Last November Apollo Global Management, the powerful buyout shop run by billionaires Leon Black, Marc Rowan and Joshua Harris, finished cashing out of arguably the greatest private equity deal of all time.
As they furiously sold billions of dollars of shares in LyondellBasell, a chemical maker, in several batches, they had every reason to think they were doing the right thing. By any metric it was a monstrous score. Since 2008 the firm had turned a $2 billion investment in the company, a plastics manufacturer and petroleum refiner based in Rotterdam with its main executive offices in Houston, into $12 billion, a sixfold return on investment that juiced the results of its biggest fund to a net internal rate of return of 30%. It was an astonishing result, especially in postcrash Wall Street, landing Apollo atop the lucrative private equity world and helping to launch an initial public offering of the firm, which is now valued at $10.5 billion. Harris earned $397 million from his work at Apollo last year alone; Black made $546 million.
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But even as Apollo’s billionaires were exiting from LyondellBasell, another billionaire investor was continuing to double down. In 2013 Len Blavatnik spent $575 million purchasing 8.5 million of Apollo’s LyondellBasell shares, an unparalleled bet on an investment that had already helped make him one of the richest men in the world, and one that had many scratching their heads at the time.
“It’s an easy argument against it: If Apollo is selling, why are you buying?” Blavatnik tells FORBES in a rare interview. “Before every one of my additional purchases of stock in LyondellBasell, some people around me told me it was a mistake and that I should sell instead of buying more.”
But so far Blavatnik has been right—seriously right. Shares of LyondellBasell have soared by more than 50% since he bought his last block of stock from Apollo.
In the history of Wall Street there haven’t been too many moneymaking machines quite like LyondellBasell, which has seen its shares return 500% since it emerged from bankruptcy four years ago. And that’s been especially lucrative for Blavatnik, 57, who cobbled the company together, saw it fail and plunge into bankruptcy court, and then doubled down on the same assets, personally investing another $2.37 billion in LyondellBasell the second time around.
His investment is now worth more than $10 billion, generating $8 billion in mostly unrealized personal profits. As it stands, FORBES believes it’s the biggest individual score from a single deal, ever. While Blavatnik usually makes headlines these days for his media holdings, like Warner Music or his stake in Beats Electronics, those parts of his portfolio are a sideshow compared to the LyondellBasell redemption that has pushed his net worth above $20 billion—making him the world’s 33rd-richest man.
“It is an historic transaction,” says Mark Epley, managing director in Nomura’s private equity banking unit. Says Stuart Gilson, a Harvard Business School finance professor who has studied LyondellBasell’s restructuring: “It’s outstanding given the return, but recalling what we were all feeling in 2008—it was the end of the world—makes the outcome even more remarkable given the enormous risk.”
Blavatnik, who owns 16% of LyondellBasell through his Access Industries, thinks there’s still more room to run, wagering that LyondellBasell’s stock will continue to rise. “So far I feel vindicated and proud of my investment decisions,” he says. “The question is whether the luck will continue.”
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When Len Blavatnik was first handed an investor memorandum for Dutch chemicals company Basell, it had the number 64 on the cover, prompting one of Blavatnik’s associates to caution him about jumping in. Why bid for a company that 63 other players were already considering? Blavatnik waved him off—he wanted to create a global chemicals empire, and this was his way in. A Ukrainian-born American citizen who grew up in Russia and immigrated to the U.S. in 1978 at the age of 21, he later got his M.B.A. at Harvard. Blavatnik made his first fortune with a former classmate in Russia, Viktor Vekselberg, in oil and aluminum deals during the anything-goes post-Soviet days.
Blavatnik’s biggest scores in Russia were oil company TNK-BP, a joint venture with British Petroleum that was eventually bought by Rosneft for $55 billion, and Sual, an aluminum producer that merged with the larger Rusal. Chemical companies that had nothing to do with Russia would be his next big thing. He paid full price, putting down $1.1 billion to purchase Basell in a $5 billion leveraged buyout in 2005. Then he tried, and failed, to buy other chemical companies, including Huntsman International.
In 2007 Blavatnik decided to buy Lyondell, a Houston-based company—not particularly well run—that produced commodity chemicals used in making plastics and that also had refining assets. Blavatnik had been stalking Lyondell, buying up the right to purchase 8%. When he decided in July 2007 to use Basell to buy up a controlling stake in the company at $48 a share, a 45% premium to the market price, Blavatnik’s associates got nervous. Alan Bigman, a trusted lieutenant who’d been working for Blavatnik for a decade, woke up at 4:30 one July morning, unsettled by the deal.
“I know you’ve already made up your mind,” Bigman wrote to Blavatnik, according to a court document. “But I am uncomfortable with the valuation.” Blavatnik waved him off and did the same when Philip Kassin, another colleague who also sat on Basell’s board, expressed his own worries. Ultimately, Blavatnik has told FORBES, employees can voice their opinions, but he is “risking my money, not their money.”
Basell bought Lyondell in a $20 billion leveraged buyout in December 2007 to create LyondellBasell, the world’s third-biggest independent chemicals company. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Within months the financial crisis hit and the deal looked like a debacle. Weighed down by more than $20 billion in debt, LyondellBasell hit the wall as the economy crumbled. Chemical orders stopped, a huge crane collapsed in an accident at its Houston refinery that killed four employees, and Hurricane Ike shut down its plants in Texas. Some 2,500 employees, 15% of its workforce, were laid off at the end of 2008. In early 2009 Blavatnik pushed LyondellBasell into bankruptcy. It was a humiliating moment for Blavatnik. “Filing for Chapter 11 is an experience I would never want to repeat; it was really a dark moment,” he has said of that time.
It was also his biggest-ever financial loss. How much he lost has been a subject of fierce litigation by LyondellBasell creditors, who went after Blavatnik in a lawsuit that continues to this day. At minimum, Blavatnik was out $1.2 billion. But despite the reversals, Blavatnik believed in the assets and potential earnings power of a company he felt had simply been hit by a perfect storm.
He wasn’t the only billionaire with an appetite for chemicals. Apollo had also been trolling the industry, buying and owning chemical assets like Hexion Specialty Chemicals and Momentive Performance Materials that had been similarly battered by the financial crisis, sinking Apollo’s performance. Yet, like Blavatnik, Harris, Black and Rowan knew the industry and decided to keep investing. Before LyondellBasell headed to bankruptcy court, Harris bought ­LyondellBasell term loans from a reeling Citigroup at a discount and kept buying bank debt for as low as 20 cents on the dollar, as the financial crisis raged and those loans plunged in value. Harris knew some people on Wall Street thought he had lost it, but Apollo’s analysis determined that the most secured LyondellBasell debt would perform well absent a complete global economic collapse.
“Every day we would buy Lyondell as prices fell. We had conviction, and we were buying supercheaply,” Harris tells FORBES. “We were able to pair our deep industry expertise in chemicals with a highly complex distressed process so it highlighted what we are good at in terms of distress for control.”
It was a daring $2 billion investment that gave Harris an opportunity to convert his debt into a big equity stake in LyondellBasell in bankruptcy court. That meant working with Blavatnik. Harris and Blavatnik are friends who still get together socially and whose wives know each other. Still, a minor skirmish broke out between them over who would run the “debtor-in-possession” bankruptcy financing—and in turn have more control over the company. In the end Harris won out, leading an $8 billion bankruptcy financing that included an innovative roll-up feature that allowed Apollo to move some of its debt higher in the capital structure. Harris and two other Apollo representatives jumped on LyondellBasell’s board, and they worked closely with Blavatnik and his team on the restructuring. “Overall, we had a very good working relationship with Apollo,” says Blavatnik. “Sometimes it was tense because we had somewhat different interests in the beginning.”
The bankruptcy wiped out Blavatnik’s stake in the company, but he found ways to rebuild equity in LyondellBasell, mostly through private transactions with creditors and buying stock on the Pink Sheets, where LyondellBasell’s shares traded. He also kept his new key advisor, Stephen Cooper, who guided Enron through bankruptcy as CEO, on the board. (He’s now CEO of Blavatnik’s Warner Music.)
In bankruptcy court LyondellBasell shed the weight that brought it down, including bad contracts and high-cost assets, shutting expensive plants in Texas and Germany. It reduced its debt load to $2.5 billion, slashing annual interest expenses by $1.7 billion. The company added as its CEO Jim Gallogly, who had headed Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. Gallogly got 1.8 million restricted shares and options to purchase 5.6 million shares for $17.61 apiece to run the floundering company. “It was hard to convince Jim, and it took us some time,” says Blavatnik. “We offered a very attractive package.”
In 2010 LyondellBasell emerged from bankruptcy court valued at $15 billion. That number was about to soar.
The revolution that changed everything for Blavatnik, Apollo and LyondellBasell originated in the thin fissures of shale rock filled with oil and natural gas reserves throughout the United States. Throughout the last decade drillers pioneered new techniques of exploiting rock formations with hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling to draw out the petrochemicals trapped within. As a result, the U.S. became one of the world’s largest sources of cheap natural gas almost overnight, with prices falling from highs of $13 per million British thermal units to a $3 to $4 range today. This dramatic drop in prices proved a huge boon to dozens of industries, none more so than the chemical business—and few more than LyondellBasell.
LyondellBasell is a top producer of ethylene, which it upgrades into the plastic known as polyethylene, used in everything from food packaging to trash bags and hard hats. The company operates six facilities (known as “crackers”) to produce ethylene in the U.S. and four in Europe. Profits from ethylene and its derivative chemicals and coproducts are the core of LyondellBasell’s earnings.
Ethane, refined from natural gas, and naphtha, a crude oil derivative, are the prime raw materials used to produce ethylene. Starting in 2007, U.S. drillers were finding natural gas everywhere. By 2012 the price of ethane had fallen from 90 cents per gallon to 30 cents, giving U.S. chemical producers a huge advantage over foreign competitors in Europe and Asia that are dependent on pricey oil-based naphtha as a feedstock. The gap between the two supercharged LyondellBasell’s profitability.
LyondellBasell’s decades-old crackers in Clinton, Iowa and Morris, Ill., for example, are the only ones in the Midwest—and are situated near natural gas liquid pipelines and a hub in Kansas, home of some of the cheapest ethane in America. Almost overnight they were transformed, churning out profit margins of 32 cents per pound compared to European naphtha-based ethylene, which is barely even profitable. “It’s improbable that anyone could have foreseen the full impact of the shale revolution,” says Blavatnik. “But Jim had some experience and insight through his work at ConocoPhillips that I think helped.”
Gallogly, 61, a lawyer by training who was born on Canada’s Newfoundland island, quickly cut $1 billion of annual fixed costs and guided the company to swiftly take advantage of the shale gas boom, converting the company’s U.S. processing facilities so that 90% of the time they can run on cheap natural gas-based feedstock.
Gallogly’s strategy has been straightforward. Instead of spending huge amounts of money and time building new crackers like other chemical companies, he incrementally expanded capacity at his existing U.S. plants. That shortened construction time and allowed the company to quickly benefit from the ethane advantage, adding capacity while others waited for new permits. Instead of it taking six years for new plants to come online, it has taken just two years to add capacity. “Perhaps you have heard the expression,” Gallogly likes to say, “ ‘The early bird gets the worm’?”
In all, Gallogly has spent just $3.7 billion over the last three years on capital expenditures. He spent $510 million to expand capacity of a steam cracker in La Porte, Tex., to be able to process 800 million more pounds of ethylene from ethane, a project that will finish this year. He spent another $200 million to increase the ethane-processing capability at the company’s cracker in Channelview, Tex. Those crackers in the Midwest? For just $30 million Gallogly added 100 million pounds of ethylene and polyethylene capacity, worth an estimated $30 million in operating profits to the company. LyondellBasell has gone from posting losses in 2009 to profits of $3.9 billion on revenues of $44 billion last year. (Gallogly’s shares of LyondellBasell are now worth $380 million.)
Just as importantly for Blavatnik, Apollo and other shareholders, LyondellBasell has been a cash machine. In the past three years the company returned $8.4 billion to shareholders via share repurchases and dividends. It’s “a beast,” says Deutsche Bank analyst David Begleiter. “They are the poster child for the renaissance of the U.S. chemical industry.”
Other big shots on Wall Street have taken notice. Billionaire hedge fund manager Dan Loeb used more than half of his first-quarter letter to his investors wondering why Dow ­Chemical Co.—where returns have trailed ­LyondellBasell significantly over the last three years—wasn’t more like its rival. Loeb’s Third Point hedge fund has taken a ­position in Dow, and the activist investor made it clear that he would push Dow to follow LyondellBasell’s lead. “Underearning is clear when one compares Dow to its North American petchem peer, LyondellBasell,” Loeb wrote in May.
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Not everyone has been convinced the party will last, of course, but so far Blavatnik continues to have made the best bet. The investment firms of some billionaire investors—including Antony Ressler, David Einhorn and James Dinan—held stakes in LyondellBasell after it emerged from bankruptcy and sold them in the early innings of its rally. Harris and Apollo held on much longer, selling their LyondellBasell shares at an average price of $62.65 a share. Still, in July LyondellBasell started trading above $100. The feeling at Apollo was that the investment was unlikely to continue providing the kind of high returns private equity investors expect. Apollo, mindful of the cyclical nature of the chemical industry, also simply thought it was time to monetize one of the greatest deals ever. “As an institutional fund we have to make private equity returns,” says Harris. “So in our view it was time to monetize.”
Of course, unlike Blavatnik, who invests on his own dime, Harris’ Apollo needs to return money to outside investors, preferably in the kind of large amounts that will help Apollo raise more money. In fact, as Apollo was selling its LyondellBasell stake, it was raising $18.4 billion for Apollo Fund VIII, the most ever for the firm—and the biggest new private equity fund raised by far since the financial crisis. LyondellBasell certainly helped, making up 15% of the profits of the wildly successful Apollo Fund VII.
Now Harris and Apollo are making bets that natural gas prices will increase, essentially going against Blavatnik’s take on the market. In June Apollo announced it was buying natural gas properties from Encana for $2 billion in a straight-up play on rising natural gas prices. Apollo has also been wagering on Energy Future Holdings, a leveraged buyout bankruptcy that is actually bigger than LyondellBasell, working to take control of Energy Future Holdings’ unregulated unit, which would benefit if natural gas prices rise because the company produces electricity using coal and uranium while most electricity in Texas is generated using natural gas.
Blavatnik shrugs off worries about rising gas prices and continues to believe fervently that changes to the energy and chemical markets are near permanent, and abundant low-cost ethane will continue to fuel LyondellBasell. “The shale revolution is continuing,” he says. “And we see the competitive advantage staying for some time.” On July 25 LyondellBasell reported record second-quarter earnings of $1.17 billion. The stock closed at an alltime high of $107.49.

