DJ Kumbula is a brisk, no-nonsense entrepreneur. If you look closely, beyond the sharp suit and sculpted face, you can see traces of tough times that steeled him for risk.
The journey began in the dusty road of Chipinge, a tea planting town near the border with Mozambique, in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands. Here he woke before the cock crowed and worked barefoot in the market.
“We woke up very early, scrubbed the floors and made breakfast before going to school. My mother wasn’t very educated so she started knitting jerseys and my siblings and I were the sales people. She also had a big garden and we grew vegetables on it after school and sold them when ready,” says Kumbula.
At high school, Kumbula graduated from market to salesman.
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“My parents invested the hard earned cash into a grinding mill and small shops and by the time I finished high school I was in a private school funded by my parents. My parents inspired my dreams to have my own business. They had nothing but I saw them work hard to change their lives,” he says.
Kumbula moved to Johannesburg where he met fellow chartered accountant, Zakhe Khuzwayo, while working at Rentworks, an independent rental and asset management company. While there, they saw the demand for equipment thrown away by most companies in the industry.
The pair teamed up to open InnoVent, a rental and asset management company with a twist, in 2003. They squeeze every dollar out of a laptop by renting it over and over before selling it.
“InnoVent rents out equipment to clients, for example, to corporate clients for three years. When those computers are obsolete and can’t be used by those clients who need fast speedy technology, they bring them to us and our other business, Qrent, refurbishes the equipment and re-rent it into a second market to someone who doesn’t need high powered equipment,” says Kumbula.
Then there is a third phase.
“We put in, for example, 40 computers in a lab for a dollar per child per month and it means each child has access to a computer and the computer is maintained for three years. We also offer these computers to teachers and deduct monthly payments for 12 months from their salaries.”
When they opted to start the business, Khuzwayo had just qualified as a chartered accountant.
“When DJ came to me and told me about building a company like this, I jumped at the opportunity. I had no children or any responsibilities. Not once did we ever doubt that this was going to work,” says Khuzwayo.
They swapped their well-paid jobs for the uncertain world of entrepreneurship.
“We felt that there was a gap. We had seen some good and bad things in the company and we decided to build a better model, take what we had learned and add a number of things to create a better model we believed would work better for the clients we targeted,” says Kumbula.
It was easier said than done. For seven months, the pair worked day and night with zero clients on board.
“One of the companies that funded us gave us a desk, two chairs and a phone in a tiny room as our first office. We were convinced the business would work… We knew it was just a matter of time. We had structured our financing to allow us to survive for 12 months without any income and we did,” says Khuzwayo.
Nearly 13 years later, they have swapped the small office for a whole building in Africa’s richest square mile, Sandton in Johannesburg.
Where there is a laptop, there is a hidden dollar.

