was to be respected; the government was prepared to get tough on violent wildcat strikes and the country was open for business.
He wasn’t so clear cut on the regulation front. There was plenty of confusion over the amendments to the Minerals and Petroleum and Resources Development Act – the law that governs mining that is going back and forth through Parliament. President Jacob Zuma sent the amendments back saying they were unconstitutional.
One of the bones of contention is the proposal of so called developmental pricing – that is, lower prices for commodities like iron ore and coal to help stimulate the South African economy. A year ago the miners negotiated so called ‘mine gate prices’ similar to import parity pricing, where transport costs are taken into consideration, leaving the producer with a fair profit margin.
The problem is there is a strong voice within the ruling party for developmental pricing to be written into law. If so, the minister could be handed the power to declare minerals strategic; meaning miners would have to accept government prices and have to ask state permission to export. It could bring down the price of coal for Eskom, with it the cost of electricity, which is likely to be popular with voters.
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But among foreign investors it is likely to go down like a lead balloon laden with ten tons of coal. They are likely to see it as the state tinkering with the economy, laced with uncertainty, at a time when investors are looking for long term stability.
“It doesn’t feel like we are getting clarity,” says Wickus Botha, a mining analyst with EY.
“How long is it going to take to get these regulations through Parliament? It is not going to happen overnight. For the next two years it is going to be very difficult.”
In many other countries in Africa, these fears are far away. Many miners are making hay from Abidjan to Maputo as the hunt for investors overcomes shortcomings in infrastructure and financial systems.
One of them is Mark Bristow, the CEO of Randgold Resources, who has spent 20 years building mines everywhere from Mali to the Democratic Republic of Congo. His company’s results, released at the Mining Indaba, shows this penchant for the byways of African mining is paying off. In its Q4 figures, the company recorded record year-on-year production, up 26%, to 1,147,414oz in a company that is debt free and has paid a dividend at a time when the gold price is falling and most mining companies have forgotten what a dividend is. Bristow says his company is making a 20% real return on investment and is looking to invest in South Sudan and Kenya.
“Risk is in the eye of the beholder, as long as you have a good relationship with the stakeholders it is fine,” he says.
Elsewhere, Côte d’Ivoire, famous for agriculture, has a golden dream. The West African nation plans to open a gold mine every year for the next five years as part of its economic diversification, according to mining minister Jean-Claude Brou.
Gold mining in Cote d’Ivoire has grown rapidly in five years. In 2009, the country produced seven tons of gold; in 2014, it mined 18.6 tons. The country plans to increase production to 30 tons in the next five years.
“That is a very conservative target,” says Brou.
One last cautionary tale for African mining; there was a lot of talk about the increased mining royalties in Zambia and Zimbabwe and the threat they pose to investment.
From the gloom came a voice of sweet moderation from Ghana. The West African nation mined 4.4 million oz of gold in 2014 earning 40% of the country’s foreign currency.
In 2006, Ghana imposed a 5% royalty and mining minister Nii Osah Mills says his country plans to keep it at that rate for at least another 10 years.
“We were thinking recently of increasing the royalty, but we decided against it because we felt it would be disruptive to mining. So, no one is fleeing Ghana and that is a vote for us,” says Mills.
A dash of pragmatism that could help Ghana keep its place as the world’s 9th largest gold producer.

Four Frantic Days  Full Of Fear

It is 16 years since Nigeria drew back from the abyss in the former colonial town of Kaduna. In February 1999, 5,000 Christians took to the streets in an anti-Sharia march to protest the introduction of the strict Islamic penal code. Their contention was that Nigeria’s constitution did not allow federation, or state, to adopt any religion.
The march sparked a deadly confrontation between Christians and Muslims. Three days of street fighting left at least 2,000 dead. President Olusegun Obasanjo dispatched troops as conflict threatened to spread. He managed to head off more fighting, but the rumpus around Sharia law did not go away.
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Obasanjo tried to persuade northern governors to hold off on Sharia law; days before, Kano in the north west, signed a Sharia bill. Weeks later, Zamfara State amputated the right hand of Buba Jangebe after a Sharia court convicted him of stealing a cow. Four northern states: Sokoto, Zamfara, Kebbi and Kano have adopted Sharia law since 1999 and Obasanjo’s negotiations.
Many northern politicians felt marginalized by the new republic under Obasanjo. They complained of a southern and Christian bias and latched onto the rigors of Sharia law to boost waning support.
Fast forward to 2015, as the six-year Boko Haram insurgency rages. Boko Haram has condemned northern governors who have adopted Sharia law. The militants believe the brand of Sharia law practiced in the country is not true Islam and have vowed to wage war until the entire country falls under their brand of Sharia. In this struggle, Boko Haram has captured around 20 small towns along Nigeria’s border with Chad and Cameroon. Militants have also taken larger towns like Mubi in the north eastern state of Adamawa.
Boko Haram renamed Mubi ‘Madinatul Islam’ or the City of Islam. Tens of thousands fled as the invaders hoisted their flag in the deserted emir’s palace and warned that ‘true’ Sharia law was now in force. A market thief was convicted by a Sharia court and his hand amputated to make the point.
Seventeen-year-old Aisha Ibrahim recalls the day Boko Haram rolled into town in with armored cars, trucks and motorcycles. She was still in school when the town reverberated to the sound of gunfire. She ran home to find her parents had fled, leaving her grandmother behind. In the fraught weeks that followed, she says, her best friend, Umma, was forced into marriage with one of the militants. She feared the same fate and fled to Yola in the hope of finding her parents and four siblings. Her father has not been found. She is now back in Mubi after the Nigerian army took back the second-largest commercial center in Adamawa State, after Yola.
Mubi is also the largest cattle trading center in Nigeria. The cattle rearing northerners use the Mubi cattle market as an important trading post to sell to traders from as far as Lagos.
These days the southern businessmen fear the trip north and the insurgency appears to be killing the meat trade, which has yet to recover from a recent truck drivers’ strike.
On the other side of the city, Pastor Titi Adewumi, leader of one of the many churches that dot the landscape of the Adamawa State capital, says residents are depressed by all the security checks. All movement between 12AM and 5AM is prohibited as part of a state of emergency. Interestingly, worshippers are searched before they enter their local mosque or church. But while Yola residents complain, they know things could be worse; Boko Haram, at the time of writing, were engaged in a fight to the death for the control of the Borno State capital, Maiduguri, where a total ban on all movement has been imposed.
In Mubi, there is hope. Retired Colonel, Taboyi Elam Dong, says the recapture of Mubi shows that the Nigerian military is winning the war against Boko Haram. Other towns recaptured include Gwoza in Borno State and Potiskum in Yobe State.
Most people here feel the government is not doing enough as hell lurks around the corner.

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