The  Greatest  Deal  of All Time

It is better to own 10% of a billion dollars than 100% of ten dollars. Kenyan entrepreneur Ndiritu Muriithi lives by this philosophy. Twelve years ago, he saw an opportunity when he visited his childhood friend, Bernard Macharia, who was working as a rancher in Rumuruti, Laikipia County.
“It seemed odd to me that cattle destined for slaughter were being transported alive to Nairobi and other markets. I wondered why they were not being slaughtered at the source. After all, a pick-up truck can only ferry four to five live animals, but three times that number when they are slaughtered,” says Muriithi.
A year later, Muriithi and Macharia started Ngare Narok Meat Industries. With $34,775 as seed capital, they set up a modest abattoir that served livestock traders in the region.
“We saw a big opportunity. Every Thursday, we have a market day in Rumuruti and livestock from Samburu, Baringo and Isiolo are sold,” says Muriithi.
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According to statistics from the Laikipia sub-county veterinary office, around $347,000 is exchanged at the Rumuruti livestock auction every week. The market is the second largest in Kenya after the one in Garissa in northern Kenya that is valued at more than $695,000.
Laikipia County is the Kenyan capital of ranching and the ideal place for Ngare Narok. The region has 43 registered ranches sitting on between 10,000 to 110,000 acres of land. The ranches occupy more than 50% of the total land area. The county had 189,685 heads of cattle and 623,648 sheep and goats, according to the Kenya Population and Housing Census. Macharia estimates the entire Kenyan livestock business to be valued at $23 million.
Of the 43 ranches in Laikipia, 30 are privately owned. Laikipia is home to Ol Pejeta Conservancy, East Africa’s largest black rhino sanctuary. Private ranches are used for wildlife conservancy as well as cattle rearing.
“Most ranches are owned by white Kenyans and they account for 15 to 20 percent of the cattle in Laikipia,” says Macharia.
Livestock infrastructure is supported by 50 holding grounds, stock routes and outspans, two public and three private abattoirs, five auction yards and 33 slaughter slabs.
When FORBES AFRICA visits Ngare Narok, the staff is preparing to slaughter a group of animals. The plant has a daily capacity of 50 cows and 100 smaller animals.
“When the animals are brought to us from the auction market, we have to give them about five hours to graze and rest. This allows them to relax, otherwise the meat will be hard because of their tension,” says Rajab Hassan, the General Manager of Production at Ngare Narok.
The company has also broadened its services. Instead of only being an abattoir, Ngare Narok now collects hides and skins, and produces prime beef products, organic compound fertilizer, and organically tanned leather and leather products. Initially, the business didn’t make much money but its fortunes have since improved. By 2007, it was making $31,000 and by the end of last year it had revenue of $1.8 million. Projections for the end of this year are $11.5 million.
“Essentially, we were a toll slaughter house. You brought your animals and we slaughtered for a fee. This led to a trade in hides and skins, as some butchers and meat mongers would pay for the slaughter service using the resultant hide or skin. Ninety percent of the revenue is from hides and skin,” says Muriithi.
Abattoir operations generate large amounts of offal waste. Ngare Narok had to innovate or continue spending money on its disposal. The solution was to produce organic compound fertilizer. They also started experimenting with naturally occurring herbs to tan hides and skins.
“In this business, you make money by adding value to everything. You have to utilize all the by-products to make a good return,” says Macharia.
Muriithi and Macharia were fortunate enough to have friends that believed in their business. One of them was the resident judge of the High Court of Kenya, Justice Isaac Lenaola.
“Lenaola invited his friend in 2005. In the same year, my colleague at the International Finance Corporation, Mary-Jean Ndlovu, intrigued by the story, visited the abattoir. Shortly after, she invested,” says Muriithi.
In 2009, two other potential investors showed an interest in the business. They, however, were not impressed. Their recommendation was drastic: overhaul the top management. The board and management were not taking the business seriously enough. Whereas Ngare Narok had a professional looking business plan, it lacked execution.
Muriithi decided to heed this advice.
“In mid-2011, I had a conversation with my business partner Ken Mbwaya. We were looking at how we could transform our small businesses we had invested in. These SMEs were draining our income instead of growing it.”
Mbwaya, a former HP regional boss, decided to take charge of Ngare Narok in August, 2012, and things started changing.
The renewed shareholder enthusiasm led to two successful issues of rights. They have since welcomed four new shareholders.
“In total, we raised [$460,000] in equity in 2013, most of it from YCEO Holdings Ltd, a young venture capital firm,” says Muriithi.
This year, Fanisi Capital, a private equity fund invested $2.5 million for a 40% shareholding.
Although Muriithi had the option of getting money from a bank, he says private equity offers much more.
“It comes with professional investment and expertise which allows an entrepreneur to get additional ideas that will take the business further than what a sole entrepreneur could have done.”
The downside of private equity is that investors expect high return is short spaces of time. This doesn’t worry Muriithi.
“All aspects of life involve an element of risk. The only question is how well we manage that risk.”
His vision is to make Ngare Narok a multi-billion-dollar establishment. All he wants, is to own just 10% of it.