How To Squeeze A Laptop Dry

Imagine strapping on a headset and being able to ‘test drive’ a car you wish to purchase; or getting a 360-degree tour of potential holiday destinations; how about a quick look inside an apartment you want to book for a trip? Virtual Reality (VR) has made all these scenarios possible, radically changing the way we interact with the world.
VR gained a lot of attention when Facebook took a gamble and purchased a startup called Oculus VR back in 2014 for a cool $2 billion. Fast forward to 2016 and the company has two products ready for the public; the pricey Oculus Rift at $600, and the Samsung Gear VR, offered free with all pre-orders and purchases of the new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge handsets globally until March 20 this year.
And consumers can’t wait. Simon de la Rouviere, a 26-year-old based in Cape Town who owns a Gear VR headset, says he’s mostly a fan of VR content that pushes the boundaries of what we aren’t able to experience in real life.
“Games like Land’s End, where you guide blocks in an alternate meditative space, was grand. I really enjoyed I Am You, a short film where one assumes the mind of another person. I’m looking forward to some great productivity apps though. I think there is an untapped market currently for it, rather than entertainment.”
Meanwhile, Naeema Surtee, a 40-year-old mother of four says the Gear VR is entertaining for both kids and adults alike.
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“When the headset is strapped on, you lose complete sense of reality; it is extremely life-like and feels like you’ve stepped into another country when using the virtual cities app.” You can stand in the center of a busy street in a major city, turn a full 360-degrees and view everything around you, she says. “My kids really enjoyed this.”
Arthur Goldstuck, founder and analyst at World Wide Worx in South Africa, says there are quite a few manufacturers moving in the right direction with VR headsets, such as Gear VR with its Oculus integration, but it’s difficult to say if any particular brand has gotten it “right” thus far.
Goldstuck notes LG has taken an interesting approach in terms of comfort, with its LG 360 VR headset, unveiled in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress in February. The headset does not require a smartphone to be slotted into it like like Gear VR and other headsets, but instead, allows the user to run a cable to the accompanying smartphone.
“Virtual reality is going to become a part of a mix of the entertainment world, and the real power of VR is that it creates immersion in entertainment,” says Goldstuck.
“Traditionally, when watching Cirque du Soleil, spectators are outside the action and view it from the perspective of the cameras present. But the moment you are inside the action, it becomes immersive, with the dancing and acrobatics taking place around you, rather than in front of you.”
Goldstuck adds: “VR is not only coming at you, but you can come at it as well. You can explore at your leisure, in a way you want to view it and in terms of what you want to focus on, with a complete 360-degree view allowing you to look around you.”
South African consumers can pick up various VR headsets, one being the entry-level Android and iOS compatible Google Cardboard for about R120 ($7) at iToys.co.za; the mid-range Homido (iPhone and Android) VR headset for under R1,300 ($84) at the local Orange Store online; or get the more expensive Gear VR and LG 360 VR from various retailers across the country.
One particular device, the HTC Vive, aimed at the gaming community, sold out within 10 minutes when it opened for pre-orders in February. The headset combines both realities by letting you receive and respond to incoming calls and texts directly, is bundled with two wireless controllers with haptic feedback, and has a front-facing camera, which allows the blending of physical elements into a virtual world. The HTC Vive is regarded as having the best VR experience you can currently get, but there’s no confirmation when it will come to the African market.
Deep VR, a South African company specializing in creating VR content for brands since early 2015, thinks VR video is going to become a mainstream form of content, but at the same time says VR headsets won’t become a household device anytime soon, even though they’d love for that to happen.
Ulrico Grech-Cumbo, CEO at Deep VR, says they specialize in cinematic virtual reality experiences but not gaming.
“We’ve done content for GoPro, a variety of different footage from nature to music; for Standard Bank we did a live jazz club experience; and for African Leadership University, it was a ‘week in the life of a student’ at their Mauritius campus, a tool being used to recruit future enrolments.”
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But before you go out and purchase a VR headset, Goldstuck emphasizes you need to try it before you buy it, and not just for a minute, as users should be aware of potential issues.
“You need to immerse yourself for a while to make sure you can cope with VR as there are cases of people who suffer from vertigo, dizziness and motion sickness when making use of it.”
Should you go out and purchase a VR headset this year? “If budget is an issue, then wait at least a year to see what emerges over the coming months, not just in terms of the hardware itself but also the content available for it.
“There are categories of people for whom it would make sense right now, for example if you are an enthusiast. Specific cases will guide people to adopt it sooner rather than later. For the rest, unless you have money to burn, hold off on any purchasing decision,” concludes Goldstuck.