Beefing Up

Stars are still out as Dirk Schlebusch starts work at 4AM. It is the busiest time of day for him as truckloads of potatoes arrive at the Joburg Market. In the next few hours, they will be traded as commodities worth millions.
The market’s 10 halls, that span 64 hectares, are piled high with pallets of every kind of fruit and vegetable. This is the primary fresh produce exchange of South Africa as well as destinations across Africa. It is also the largest of its kind in the world.
Before noon, the dynamics of supply and demand, of middlemen’s mark-up and the whims of what nature offers up on the day, merge to determine the first price tag on fresh produce as it exits the market. Food price inflation and food security issues are becoming more and more important as population numbers explode and demand soars. It puts the links in the chain, like the passage of food through the market, under increasing scrutiny.
Schlebusch is a buyer with Wenpro, one of the most established agents at the market. They serve as middlemen between producers and buyers. He specializes in potatoes, like his father has done for 40 years.
Potatoes and onions are big sellers at the Joburg Market and together fill out their own hall. An average day sees around 1.4 million kilograms of potatoes traded.
Schlebusch has standard daily orders from big retail chains, wholesalers and the companies that process vegetables for frozen food products. He also sells to restaurants, hawkers and walk-in buyers.
“We have potatoes for everything and potatoes with every kind of price tag to suit whatever buyers are looking for.”
When determining a daily price, Schlebusch checks the quality of physical stock that arrived on the day, examining stats from previous days and pulling up stock sheets that detail the availability of potatoes throughout the market.
With fresh produce you don’t have the luxury of stockpiling for extended periods to influence the market in the hope of fetching a higher price. It’s too much of a gamble &#8211; fresh food perishes or loses quality and there’s no saying what hand nature will play.
Schlebusch says it’s ultimately down to supply and demand, the best produce still fetches the best prices and the highest bidder still wins. It’s how the market has functioned for 120 years, from the days of its origins in Newtown. The market is just a few years younger than when the city of Johannesburg itself was founded.
Schlebusch’s ear is glued to a phone, communicating with buyers and farmers throughout the day.
“It is about relationships. If you don’t give your farmers the service they expect they’ll go to another agent and if your buyers don’t get the produce at the prices they want they will also go somewhere else,” he says.
As he chats, a call comes through from an anxious farmer. A lorry has been delayed; it never made it to market on time to join the sample displays. It means an instant drop in price for the farmer as his potatoes become day-old stock.
It’s the middle of July, and at the market the bulk purchase price of Grade 1 bananas is worked out at around R4.45 a kilogram (R1=$0.10). They will end up in the mid-range supermarket upwards of R8.99 a kilo. The top-grade potatoes are selling at R46 for 10 kilograms. The price almost doubles at retailers.
The price gap from market to retail comes with everyone along the value chain taking their cut. Tracy Davids, an analyst at the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy (BFAP), says day to day market prices are more volatile than what end consumers see at retail level. The price hikes come from transport and labor costs, repackaging, labeling and operational and distribution overheads that retailers incur. Added to this is the rising fuel and electricity costs in South Africa.
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Davids says managing food inflation ultimately comes down to having a more robust economy.
“Food security will always be a critical issue and at the end of the day it’s the consumer who pays more and more as costs in the value chain increase, which is why we need effective value chains,” she says.
Piet van Zyl, who runs Wenpro’s fruit section, outlines some of the unique challenges of handling fresh produce. Although the value chain comes with mark-ups, disruptions can cause even more hikes. Wenpro has seven cold rooms, each runs at around $470 to $560 a month. It makes load shedding and power cuts his biggest nightmares. Agents are responsible for the upkeep of their own pallets and fleets of forklift trucks that criss-cross the halls in urgent beeps. Agents are also responsible for the health, safety and general cleanliness of their halls. It adds up to operating costs that run into the millions.
“Agents must perform and grow or the market will start taking away your floor space,” he says, waving his gloved hand, protected against the early morning chill, across the expanse of the hall that is Wenpro’s terrain.
Agents must be able to offload produce fast enough, retain the integrity of the product on the warehouse floor and sell as quickly as possible at the best price possible.
“Sometimes the agent’s buyers resort to salvage sale, it means they will make up the loss from their profits to make sure that the farmer still gets his base asking price. It keeps the farmer loyal to the agent and opens up floor space. Good buyers know where they can afford to take a loss and where they can make a profit,” says Van Zyl.
Agents take up to 7% on any deal, 4% goes directly to the agent’s buyers. The market takes a 5% cut.
It’s something that’s top of mind for Gugu Hadebe. She is the director of Egoly, the newest of the market’s three Black Economic Empowerment agents.
Hadebe says breaking into the market as a black woman was not easy. Her advantage is that she was previously employed by the Joburg Market. She understands the role of agents as well as the cultural, political and historical nuances attached to farming in South Africa. Another significant insight she had was to team up with old hands in the business, which plainly put, meant white males.
“I knew I had to have the right partners, people who have been in the game longer than I have been, people who have built relationships with farmers and buyers,” she says.
Egoly currently has eight sales staff. They concentrate on selling to hawkers rather than competing at this stage, with the likes of Wenpro, with its 350 staffers, who target bigger fish like retail giants.
“There is a big hawkers market out there that’s still growing in South Africa. People still buy from the [old lady] on the street where they pay less, where they may know the seller and they pick and choose as they like,” says Hadebe.
Each of the market’s 14 agents has to find its niche to deliver a value-add. Some do specialty items like sourcing exotic dragon fruit from South East Asia, or making sure there’s enough ginger for the explosion of sushi bars across the country. Others offer pre-packaged produce or some, like Egoly, target specific sectors within the pool of buyers.
“We don’t sell anything as a market. It is a free market system, we are just a platform where anyone can come here to sell through an agent or to buy from whomever they choose,” says Simangele Sekgobela, CEO of the Joburg Market.
Sekgobela adds that the market has had to respond to changing demands, like the key issues of traceability of produce and minimizing human handling of food.
“We’ve also had to adapt to meet international standards, which includes things like maintaining an unbroken cold chain and following standards for pesticide limits,” she says.
The adapt or die principle applies to the market, like it does to almost everything else.
“We have seen a decline in the stock that comes through the market in the past few years. Retailers are doing more direct sales from farmers and developing their own storage facilities. In the future, there will also be more virtual sales that will mean produce will not physically come through the market. It’s the reality of a free market, but you’ll never replace the market completely. You will still need the market for its facilities, its quality control and convenience of having everything under one roof,” says Sekgobela.

Why We Pay Through The Nose For Food

“Roho Mzungu,” shrieks a group of barefoot children in prayer caps as they run past a mildewed wanted poster, crudely plastered onto an ancient narrow lane on Mombasa Island. Translated from Swahili, the youngsters’ cries simply mean: White Ghost. It has become the latest moniker for perhaps the most unlikely international terrorist of our generation.
I am back in Mombasa after an absence of two years and there is still only one name on the lips of local people. Today, in the schools and playgrounds of coastal Kenya, a region that once welcomed a million tourists every year, a flame-haired British housewife plagues the nightmares of local children. To the local media she is also known as the White Widow and her name is whispered in fear in churches and teeming coastal markets.
<div id="attachment_3029" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3029" class="size-medium wp-image-3029" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/NM_00001208-1-300x201.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="201" />NAIROBI, KENYA &#8211; SEPTEMBER 23: Heavy smoke is seen from the site of the terrorist attack, Westgate Mall, on September 23, 2013 in Nairobi, Kenya. The attack occurred on Saturday, 10-15 gunmen from the extremist group Al-Shabab entered the mall and opened fire at random on shoppers; 68 deaths have been confirmed. (Photo by Gallo Images / Nation Media / Salaton Njau)</div>
Thirty-one-year-old Samantha Lewthwaite, a white Muslim convert and the fanatical widow of Jermaine Lindsay, the 7/7 bomber who killed 26 people when he blew up a Piccadilly Line Tube train near London’s King’s Cross in 2005, remains at large in East Africa today, known to be in possession of significant quantities of explosives, cash, ammunition and a zeal so deeply entrenched her name is whispered in Al-Shabaab training camps with some reverence.
Kenya has been a primary target for Al-Shabab fighters ever since Nairobi sent thousands of troops to fight in Somalia. The Africa Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) has used troops from various African countries to fight the militants since 2007, but Kenya’s ramped-up involvement since October 2011, has been instrumental in pushing Al-Shabaab out of its most important strongholds, including Mogadishu and the port town of Kismayo.
The enduring role of a British housewife at the core of East Africa’s terror shows how complex the task of combatting the growth of attacks is. As we approach the anniversary of the Westgate Mall attack, global terrorist related deaths have leaped by almost one third as the world enters a deadly new phase in the cycle of violence.
Data compiled by Maplecroft, a British risk consultancy, found that over the last 12 months, global deaths have risen 30% compared to the previous five-year average. Africa, as a continent, has been among the hardest hit. With terrorism incidents in Libya doubling in the last year, violence is having a toxic impact on its economy, especially its oil sector, while attacks in Egypt have hit its tourism industry and of course Kenya, which has been hit by increasing attacks.
For Kenya in particular, there is arguably more to lose from adverse publicity. According to Maplecroft, June represented Kenya’s bloodiest month since the Westgate shopping mall attack, with 69 deaths and at least seven wounded, with a single Al-Shabaab attack on a Mpeketoni village in Lamu County responsible for 48 of the deaths.
In Mombasa, the impact of terrorism on the local economy was stark. Occupancy in most of the major resorts strung out along the coast was as low as 10%. Kenya’s tourism, which has provided 15% of GDP in recent years, is in tatters. Warnings last month by the British and other foreign governments prompted flustered tour companies to evacuate clients from Kenya’s coastal tourist hub, Mombasa. Today, the luxurious resorts on Lamu Island stand empty. Operators admit it could take years to restore confidence.
The reason? Mombasa is a fertile recruiting ground for Al-Shabaab, working through radical mosques and clerics. These leaders portray the conflict across the border as jihad, which has an energizing appeal to many youth. The myth of Lewthwaite has curiously become part of that dynamic.
Lewthwaite’s list of alleged cohorts is as deadly as it is long. United States (US) intelligence sources believe that networks linked to Dawood Ibrahim, one of the world’s most wanted men, are bankrolling the deadly Al Qaeda cell Lewthwaite is part of. Dawood, the head of Indian crime network D-Company, is currently the most wanted man in Asia and the ruthless driving force of 5,000 foot soldiers involved in everything from drugs trafficking to contract killing. Currently on the Interpol wanted list, his association with Al Qaeda in Africa has dramatically grown in the last two years.
What is undeniable is Lewthwaite has funding from somewhere and she is backing it up with action. Lewthwaite was recently identified as the brains behind a bold operation to free her terrorist lover, Jermaine Grant, who was arrested in Mombasa in December 2011 in a raid. Kenyan police believe the audacious attempt to rescue Grant, as he was taken from prison to a Mombasa court to face trial, was coordinated by Lewthwaite after two suspected terrorists were stopped crossing into Kenya from Tanzania with bullet-proof vests and face masks. Both men claimed they were acting under the direction of Lewthwaite.
A source from the Kenyan Anti-Terrorism Police Unit told me that she could still be in Mombasa.
“We believe that for some time she was in fact hiding in plain sight here in Mombasa, working her identities between a now blonde western tourist and burka-clad Muslim. Mombasa is Kenya’s second largest city and she knows the city well. The problem for us is, although not quite a master of disguise, she is afforded the right to wear a hijab or a burka and this simplest of methods allows her to travel. To catch her we must lift the veils of 100,000 women and she knows this is her biggest weapon.”
Lewthwaite’s incredible life on the run is a remarkable twist to an enduring story that is made for Hollywood. Over three years ago, Lewthwaite was forced to flee a terrorist safe-house in Mombasa after Kenyan Police received a tip-off that an Al Qaeda-linked terror cell she was part of was planning to blow up hotels and shopping centers in the city over Christmas.
Instead of the suspects they expected, the police discovered an empty shell. A hastily abandoned bomb-making factory containing batteries, hydrogen peroxide and wires. Crucially they also found a false passport left behind in panic by one of the alleged terrorists, a white woman, later identified as Lewthwaite.
Since then, it has been shadow chasing for the authorities. Relentlessly hunted by the Kenyan Anti-Terrorism Police Unit, and partially supported towards the end of last year by Scotland Yard’s elite SO15 anti-terror squad, the White Widow has remarkably eluded capture.
Frustrated at Lewthwaite’s sophisticated field skills, Kenyan investigators increasingly believe that the Aylesbury mother of three might have played a small, but influential, part in the 2005 London bombings and is now so mired in jihad she has abandoned her three young children to enable her to stay on the run.
The information surrounding Lewthwaite’s current whereabouts is believed to have been sourced under interrogation from known associates of the Briton, including Marianna Issa Mohammed, a female terrorist who was arrested in Kisamayo, Somalia.
Claims that she had boasted of prior knowledge of the London bombings within the terrorist community are particularly remarkable considering that in the wake of the tragedy, Lewthwaite went public on her horror at her dead husband’s act of terror and she was even placed into protective custody by Scotland Yard.
Suspiciously, it wasn’t until a week after the 2005 bombing, that Lewthwaite contacted her local police to register her husband missing. At the time, she claimed they were having relationship troubles. Lewthwaite then later refused to accept Scotland Yard’s insistence that her husband had been the bomber, until investigators produced evidence and she was apparently dragged screaming from her home claiming her husband’s mind was poisoned by radicals.
The White Widow’s journey from suburban Britain to Somalia is all the more astonishing because her father was in fact a British soldier who served in Northern Ireland. Her parents separated when she was 11, which friends claim badly affected her, leading to her being comforted by Muslim neighbors in the town.
After starting A-levels in religious studies, the teenage Samantha decided to convert to Islam, aged 15 and began wearing a hijab and swapped her jeans and T-shirt for a salwar kameez, a traditional Asian tunic and trousers. At 17, she went one step further, changing her name to Asmantara.
As her radicalization continued, Lewthwaite, described by her teachers as precocious and intelligent, enrolled for a degree in religion and politics at the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Around this time, she met Jamaican-born Islamic convert Jermaine Lindsay on an internet chatroom for Muslims and they later met face to face at an anti-war rally in London. The couple married in an Islamic ceremony in the front room of a terraced house in Aylesbury in October 2002 before just four witnesses. None of Lewthwaite’s family attended.
“My father Andy didn’t approve and stayed away and my mum just couldn’t make it. I was his youngest daughter. He found it hard enough when I converted to Islam, without marrying a Muslim I had hardly met,” she later recalled.
In 2004, the couple’s first son was born, which is when Lewthwaite claims her husband started to spend time at radical mosques. She has said he was a peaceful man before these visits. Lewthwaite was seven months pregnant with their second child when Lindsay launched his 7/7 attacks. Police believed that she was also a victim of the terrible events and placed her in protective custody after her house was torched in an arson attack.
But her precise movements since the bombings are harder to follow. Within two years of the London attacks, the widow met a new lover, identified by her family only as a Moroccan Muslim from Birmingham, and she later gave birth to her third child in August 2009. It was shortly after this point that Lewthwaite went off the grid.
In late 2010, Lewthwaite is believed to have traveled to South Africa on her own passport but later left with a new identity: that of Natalie Faye Webb, a 26-year-old South African-born nurse based in Essex, England, who was later confirmed as a victim of identity theft. At this point, it is believed Lewthwaite spent time at a training camp in Somalia.
By August 25, 2011, the Briton entered Kenya from Tanzania with her three children, also on false passports, where she is believed to have met with her current lover, Habib Saleh Gani, an Al-Shabaab sleeper, in Mombasa. Lewthwaite is also thought to have made contact with a third British terrorist, Jermaine Grant, 29, from Newham, East London.
By linking herself to Al-Shabaab, Lewthwaite had chosen one of the most ruthless terrorist organizations on the planet. The group, which has imposed a strict version of Sharia law in areas under its control, including the stoning to death of women accused of adultery and amputating the hands of thieves, was responsible for a double suicide bombing in Kampala, which killed 76 people watching the 2010 World Cup final at a local rugby club.
Chillingly, a cache of intelligence, found on the body of Al Qaeda’s African leader and inside the bullet-ridden truck he tried to ram through a Somali government checkpoint, provides a chilling look at the global aspirations of Al-Shabaab. The meticulously prepared documents that detail plots for a kidnapping and attacks on London’s prestigious Eton College, Jewish neighborhoods and the posh Ritz and Dorchester hotels, were uncovered last year when senior Al Qaeda leader Fazul Abdullah Mohammed was shot dead by Somali forces.
According to anti-terrorist police, Lewthwaite seemed the perfect operative. Able to seamlessly mix with tourists on surveillance trips but also able to revert back into strict Muslim society in a burka, her logistical skills proved to be invaluable.
On arrival, it seems Lewthwaite blended quickly into the tourist capital of Mombasa where she operated three safe houses in high-end estates in the north of the city. In the Kisauni area, she lived in a house belonging to a wife of Musa Hussein Abdi, a British-born terrorist who lived in Africa for a long time and who was killed in Somalia last year alongside Fazul Mohammed. The latter was the mastermind of the bombings on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
Lewthwaite then moved to Shanzu, a magnet for British tourists, where she lived in a five-bedroom villa paying four month’s rent upfront. She used her western appearance to mingle with holidaymakers and carry out reconnaissance on security in major hotels. But on December 19, 2011, anti-terrorism police raided the house. How Lewthwaite escaped before the raid is a mystery.
Police recovered 60 bullets, two magazines for AK-47 rifles and bomb-making material including acetone, hydrogen peroxide, ammonium nitrate, sulphur, lead nitrate chemicals, AA-sized batteries, an electric switch and a piece of conductive wire.
Ahmed Hassan, a resident of the Kisauni apartment block, says Lewthwaite would leave the house in both western clothes and in her burka.
“Wearing a burka will not get you into an international hotel but wearing a bikini will and a sarong will. It is obvious now that she was the terrorist’s main spy,” he says.
Following the raid, Lewthwaite fled with a laptop, cash and bomb-making material to another safe house barely 20 kilometers away from where anti-terrorism officers believe she dished out equipment and money to field terrorists under the noses of unsuspecting neighbors and police.
But as the net tightened Lewthwaite’s London associate, Jermaine Grant, was arrested in central Mombasa. Grant’s arrest is significant. Within days the White Widow’s latest hideout was exposed again. But, when officers led a raid on the property in January, Lewthwaite had somehow left shortly before and was last seen driving towards the Tanzanian border crossing, Lunga Lunga.
Lewthwaite didn’t raise her head in Mombasa again until June 24 last year when witnesses claim they saw a white woman throw grenades into a crowded bar, killing three people, including a nine-year-old boy, and horrifically injuring 30. Since that last incident, she has been true to her nickname. A ghostly presence linked to sporadic attacks across Kenya including the Westgate Mall.
In Mombasa, Lewthwaite’s case file remains open at the regional Law Courts, where she has been charged in absentia. Court documents indicate that Lewthwaite and her lover Gani are charged with being in possession of explosive materials and conspiracy to commit a felony. The files also allege that Lewthwaite is bankrolling a Mombasa terror cell whose members include Grant.
Jacob Ondari of Kenya’s directorate of public prosecutions believes Lewthwaite is highly dangerous.
“She is not just a small cog in this terrorist machine; she has links to the top. I will be calling for the death penalty when she is finally caught. That would be our prayer,” he says.
In recent months, The Muslim Youth Centre, a radical Kenyan organization believed to have terrorist links, has used the myth of Lewthwaite as a recruitment tool, boasting of her escape from the world’s most sophisticated intelligence agencies. The group has also posted a recent video of a hooded British Al-Shabaab operative calling for holy war in Somalia in a bid to further boast their international credentials.
Perhaps most tellingly, using Lewthwaite’s image on its website and Twitter feed, the group recently referenced the Hollywood blockbuster, The Thomas Crown Affair, in which Pierce Brosnan plays an art thief who carries off a heist by dressing dozens of accomplices in identical clothing as him, allowing him to escape right under the noses of the police.
According to Phyllis Muema, director of the Kenya Community Support Center, a not-for-profit group in Mombasa that works on rehabilitating Somali fighters, Lewthwaite is a powerful recruitment tool.
“To have a white western woman on their side provides Al-Shabaab with a major weapon. For illiterate and impoverished young Muslim men it is easy to be radicalized, but to follow a white woman with access to money from abroad and with her education and intelligence is a significant allure,” she says.
For Lewthwaite’s family, the uncertainty of her children’s fate remains the hardest pill to swallow. Her grandmother in Northern Ireland, Elizabeth Allen, wears a panic alarm and has been told to contact police immediately if Lewthwaite arrives at her home in Banbridge, where she spent part of her youth. Her mother, Christine Allen, claims she hasn’t heard from her daughter in years.
My source within the Kenyan Anti-Terrorism Police Unit reveals that they have believed for several months that although Lewthwaite is still with her lover, Gani, she is no longer on the run with her children.
“We believe that she is separated from her children at the moment to enable her to remain at large. Even under a burka her footprint is compromised by the children. We have artists’ impressions of them and Lewthwaite knows they are her biggest weakness. She cannot hide them under burkas. We believe they have been smuggled over the Somali border and are being cared for in a training camp.”
The claims are backed up by postings on the widow’s closed down blog which stated: “I advise you to raise your children in the cult of jihad and martyrdom and to instil in them a love for religion and death.”
The source added: “The truth is there was no mention of children from eye witnesses in the final property she was linked to and interrogations since have identified her as operating with Habib only. It wouldn’t be the first time a jihadist has made such a sacrifice. They sacrifice everything they have for this life.”