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The  Gadgets That Will Change Your World

A few months ago, I suddenly found myself dropping to the ground and crouching in long grass with bullets whirring overhead. Minutes earlier, I’d been following a group of pro-Russian fighters conducting a sweep of an area in eastern Ukraine to make sure it was ‘clean’ of the Ukrainian military. For a few frozen moments, my world stood still.
Everything was deathly quiet aside from the frighteningly close cracking of gunfire. Somewhere in the distance a dog was barking and the commander was shouting&#8230; Yes, I was afraid.
Last May, I was sitting in a hotel room, warm water lazily filling a bath tub nearby. I switched on my phone and instantly paled. I was just as afraid.
“Scum of the earth”, “f*** her”, “take a knife and pull out all her Russian shit”.
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My Twitter feed had gone into overdrive and as I scrolled down each message, the abuse intensified.
I was on assignment in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, reporting for the Moscow-based broadcaster, Russia Today. The two countries were at war with each other and a local activist had picked up on my location and started a manhunt – “not just to catch her but to kill her”.
Within hours, I was on a plane out of the country. I arrived at the airport with dark glasses and a scarf. If I hadn’t been so afraid, it might have been funny.
Ukraine is currently the third most dangerous country for journalists to work in. The online harassment I faced, and continue to face, is not unique to Ukraine though, or for that matter, to journalists in general.
But what the threats uniquely focus on is my gender – the fact that I’m a woman – and the explicit threats are of extreme violence to rape and assault me. Most of my so-called online detractors focus their criticism less on my work and more on me.
My experience echoes the stories of other female journalists, writers and bloggers. A staggering 72.5% of online harassment is targeted at women, according to the Organisation for Safety and Co-operation in Europe.
The issue is of such concern that a special panel has been set up to address it. Trolling has become a favorite past-time for people buoyed by the anonymity and safety the online world offers. It is easy to sit in your home and spurt threats at anyone with views you don’t like. Legislation is far from water-tight in preventing it and what gives these words so much power is the incitement they can evoke and the very real possibility for them to be carried out in the real world.
I was in a taxi, lost, in an outlying suburb of Beirut, Lebanon. The driver had been circling the same neighborhoods for more than an hour and it was starting to get dark and I was getting concerned.
In such a situation, GPS tracking is a godsend – not just for finding one’s way but for alerting one’s editors to a possible abduction attempt. Today, journalists are seen as legitimate targets – no longer do we merely cover the story; in many instances we’ve become the story – whether online or in the real world.
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The number one fear we all share is that of being kidnapped. Paradoxically though, while switching on my cellphone’s GPS that day in Beirut and increasing my security, I also decreased it by alerting online detractors as to where I was.
The risks are greater when you’re a woman in the field than a man. In many parts of the world, women journalists are a strange persona for those with preconceived ideas of where a woman’s place should be.
Once, during an embed (term for a journalist attached to a military unit in conflict areas) with American soldiers in the Afghan province of Zabul, a group of children came running after us, laughing and joking. I was weighed down by a bulletproof jacket, helmet and backpack, but through the military sunglasses that kept slipping down my nose I could see the children pointing at my red-painted finger nails.
When we eventually took a breather and I removed my helmet, one of the more courageous boys plucked up the courage to step forward and ask: “Ma’am, do your parents know you’re here?”
All voices need to be heard, whether male or female, whether for or against the views one holds. Courage lies not only in speaking out for what one believes in, but for making sure the views of those we disagree with are given a platform.
– The writer is South African and the Middle East bureau chief of Russia Today. She was reporting for the channel in Kiev when a manhunt started against her and she had to exit.

shutterstock_266430095

‘Catch Her… Kill Her’