On The Trail Of The White Widow

Four days after the horrors of the Westgate siege, the mall’s business owners shuffled back to what was left of their businesses. Among them was Joyce Gikunda of Lintons Beauty World, a Nairobi spa and beauty chain. Her Westgate store was the oldest and most profitable of her three branches.
<div id="attachment_3025" style="width: 209px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3025" class="size-medium wp-image-3025" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Dr.-Joyce-Gikunda-new-199x300.jpg" alt="" width="199" height="300" />Dr. Joyce Gikunda</div>
“I never recovered anything as mould had set in due to flooded water and our insurance cover didn’t include terrorism,” she says.
Scores of business owners in Westgate rued their insurance. Up to then, terrorism came under political risk and many didn’t know about it and therefore didn’t sign up.
This is changing. The head of the Association of Kenya Insurers, Tom Gichuhi, told London-based ‘Africa Insurance Review’ a few weeks after the attack that business owners had been given a wake-up call.
“Especially for firms with no terrorism cover, and those who have terrorism cover, to evaluate their current contract to make sure they are properly covered,” he says.
The concern is the cost. Earlier this year, Kenyan reinsurers pushed up terrorism premiums by 40%. Set against an environment of increasing attacks since Westgate, from Nairobi to the coastal cities, these rates may continue to climb.
“Risk perception is rather high,” says Kenyan analyst Aly-Khan Satchu. He estimates the cost of terrorism cover for businesses to stand at 1% to 3% of annual revenue.
That may be too high for some. Gikunda recently opened a new Lintons outlet at another shopping mall, the Village Market, just a 15-minute drive from Westgate. She is considering terrorism cover options. But, after losing close to KES20 million ($230,000) after the mall attack and being forced to open a new store, Gikunda is not sure whether she can afford it.
“It’s quite expensive insurance,” she says.
Despite grim tidings for small business owners, it seems that the economy, as a whole, is pulling through. While concerns rest on the worsening security crisis, which has already hit shopping and tourism, foreign investment from the North American and European markets is still flowing into Kenya. More investment is also coming in from fellow African countries.
“It’s the resilience of the market,” says Satchu.
Gikunda mixes resilience with a generous dash of hope. She admits fear from Westgate is still hurting her business in other Nairobi malls, but presses on.
“I am still opening new stores because this is my country and we must invest and live in it successfully as citizens,” Gikunda says.
Luckily for Kenya, many other business owners feel the same way.

In The Cold Shadow of Westgate

West African cuisine has gained increasing popularity worldwide as more indigenes at home and in the diaspora continuously share the influences that inspire their palates and dinner tables.
Minjiba Cookey is one such. She is a well-traveled Nigerian foodie, but her kitchen at home is where her heart is, and where all her culinary adventures finally lead her to.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-29524 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5119-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5119-300x199.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5119-600x398.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5119-768x509.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5119-1024x678.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5119.jpg 1023w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
She documents her passion for culinary delights and her adventures with taste, texture and color on her blog, On Nom Lagos. The idea of fusion and creating exciting food experiences is a thrill her blog intends to ignite in a diverse readership.
The blog, which draws influences from various countries, regularly shares updated recipes and images of different dishes and dessert offerings.
“I was inspired to start the blog when I moved back to Lagos a couple of years ago. I hadn’t lived in Nigeria for a very long time. I love food and use it as a tool to explore my life experiences. I thought it would be great to share my adventures with food, all the flavors I came across and the inspiration and influences they draw from. This blog really represents my love affair with food,” says Cookey.
She initially ran a small bakery out of her home kitchen in Nigeria. Cookey now intends to create and share African lifestyle convenience products that have aided her in the kitchen. She also wants to play an advisory role to restaurants.
“African cuisine is highly versatile and is enjoying a worldwide wave of popularity. West African cuisine for instance, shares a few common ideologies, yet, there are so many variations to its translation in individual countries. Africa is a rich source of inspiration for food and there is so much to explore still,” says Cookey.
Cookey’s blog currently enjoys over 14,000 hits with 406 visitors per week. She also recently teamed up with an online lifestyle publication for her column ‘Om Nom Lagos Eats’. She is also in the process of working on a television cookery show, the content being fusion food with an African twist.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-29526 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5475-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5475-300x199.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5475-600x398.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5475-768x509.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5475-1024x678.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5475.jpg 1023w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-29525 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5127-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5127-300x199.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5127-600x398.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5127-768x509.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5127-1024x678.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DSC_5127.jpg 1023w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
“The aim is to produce a show that is of world-class quality, which sits comfortably alongside cookery shows from around the world that I enjoy watching myself. I have always known that food was my natural home so I am enjoying this journey, learning and growing as each day unfolds,” says Cookey.

DSC_5536

West Africa On A Plate

Italian fashion designer and Lagos-resident
Caterina Bortolussi can be mistaken for a home-grown Nigerian. She fits in seamlessly with Lagos’ thriving social circuit and is always on the VIP list at sought-after city events.
She is the founder of the ethical African fashion label Kinabuti, dedicated to sustainable development in the Niger Delta, and popular among fashionistas, Afropolitans and Nigeria’s entertainment elite.
<div id="attachment_29490" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-29490" class="size-medium wp-image-29490" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Aug-Sep-074-075-Kinabuti-003-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Aug-Sep-074-075-Kinabuti-003-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Aug-Sep-074-075-Kinabuti-003-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Aug-Sep-074-075-Kinabuti-003-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Aug-Sep-074-075-Kinabuti-003-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Aug-Sep-074-075-Kinabuti-003.jpg 1023w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Lagos (Nigeria) Kinabuti Collection 2012</div>
“I believe it was God who guided me towards this idea; I just had a dream of designing clothes. I never thought I was going to live in Africa or Nigeria. I didn’t have formal education in fashion and didn’t even know how to sketch but I have been lucky to come across so many amazing personalities that inspired me with their vision and drive,” says Bortolussi.
She had been working in the strife-torn Niger Delta since 2007, when a state of emergency was proclaimed, and there were ensuing kidnappings, curfews and police blocks. She compiled a paper called Peace and Art and saw in art a vehicle to spread peace and inspire the youth.
“This propelled me to start the Kinabuti fashion label in 2010 with the focus of using it to go into areas described as highly unsafe and populated by militants, to provide training [for women and youth] in modeling, silk-screening, cutting and pattern drafting.”
And what does Kinabuti mean?
“It is my nickname. As a little girl, I found it hard trying to pronounce my lengthy name. I used to call it Kina [short for Caterina], and Buti [short for Bortolussi], so when people asked my name, I told them I was Kinabuti.”
Before landing in Lagos eight years ago, Bortolussi was with an investment bank in London. After that, she moved to shipping, but she was on the look-out for something more exciting and creative.
“I have made several career moves, from selling advertising to setting up my own communications agency. But the direction was clear: to set up my own fashion label,” she says.
Bortolussi says settling in Nigeria has not been easy. A lot of capital is necessary to invest in Nigeria due to high costs of starting a business, limited access to credit, lack of power, and market insecurity.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-29489 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Aug-Sep-074-075-Kinabuti-002-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Aug-Sep-074-075-Kinabuti-002-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Aug-Sep-074-075-Kinabuti-002-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Aug-Sep-074-075-Kinabuti-002-600x901.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Aug-Sep-074-075-Kinabuti-002.jpg 682w" sizes="(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" />
“There was a time when I lost all my money and was threatened to leave the country but I never lost faith. Nigeria is not an easy place, but teaches you to endure, to be fearless and most of all to have self-belief. Nigeria has plenty of opportunities, in eight of my years here, I have felt its transformation and development and consider myself lucky. Nigeria is a place where dreams can become a reality.”
Through Kinabuti, Bortolussi is also passionate about training young entrepreneurs. She has taken her drive to the ghettoes of Port Harcourt in the south of Nigeria.
South African apartheid activist Nelson Mandela is an inspiration, as she quotes him: “A winner is a dreamer who never gives up.”

Lagos (Nigeria)Kinabuti Collection 2012

Ghetto Glamor

The first thing you notice about a FOMI Collection handbag is the unmistakeable African pattern that adorns it. Next is the intricate stitching that binds it, followed by the refined leather finish.
And then you know the origin of this luxury product – Ethiopia.
The handbags and accessories are the creation of Afomia Tesfaye, the Ethiopian-born founder of the FOMI Collection that’s now sold in the airy, arty boutiques of Los Angeles (LA).
Although Ethiopian, Tesfaye has not lived in her home country since the age of three. That’s when her family moved to England, leaving thereafter to Washington DC in the United States (US), where her father served as the Ethiopian Ambassador to the US, before relocating yet again to San Diego, California.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-29463 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Original-20-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Original-20-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Original-20-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Original-20-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Original-20-683x1024.jpg 683w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Original-20.jpg 682w" sizes="(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" />
Tesfaye went to the University of California in LA, and visited Ethiopia in 2010. That’s when she was struck with the idea of starting her own business in her home country.
“My professional goal was to someday develop a design company, and on a visit to Ethiopia, I began playing with the idea of starting a business. At the time, I really had no idea what I wanted to do,” says Tesfaye.
But she was determined to pursue her dream, even giving up her public relations job for it.
“I began by visiting tanneries and was so impressed with the quality of the leather. That sparked the idea to work with leather in some way and handbags felt like a natural way to begin,” she says.
The following year, she designed a small collection of handbags and wallets she took back to America and sold to small boutiques in LA. As fine wine would be received, so were her products, and they were soon sold out.
Her next big break was receiving an order from Anthropologie, the famous American women’s clothing retailer with over 175 stores globally. There were however snags to Tesfaye’s start, as with every new business.
“The first couple of seasons, I dealt with so many issues: discolored leather and suede, lack of available zippers and accessories within the country, shipping merchandise that arrived late to retailers [and so on],” she says.
But she admits that just as she was developing as a designer, Ethiopia’s manufacturing capabilities also strengthened and “the mistakes have lessened”.
Today, Ethiopia is considered an emerging textile hub, and international retail brands such as H&amp;M and Primark are looking to set up shop in the East African country as its textile industry’s production grows more globally competitive. UK supermarket chain Tesco also plans to expand its sourcing operations to Ethiopia.
It is however easy to overlook that Ethiopia, like many other African countries, has a wide gap between rich and poor, and an even smaller demand for luxury goods than its major African counterparts.
Nevertheless, Ethiopia’s GDP in 2013 was larger than its East African neighbors. According to the World Bank, Ethiopia’s GDP in 2013 was recorded at $46.8 billion, followed by Kenya at $44.1 billion and Tanzania at $33.2 billion.
FOMI Collection’s luxurious tassels will therefore sooner or later find a stronger demand from the same expanse that provides it with material and labor.
All the leather Tesfaye sources for her products are Ethiopian indigenous materials, a variation of highland sheepskin, goatskin and cowhide. Highland sheepskin in particular is considered to be among some of the most refined leather.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-29464 alignright" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Original-35-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Original-35-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Original-35-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Original-35-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Original-35-683x1024.jpg 683w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Original-35.jpg 682w" sizes="(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" />
“I want FOMI Collection to be appreciated for its quality and aesthetical value, not for people to buy it because they pity Ethiopia. I use a small workshop in Addis Ababa and work with several skilled men and women who are paid well above the standard salary. The more successful I become, the more people I am able to employ, which is the value that I bring to the country,” she says.
Her work between her birthplace and LA also means her collection gets the best of both worlds in terms of design and creativity.
“In Ethiopia, I often drive outside the capital city for work, in chaotic traffic passing goats and donkeys on the side of the road. LA is the polar opposite, it is the mecca of entertainment, fashion and art which is stimulating in so many other ways. I am creatively and culturally inspired in both cities and feel lucky to be able to experience life in such different environments.”

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Buy For Quality, Not For Pity

It was like re-living a moment in South African history, going back 58 years with Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, to the place where it all began.
We are outside the Union Buildings in the South African capital Pretoria, and De Bruyn is wearing a dark coat and shades on a cold winter morning.
She was hardly 18 when as one of four women leaders, she marched 20,000 other women to the Union Buildings on August 9, 1956.
Today, she is an elegant, demure grandmother, and the last living member of the famous four who led the protest, the others being Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph and Rahima Moosa.
It has not been an easy journey, and this particular moment stokes many memories of that historic day.
“I had no fear,” she said, as we made our way to Pretoria.
The women had decided that they did not need, or want, passbooks (special identification booklets that limited their freedom of movement) as black or colored women. And as she delivered their angst in a letter to the Prime Minister JG Strijdom, a major supporter of the apartheid government, on that chilly August day, De Bruyn and her comrades set the precedent for Women’s Day in South Africa.
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<div id="attachment_6391" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6391" class="size-medium wp-image-6391" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Sophia-de-Bruyn_Womans-March-300x217.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="217" />The 50th anniversary of the march in 2006.</div>
The 1950s were a tumultuous time in South Africa. Mass meetings were often met with violence by authorities. And political organizations, designed to fight the system, were separated by race. The rule of law, which accorded non-white South Africans the status of second class citizens in their own country, was at its worst.
This was why the Women’s March was the ultimate act of defiance.
It was unheard of in those days for any woman, let alone colored women, to stroll around the Union Buildings, the seat of South African government. For De Bruyn, the buildings housed more than the men responsible for deciding their fate. To her, they were the “Holy Grail”.
And after surviving the travails of getting the women to Pretoria, she was unafraid of any consequences.
The women had journeyed far and raised a fortune to make the march. De Bruyn’s group arrived from the Eastern Cape in two coaches. They sold tea and scones at political meetings for a profit of three pence, and a shilling was earned from serving chicken stew and rice. These little enterprises raised enough to make the long trip north.
Originally, the women had intended to camp outside the Union Buildings for an entire week. But the logistics of that plan were too difficult to follow through. Instead, they organized within their splinter groups and made their way, separately, towards Pretoria. When she saw the women that day, De Bruyn says she was gratified.
“The glory of how they looked, and their dignity and grace, and that determination in lifting their feet in a place where no other African person had done before,” she says.
The women came in droves and that surprised De Bruyn. There were women of every race at the march and she remembers the splendor of that scene.
“It was a splendid day, [there were] women in all sorts of dress – Indian women wore saris, the African National Congress [ANC] women in their green, black and gold and others in their everyday wear.”
She didn’t realize how many they were until she “sat and looked back at them, in their thousands”.
After the march, De Bruyn committed herself further to the freedom struggle. As the 1960s ended, she joined her late husband, Henry De Bruyn, who was exiled in Zambia. While in Lusaka, she took evening classes and studied for her O level certificate exams. Three years later, she moved to Nairobi and earned a diploma in education. The De Bruyns did not return to South Africa until the early 1990s to a short-lived return. Soon after the ANC came to power in 1994, she moved with her husband to Jordan as the first South African diplomats there.
Even when in exile, De Bruyn concerned herself with the freedom of the South African women she left behind. She spearheaded the ANC’s Women’s League in Lusaka and, with the help of then ANC president, O.R. Tambo, forged a place for women in the party. But her concerns have shifted, over the years, to the freedom of younger African women.
“I think our young women have got it in them. Today, the things that are there for them weren’t there for us. What gives me a sense of gratitude is to see our young women and what they can do.”
When speaking about the 1956 march, De Bruyn is humble about her role in the protest. She insists that it was an “event of women” in South Africa’s history and not her own. Yet the memory and the triumph of that August day still drive her.
“It lives on in my psyche,” she says, taking a long, hard look at the Union Buildings.

LOOKING BACK At A Landmark Day

It’s a scenic two-hour drive from Kigali to the rural landscape of Kinazi in Rwanda’s southern province. Being the only journalist in this field mission led by the energetic and dynamic Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women, has its advantages.
Firstly, there’s a grand welcome awaiting us at the other end.
Barefoot children and grateful women greet the convoy, erupting in song and dance in pink, yellow and blue costumes that put the beautiful hillsides to shame. The men and infants are huddled under umbrellas in the warm sun, and the women give the occasion “so much zest”, as Mlambo-Ngcuka later says.
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In Kinazi, UN Women partners with Terimbere Mutegarugori, a cooperative bringing together 93 women from various backgrounds to enable them to financially support themselves and their families through agricultural initiatives.
This group is one of 11 cooperatives supported through the Imali Project, meaning ‘wealth’. Currently, they are being given seed money, modern greenhouses and training to increase tomato and mushroom production. This project is financed through core funding to UN Women, from the Government of Korea and in partnership with the Imbuto Foundation, headed by Rwanda’s First Lady Jeannette Kagame.
That the Rwandan government is committed to gender promotion is evident even in this tiny village.
Women are an unprecedented 63.8% of Rwanda’s parliament. Yet, there is need to ensure they are given skills to generate daily income, develop a savings mindset, upgrade their skills and sustain their communities.
As Mlambo-Ngcuka tours the greenhouse inspecting rows and rows of red, juicy tomatoes, soon to be sold to the market, the farmers around her swell with pride. This project has changed their lives.
In just two years of operation, the results are there to see. Members are using the money to pay the children’s school fees, and have also opened savings accounts to transition to the next level of empowerment.
“Food is a woman’s issue. It’s your responsibility to make sure the nation is well-fed, to make sure that out of the good land, you also have opportunities. You feed your children and yourself and you also come here to generate the surplus to sell, and [you get] income. You have done well,” said Mlambo-Ngcuka in her address to them.
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“We should also remember the other cooperatives and the 11 greenhouses spread throughout Rwanda. Together you can create a critical mass and take charge of the market. Sitting in New York, I should be able to eat a tomato from Imali. I want to be in South Africa, and eat a tomato from Imali,” she said.
Truly, you help a woman, you help the world.

Tomatoes From  Kinazi To New York

The shocking abduction, and no return, of the 300 Nigerian schoolgirls has entered its fourth month. Fears for the fate of the girls have been escalating since they were the stars of a viral video released by their captors, the extremist group Boko Haram, just a few weeks after they were taken. The minute-long clip panned in, then out, of a dry field in an undisclosed location. The girls sat fearfully, huddled together in long grey burkas which covered their hair, but not their faces. It remains the only proof the girls may still be alive.
Thus began the social media-driven ‘#BringBackOurGirls’ campaign. Despite its many controversies and false starts, it offered some international solidarity for not just the girls taken from Chibok but for other trafficked women around world. The global outrage highlighted the urgent need to fight for the rights of countless women lured from their homes, hideously exploited – and never returned.
Worries have begun to mount, especially after Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau’s admission that he was going to sell his female captives, that the girls may have been separated, pooled into smaller groups, then trafficked as sex slaves to Europe, Asia or other African destinations. This, of course, is one of the many working theories on what might have happened to the girls. Nothing is confirmed.
Several weeks ago, unconfirmed reports from Associated Press flooded international news cycles claiming Boko Haram had struck once more. Allegedly the group kidnapped another 60 girls from villages close to Chibok along with a host of young boys.
All these incidents have turned the global attention to human trafficking – a multi-billion dollar international industry which operates in a hidden network of alleys and dimly-lit apartments, where women’s lives are traded alongside money, illegal drugs and weapons.
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Going Undercover To Report
Tobore Ovuorie, an investigative journalist with Nigeria’s Premium Times, says six out of 10 people trafficked to the West are Nigerian. She has spent the bulk of her career studying the human trafficking trade and even lost a friend because of the industry. Last year, with support from an Amsterdam newspaper, Ovuorie went undercover for seven months to find out how the African trafficking syndicates worked.
Posing as a sex worker, Ovuorie saw, first hand, the terrible realities of the trafficking world. There were the orgies, a seemingly endless supply of controlled drugs and bags full of hard currency. First Ovuorie was taken to a ‘boot camp’, which all the girls had to endure before being moved to Italy. It was there that she saw an even darker side of the business. Two of the women she was with were beheaded in front her. Ovuorie claims that the group that owned them also sold human organs on the black market.
“It was the worst moment of my investigation,” she says.
Eventually, Ovuorie escaped the syndicate at the Nigeria-Benin border. She says that she walked away from the experience, “bruised and beaten, but still alive”. She has since written about her time with the traffickers although some passionate skeptics have questioned the credibility of her account.
But that was the least of her worries.
“When I returned to write the story, I feared reprisal from the syndicates and I fear I will have to watch my back for the rest of my life. Forgive and forget isn’t written in the dictionaries of these monsters,” she wrote in an email.
Despite the controversy around it, Ovuorie says she does not regret telling her story.
“It was worth it. Human trafficking is increasing in Nigeria.”
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Lured For Work, Food, Even Love
A majority of human trafficking activity is far more insidious and calculated than the tactics of Boko Haram. In South Africa, the Durban-based anti-trafficking group, Umgeni Community Empowerment Centre (UCEC), understands this well. Their counselors have rescued scores of underaged girls soliciting on city streets especially within the local red light strip, Mahatma Gandhi Street. The girls come from a mix of backgrounds, some born in Durban while some were brought in from cities further afield like Harare, Dar es Salaam and Maputo.
It may be a different context from northern Nigeria but the impact is just as devastating. Far removed from the higher echelons of piling statistical reports and complicated legislation, counselors, like the ones at UCEC, deal with the gritty, often terrifying realities of the trafficking netherworld. The women they help are mostly drug addicts and emotionally-scarred. Trust is a rare commodity amongst these women and going home, full of shame, is never an option.
Joy Conradie, a UCEC counsellor, says these women are unwittingly drawn into the trafficking world by promises of work, money, food, clothing and, in some cases, love.
“The targeted victim is spotted, be it in a club or simply getting onto a taxi,” she says, “the traffickers will make contact and they are very charming and highly manipulative.”
Conradie says the women are usually force-fed drugs and once they become addicts, the “free party ends and the nightmare begins”. The traffickers then demand payment for the drugs. The trafficked women, now addicts and destitute, are trapped by the debt. Left with little choice, they are forced into prostitution to pay their dues. Often, refusing to sell their bodies leads to them being “beaten, raped, threatened and isolated until she gives in”. This, unfortunately, is only a single scenario. Trafficked women across the world face a diversity of abuses.
“The girls are often moved from city to city and even across borders,” Conradie claims, adding the youngest victim they have helped was just 12 years old. The irony of this kind of sexual slavery is that it is largely driven by a desperation to escape poverty which traffickers exploit with offers of jobs that don’t exist.
Conradie says it is not just poverty that allows trafficking syndicates to flourish. A lack of education and awareness within the communities where victims are sourced also contributes to the trafficking cycle. But the lack of economic options also exacerbates the situation.
“We also come across sheer desperation in child-headed households, where an older teenage girl will prostitute herself in order to feed her younger siblings,” says Conradie.
To combat human trafficking, she says, more safe houses need to be provided for victims, as well as far stricter border controls, skilled rapid response teams to investigate human trafficking cases, and comprehensive intelligence gathering to understand where and how trafficking outfits operate.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) said in May that forced labor in the private economy draws in around $150 billion in illegal profits each year. Two thirds of this figure comes directly from the sex trade.
The organization’s Director-General, Guy Ryder, said that this added “a new urgency [for] efforts to eradicate [this] fundamentally evil, but hugely profitable practice, as soon as possible”. The report also claimed that there are approximately 21 million people bound by forced labor and trafficking around the world.
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Legislation to fight trafficking syndicates has been, slowly but surely, implemented across Africa and the world. In South Africa, every province has an assigned Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force. However, their power is limited. The global nature of human trafficking implies not a local, but international solution.