When Mike Lawrie fretted and sweated to connect Africa to the internet he expected a handful of dusty academics to use it. A quarter of a century on, African truck drivers, domestic workers and office clerks can’t live without it – the internet in Africa is as much a part of living as is breathing for millions.
“We know internet use in most of the continent has been growing. But it’s not even. So you have countries like South Africa and Kenya on the one hand where many people are using the internet. Then you have Ethiopia, the second largest population in Africa, and very few use the internet,” says Indra de Lanerolle, head of the South African Network Society project at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), in Johannesburg.
De Lanerolle is the author of The New Wave, a paper released in 2012 that looked at the internet users of Africa.
“The internet has grown, but there is one thing that hasn’t… fixed lines. Traditionally you would connect with a PC. But only two percent of households have a fixed line. PC penetration hasn’t been going up much. In that context it’s not surprising that it leaves us with mobile and mobile devices.”
“It’s a success story in one way that this infrastructure works. But it’s also evidence of a failure in another. Many African countries have failed to deliver those other networks, or they are way too expensive.”
Internet on the move is expensive. Net costs are high, which means the poor, without PCs, surf less.
“You are buying data in sachet size bytes, 5MB at a time, and you are rationing yourself. Our research shows you are very biased against services when you know how much data they use. One of the good things about Facebook is lowering the data consumption in order to use it.”
Internet means economic growth, says Ibrahima Guimba-Saidou, Senior Vice President Commercial Africa at SES.
“According to our research, if a developing nation has 10 percent more broadband connectivity, it results in a 1.38 percent GDP growth for that country. It is expected that Africa’s population will double to 2.4 billion people by 2050. In 20 years, the number of cities in Africa with over 10 million inhabitants will double. Remote areas are pulling African economies down. Today, over 300 million Africans live more than 50 kilometers from the nearest fiber or cable broadband connection – 400 million people have no internet access at all, that’s 700 million unconnected people. This equates to 60 to 70 percent of the African population living in remote areas, cut off from the bigger cities without access to information and the necessary facilities required for sustainable growth. These people, by no fault of their own, are pulling their country backwards as they are not able to contribute to the economy, as much as they no doubt would want to,” says Guimba-Saidou.
Language is also a barrier, says De Lanerolle. The language of technology tends to be in English, French or Portuguese, making it difficult for those who don’t speak them to navigate on their phones.
“At a bank machine you can get numerous languages but on an app its less. In general e-commerce is generally English in South Africa. If I am a Sepedi speaker in Polokwane, and I go to a shop, I can probably speak Sepedi to a shopkeeper. I can use Sepedi to transact. I can go to a post office and do the same thing,” says De Lanerolle.
“There are a lot of people in South Africa who do not read and write English easily. It’s a significant barrier, but is a solvable one. People, who design services and content, need to take account of that, especially when you have got these limits when you have reached the limit of your clientele.”
Internet users on the continent may be on the rise, but almost half the population lives below the poverty line. According to De Lanerolle’s research, in 2008, one in seven people in South Africa were online. In 2012, this grew to one in three. By 2016, there could be as many as two out of three, he says.
The research bears out that the younger you are, the more likely you are to use it. Almost 50% of those under 25 are internet users, while less than 20% older than 45 use the net. Businesses need to be cautious when it comes to developing apps.
“When people are launching the business they say let’s design an app for an IOS system. First, ask why do an app? If your target market is a low-end income user, they are most likely using a BlackBerry. Why use smartphones?”
“Research, from the US, shows that most users use only 10 apps. It’s quite hard to develop an app that is quite easy to use. More seriously, it’s harder to make an app absolutely necessary that will be in that top 10. Most apps will be used and then dropped in a very short time, like games,” he says.
For those who have dreams of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg and designing a multimillion-dollar app in their garage in Africa, the road may belong and rocky. There is a shortage of developers in Africa, for a start.
“By far our biggest constraint is developers. I was speaking to a CEO of a fairly big company in Sandton; they alone have a hundred vacancies for developers. The problem is we don’t have enough, especially at an entrepreneur level. Because they have such shortages in Sandton, they are offering pretty good salaries. You have to be pretty brave and pretty confident to say ‘screw that I am going to do my own thing and hope I score.’”
Social media is the king of the internet. Seventy five percent of users have at least one account on Facebook, Twitter, Mxit or LinkedIn or other social platforms.
Dinesh Balliah, New and Social Media lecturer at Wits, has taught students to use the internet in journalism for four years. The growing generation of internet users are far less computer savvy than they are made out to be, she says.
“Students these days don’t even know how to burn a CD. I feel like the generation we have now, that deals in apps, don’t learn how to troubleshoot on a computer. Back [in 2000], if you stuffed up on a computer you had to fix it. Even a software error, you had to fix it. Now you just try something else, or reinstall. The way in which we learn about computers has completely changed.”
“I think social media has changed the game for everyone. What’s shifted drastically is initially when the internet came out it was very top down. Those who had power, money and influence were the people producing content. So you had very exclusive content producers. Then you shifted to Web 2.0, where internet users were producing internet content of their own. Now you have moved to a situation where it’s not very clear what production content is. Is a tweet content? Is a Facebook comment content? The individual matters now more than ever.”
The language of computers could be more important than learning Mandarin, she says.
“With me, my general rule with my kids is that they need to read and write properly first and then they can have access to a computer. If you look at people who became tech innovators, they played computer games. People have this aversion and get scared of games and computers, but we should be teaching our kids how to code through games,” says Balliah.
It may be for a privileged few, but it’s clear Africa is set to be changed even more by the growing, dynamic power of the internet.