She’s Not For Sale

It seems like only yesterday when Zimbabwe had the best roads in Africa and was hailed as its breadbasket. Daydreaming of yesteryear, I travel back in time to when things changed for me – 1999. Prior to then, as a military intelligence officer in the Zimbabwe Defence Forces I held my head high, proud to be the eyes and ears of my country.
On the economic front, 1999 soared to 48% but we managed. I say ‘we’ meaning the privileged members of the security forces, whose livelihoods were heavily subsidised by the government. In addition, we occasionally got money from stints in the Congo where we supported Laurent Kabila in his bid to rid his country of rebels supported by Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. Just imagine being at war but operating from Mobutu Sese Seko’s palace which had been handed to us as a gesture of gratitude. It had all mod cons: swimming pools; air conditioning and polished floors. This war was profitable even for the frontline soldier. The palms of the generals were greased with hand-outs from the Kabila government and the business opportunities that came with them.
High inflation meant food shortages back home in Zimbabwe. From time to time, the streets of Harare filled with protestors. Unions and opposition parties waged their placard-carrying war with the government in a style that would have seen the resignation of a president in a normal democracy. But in Zimbabwe, things do not work that way.
In Zimbabwe, dissent was, and still is, met with brute force. The police force, with batons and rubber bullets were sent onto the streets in full riot gear. They arrested hundreds of protestors but couldn’t quell them. The numbers on the streets grew and grew, until the police could no longer contain the protests. That was when the authorities brought the army in.
Helicopters flew over Harare firing tear gas at demonstrators. Soldiers with live ammunition roamed the streets. Fear and intimidation became the order of the day. I remember boarding an armed helicopter at an air base on its way to quash the dissent in town. This was the Alouette 111; a helicopter whose firepower strikes fear into the hearts of the most hardened fighters.
While hovering 50 meters above the city center, I saw something that would stick in my mind for a very long time. I remember watching events unfold on Samora Machel Avenue, one of the widest main streets through the city center. The looting was immense. Mobs were breaking into high street shops. A man was on the run, the soldiers not far behind him. On his shoulder, he carried a cow’s hind leg from the butcher’s shop. He ran, without dropping this carcass, despite rubber bullets hitting him on the backside. The man only came to a halt when he tripped up.
Police caught up with him and he was frog-marched to a nearby police van, still carrying his loot that was to be used as evidence. Whenever I think about motivation today the image of that man flashes into my mind. To what lengths should a man go? Here was a man ducking bullets just to have a decent meal with his family.
When I got home, tired and frustrated, I sat down and turned on the news. The then 75-year-old President Robert Mugabe stood on the podium. He raised his clenched fist and castigated the unions, the opposition party and all those involved in the strikes. He called them disloyal. He didn’t stop there; he labeled them agents of imperialists. Mugabe, of course, did not leave out the usual rant about how the West brought all this to his Zimbabwe.
It was in 1999 I felt the little voice of reason coming to sit next to me. My heart knew where it stood. It was time to raise my hands in surrender. I knew then, that Zimbabwe would never be the same.
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Magama is a former Zimbabwean intelligence officer who now lives in Britain.

Through Mayhem And Tear Gas  Came A Cow’s Hind Leg

Every designer has a list of celebrities they’re dying to dress. The star-studded names on Tanzanian fashion designer Mustafa Hassanali’s list included: Princess Diana, Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, Oprah Winfrey and Naomi Campbell, who he worked with in 2009 for her Fashion for Relief campaign.
Working with Campbell was one of the highlights of Hassanali’s career, one that began more than 15 years ago.
“She’s awesome; she has the most amazing skin. When you do fittings, you normally leave it to your staff, but for that one I had to be there.”
Campbell is infamous for her tantrums, punching cameras, hitting housekeepers and throwing cellphones at her assistants. So, before she arrived, Hassanali made sure he was prepared.
“I was planning how I was going to catch the phone if she threw it at me. I decided that, if she did, I was going to keep it and I wouldn’t sue her,” he says.
Luckily the British supermodel was on her best behavior.
As a young boy, Hassanali would rather stay indoors and make clothes for his paper dolls than play outside in the mud with the other children. As he got older, his skills with the needle and thread improved and he began making prayer mats with matching handbags for his family.
Hassanali was the only boy in a conservative Indian household. Although he had a great passion for fashion and design, society did not perceive it as a proper career. He was expected to become a doctor, get married and carry on the Indian family traditions.
Everything seemed to be going according to plan. Hassanali was studying medicine at the University of Dar es Salaam and to make extra money he made clothes for his peers.
His breakthrough came in 1999 when the 19-year-old made a dress for Hoyce Temu, one of the finalists for the Miss Tanzania pageant. Temu was crowned in Hassanali’s design and suddenly everyone wanted to work with him.
Then tragedy struck.
“My parents died, one after the other,” he says.
Hassanali began designing more frequently and used the money to continue his medical studies. At the end of his studies, he chose fashion over medicine.
In 2002, he had the chance to show his work at Kenya Fashion Week. But his lack of formal training in fashion made him feel like a fish out of water.
“It was like taking a person from a village and placing them in the middle of New York’s Times Square. They’re from a village with no cars, no light, no electricity, no running water and they go crazy.”
Since then, Hassanali pledged to learn everything he could about the industry, from telling a story with his designs to constructing his own stages. Over the years, he has worked hard to keep the essence of his designs the same. He works with a lot of traditional Tanzanian fabrics with kitenge colors.
“I do a lot of structure, silhouette gowns and a lot of flowy gowns. There has to be bling and most of my gowns have trains,” he says.
In 2007, Hassanali created Swahili Fashion Week as a platform for younger designers from Swahili-speaking countries to launch their careers. He wanted to give them opportunities he never had.
“It took me so long to build the brand. No money, no resources, nobody to guide me. So you basically fight your own battles. Your family does not support you and the people in the community do not support you. You could say my marriage broke because of it,” says Hassanali.
In his entire career, he has never won a single award and often finds it hard to see how quickly the young designers receive so much recognition and praise these days.
“[For the younger designers] if you can put your resources together, showcase a collection and if you’re good, then suddenly everyone will start noticing you. But the older designers really struggled… They might be big names today but the journey took so long.”
During difficult times, Hassanali stays grounded in his seven life philosophies: passion, patience, persistence, productivity, professionalism, principles and prayer.
Being a well-known African designer who has showcased in 27 cities and 18 countries, he still feels he has much to learn. One of his biggest dreams is to work with internationally renowned designer, Elie Saab.
“I wish I could have him dress me, that would be a dream come true. I hope I will have the chance to just work with him or even sweep floors for him for a month or two, just to know what’s happening and how they work in the global world.”
Before he expands into the global market, he wants to make sure he has fully catered to the Tanzanian market.
“East Africa has about 150 million people. If you get 0.001 percent of it in East Africa you still have 15,000 clientele. Their needs have not been satisfied. The thought of going outside the country doesn’t make sense, first you have to satisfy the needs of the country.”
In the next few years, Hassanali hopes to open a few stores and launch a shoe collection.
“Nothing less than six inches,” he says.
Having spent six years at medical school to receive a degree he never used, Hassanali’s advice to the youth is simple: Find what you love to do, make a career out of it and the money will follow.

The Designer Who  Dreams of Sweeping Floors

Gatuso the rat looks hungry and he has a job to do; it’s 6AM and he’s been up all night as nocturnal rats do – now he’s ready for a hard day’s work in the field. He looks harmless as his whiskers twitch in the light of dawn. Most people fear to tread where he works.
Clearing landmines is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Gatuso takes it on with a sniff. The rodent has a natural advantage; he weighs less than 1.5 kilograms, too light to trigger a mine. There are 10 rats like him in Camatenda, clearing minefields so people can till the earth once again.
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It takes nine months and more than $8,000 to train a rat to find a landmine. In the field, they are harnessed to a pole, like a dog on a leash, to keep them in their lanes. What Gatuso and his fellow rats do is sniff out the gunpowder beneath. The moment the rat scratches at the landmine, the engineer squeezes a clicker. When the rat smells the gunpowder and hears the click it knows it will get food.
The idea occurred in an unlikely mind in a pub in Scotland. Bart Weetjens, a former product designer from Belgium and a Zen Buddhist monk, heard about the ability of the gerbil to sniff out explosives while at a conference on technology development sensors. Weetjens had bred pet rodents as a child.
Weetjens is no stranger to Africa. As a student, he spent three months in the Congo building a soy bean mill for rural farmers. He knew Africa needed to get rid of its deadly landmines and he wanted it to be cheaper and more efficient.
“Rodents are of course everywhere. In a moment I saw [landmine clearing rats] happening.  However, between the first pitch and the first grant was two and a half years,” says Weetjens.
With a million Belgian francs ($33,700), Weetjens set out to find the perfect rat for the job. The Cricetomys gambianus, the African giant pouched rat, met the standard.
“At that time, there were so many scientific questions that had to be asked first… I knew I wanted to use rats. But the rodent is the most diversified species in all the mammals so I went to a specialist, Professor Ron Verhagen, who worked in Africa for a long time studying all kinds of rodents. He saw a villager with a giant African pouched rat on a leash. So we said, at the very least, it must be possible to domesticate this species.”
In 2000, after three years of work, Weetjens trained his first rats in Morogoro, Tanzania, through his company APOPO. Since then, landmine clearing rats have unearthed at least 3,212 mines, 1,077 UXOs (discarded bombs and grenades) and 26,934 small arms and ammunitions. They’ve worked in two of the world’s most landmine infested countries: Mozambique and Angola. Eighteen more rats will soon be working in Cambodia. One rat can clear up to 400 square meters a day. An engineer, with a metal detector, can only do 25 to 50 square meters.
APOPO’s contribution to the landmine clearing business is relatively small, says Weetjens. The company has an income of around $9.1 million; Angola receives $659,264 of this. According to Weetjens it’s a small part of the $800-950 million business that is made of mostly NGOs.
“The majority of our expenses are in Mozambique [$5.3 million]. Because of the scale of our operation; in Mozambique there is a fully integrated approach with manual clearance, mine detection rats and vehicles. In Angola we only have our essential rat services,” he says.
In Africa, Angola is the ultimate test for the rats. The country endured a brutal civil war for nearly 30 years, until 2002 and has millions of mines to prove it. No one really knows how many mines are in Angola, not even the experts, because soldiers scattered them across the country like seeds. It is estimated there are 10 to 20 million. It’s the third-most landmine laden country in the world, according to Landmine Monitor.
In 1997, Landmine Monitor estimated 110 million active mines were scattered in 68 countries. An equal number of landmines are thought to be stockpiled by governments. In 15 years, engineers have destroyed 47 million, but millions more lurk in countries like Iran and Afghanistan.
For the people of Camatenda, 400 kilometers east of Luanda, the landmine is a neighbor. Gatuso works in a 194,000 square meter field covered with three-meter-high grass and the odd cassava crop. The farming area, which grows food for 34 families, is now slowly being cleared and will one day produce more. A wooden stake tipped with red paint marks the ground that has been cleared. APOPO works with the Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA), deactivating mines in this region since 1994. The rats have amazed Austragildo Freitas, APOPO Field Operations Manager, who fought in Angola’s civil war and has cleared mines for his country for 19 years.
“The rat detects only the scent of explosives and not any other objects, while in comparison with metal detectors that can pick up anything with metal in the field. If you use one car to transport three dogs you can use the same car to transport 15 rats. The food for dogs is very expensive and must be imported while the rats can use local food,” says Freitas.
The rats of Camatenda have different personalities, says Alfredo Adamo, Operations and Training Field Supervisor at APOPO. In the world of landmines and rats, Gatuso is seen as the Lionel Messi in Angola. He’s certainly found more mines than the Argentinean has scored goals. Adamo’s star rat is able to pinpoint mines within centimeters. Others can only manage an accuracy of 30 to 40 centimeters. They also lack Gatuso’s flair.
“He’s our best pole rat. I like the way it walks in the field. He’s always active and never misses. Some of the others dawdle, but not Gatuso,” says Adamo.
The rats work best at dawn. When the temperature hits 32 degrees Celsius it’s too hot for them. At the other end of the pole, it’s too dangerous for engineers to work at night. The rats are wide awake then but you can’t see what they are doing.
The rats can also be fussy.
“Some go for bananas, others like peanuts or apples. It’s why trainers started carrying different types of food for each rat,” says Adamo.
Rewarding rats can be a problem. Engineers must be able to give food when a landmine is found. A false reward could also knock the rat’s sense of smell off.
Rats are not the only animals that have proven themselves in the minefields, says Hannes Slabbert, Canine Business Manager at MECHEM in South Africa.
“A rat is able to detect any target odor for which it is trained, maybe just as well as a dog. But so can elephants, pigs and honey bees,” says Slabbert.
MECHEM have been training dogs to sniff out explosives and drugs in airports since the 1960s. They have also been used to hunt rhino poachers in South Africa’s Kruger National Park and cleared mines in countries like South Sudan, Angola and Mozambique.
It costs Slabbert $12,600 to keep a mine detection dog in action for six years. This includes their food and the vet. He has seen dogs clear 2,500 square meters a day and as much as 4,000 square meters on a good day. Dogs can sniff out landmines in the extreme heat of deserts for up to six hours at a time.
“Dogs work to please the handler and receive a ball reward, now and again. Rats work for food… I am of the opinion that there is a place for rats, but I do not see them replacing dogs,” says Slabbert.
The path of rats in Angola is far from smooth, says Francisco Gregorio, APOPO’s  Program Manager in Angola.
“Rats are a unique thing in Angola. We have not experienced rats before and this is the first time we are experiencing anything like its kind. But the process went on in a satisfactory way. We were to start operations in January, but we did not receive the letter of approval from national authorities. We just got it at the end of February and consequently deployed the rats in the field,” says Gregorio.
Rats can also be discriminated against. In parts of Tanzania, the African giant pouched rat is endangered species, it’s considered to be a local delicacy. Weetjens also says that many think that APOPO are a pest extermination company.
It’s not always a hard day’s dig for the rodents. On Fridays, the rats party after work, like everyone else. They are rewarded a large meal over weekends.
On this day, Gatuso has to be patient, its 30 degrees Celsius already, the sunlight is blinding and its only Tuesday. There is plenty of work ahead before a brief respite under the cool shade of an umbrella.
An engineer straps on his harness. Gatuso runs up and down the field and digs furiously when he catches the whiff of gunpowder. The rat may not eat many bananas today, but he will on another day. Not a bad bargain for clearing fields and saving lives; especially for the people living in the ever safer village of Camatenda, who may soon be able to once again till their grandfathers’ fields.

A Rat Race Against Death

Delville Wood has become synonymous for South African courage in the First World War and has been described by soldier and military historian, Basil Liddell-Hart, as the bloodiest battle hell of 1916.
It was part of the Somme offensive and South Africa’s first major engagement on the Western Front. Soldiers from four battalions suffered casualties of catastrophic proportions.
They’d been ordered to hold Bois d’Elville, which lay to the north-east of the town of Longueval, because the Allies needed it to gain a tactical advantage over the Germans.
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For five days from July 14, 1916, 3,153 soldiers and officers attached to the First South African Infantry Brigade entered Delville Wood.
Showing incredible grit and determination they held on, as ordered, despite being assaulted on all sides by three crack German divisions.
The exact casualty figure is uncertain because soldiers were constantly being replenished, but by the time the South Africans were relieved on July 19, only 142 souls emerged from Delville Wood. It’s estimated that 457 men were killed in action, 120 died of their wounds and 186 were listed as missing, presumed dead.
Nancy Aucock’s father, Charles Sephton, was part of the Transvaal Scottish Regiment, and many of its men fought at Delville Wood.
A 70-something resident of the KwaZulu Natal Midlands, Nancy is fascinated by the history of the battle, perhaps because her father spoke so little about it.
“He would tell a few light-hearted stories, but that was it.”
One of the stories Charles would tell was the origin of his daughter’s name.
Nancy was the Transvaal Scottish’s mascot, a real live Springbok that accompanied troops to Europe, sometimes dressed in a tartan coat. She belonged to a Free State farmer who had volunteered her for war service.
Nancy was taught to respond to regimental calls and proudly led battalions on parade. She was the darling of the troops and after her death from pneumonia in Belgium, in 1918, Nancy was accorded full funeral honors and buried in an Allied war cemetery.
Her skin and head were preserved and after the war she was stuffed and mounted. Today, Nancy is on display at the Military Museum in Johannesburg.
Sephton didn’t keep a diary himself, but his best friend and fellow soldier Tom Leppan did. It was published in the ‘Barkly East Reporter’ in 1977 and gives some indication of the stark reality of Delville Wood.
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“Terrible shelling all day. Helped the stretcher-bearers all day. Awful work carrying through this wood… dead and wounded everywhere. This wood is an abattoir and the Longueval village too. Our men beat off several German attacks during the day and one in the night. Les Webster killed by a shell while asleep… killed outright. The very best of men, quiet and plucky… Sephton and self twice half covered by earth thrown up by shells… this has been the most awful day of my life,” reads an entry on July 16.
“Rain all night, no sleep. Helped carry Teddy Smith, then collapsed from fatigue, nervous breakdown. Dudley Pringle sent away with shellshock yesterday, a total wreck… All the South African regiments losing terribly today… Praying for relieving regiments… Solly Barker wounded through the hand and sent to the rear,” Leppan wrote the next day.
The horror continued on July 18.
“The most violent bombardments with whizz bang all day and four hours with heavy guns. Our trench blown to blazes… Tilby killed in my dugout. I was twice hit by shell pieces… only bruised. We were completely surrounded by night and got into trench with 3rd Regiment to help defend frontline. Beat off attack.”
Sephton and Leppan were captured the following day.
“Surrendered at daylight. Managed to carry all our wounded along with us. All wounded left at German dressing station to be attended to&#8230; we are being decently treated. All our possessions taken away… about 230 South Africans… 45 South African Scots. About 500 prisoners here all told.”
They spent the remainder of the war interned in a German prison camp.
“Left for Germany in trucks with seats… crossed the Rhine and saw many burned villages in Belgium.”
In November, 1918, Sephton and Leppan returned to England and got the last troop ship to Cape Town. After being demobilized, Charles caught a train home to Barkly East, in the north-eastern Cape, where his parents farmed.
After several days, his journey ended at a remote railway siding called New England Station, where he borrowed a horse and rode home. He’d been gone five years and witnessed unspeakable horrors.
In his farming notes from that day, his father, Alfred, had jotted down details of his livestock and noted the weather. And then, almost as an afterthought: “Charles returned home from Europe today”.
In 2016, Aucock, her sisters, her children and grandchildren plan to visit Deville Wood on what will be the centenary of this epic battle. Today, it is a burial site and the eternal resting place for the more than 5,000 men killed there, two thirds of them unknown.
Once a thick tangle of oak and birch trees; Delville Wood was a desolate wasteland after the battle. Shells had slammed into trees at a rate of 400 per minute, reducing them to shredded stumps. Mud and rainwater covered the bodies of South African and German forces alike.
Delville Wood was bought by the South African Government in 1920, at the instigation of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, pioneer, politician and author of Jock of the Bushveld. Percy’s other noteworthy suggestion was the minute’s silence that is still commemorated on November 11 each year.
Acorns were germinated on a farm in Franschhoek, around 75 kilometers from Cape Town, and sent to France to replant Delville Wood. Ninety odd years on, two double rows of mature oaks lead solemnly to the Herbert Baker Memorial Arch, which carries the inscription: “Their ideal is our legacy; their sacrifice our inspiration”.
It’s a small corner of France that is forever South Africa.

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