Eat, Pray, eMail

“I thought (the bullet) had gone through me. Nobody wanted to look. I wasn&#8217;t breathing properly because my lung had been punctured. And there were a couple of other wounds, rather embarrassingly, in my buttocks and in my hand,&#8221; recalls photojournalist Greg Marinovich.
This is one of the four times the 53-year-old has had to endure bullet wounds, three in his country, South Africa, and the last in Afghanistan in 1999.
Awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1991, Marinovich is one of four members of The Bang-Bang Club, famous for its brave coverage of a violent war that raged between 1990 and 1994 during South Africa’s transition from apartheid. As many journalists stayed away from the violence that broke out between the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party, only these four photojournalists braved the worst and alerted the world of the gruesome rivalry between political parties.
Interestingly, Marinovich only fell in love with the camera in his early adulthood.
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“Growing up, I never had photographer or journalist role models, I had no ambition to do this work. Now, though, I look up to many of my colleagues, especially Gilles Peress, who is a great photographer and a great thinker,” says Marinovich.
The, now, US-based photojournalist co-authored the book The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War, together with the only other surviving member of the club, João Silva. Fellow Pulitzer Prize winner, Kevin Carter, took his own life; Ken Oosterbroek died from a stray bullet in street fighting in Johannesburg, East Rand.
After being dissatisfied with what their images alone told about the war, Marinovich and Silva decided to write a fuller account, what he describes as being deeper than the superficiality of conflict images. Marinovich is still a bit dissatisfied with the legacy The Bang-Bang Club has left.
“It seems to have left a legacy contrary to what we aimed to achieve. It seems that so many young photographers see the business as being glamorous and attractive, whereas we hate the glamorization of photojournalists, nor is it heroic,” says Marinovich.
On his own legacy, Marinovich is prouder.
“Perhaps I have left a passion of truth telling of people’s stories no matter how difficult that is. Of never faking stuff,” says Marinovich.
Testimony to this would be the Marikana investigations where Marinovich helped reveal that South African police had executed miners in a hidden area after the televised shooting, which resulted in the death of 34 mineworkers at the hands of the police in 2012.
Although Marinovich says that only a lotto ticket would make him stop being a photojournalist any time soon, he has ceased from doing conflict journalism, which cost his friend, Silva, both his legs when he stood on a landmine in Afghanistan.
“We are as close as ever, but I was horrified by the incident. He has suffered and still suffers greatly from the wounds,” says Marinovich.
Marinovich reckons the future of photojournalism in Africa is promising, mentioning: some “great” ones in Zanele Muholi; Andrew Esiebo; Tsepo Gumbi; and Boniface Mwangi.
“It’s very tough to make a living for the majority, but if you are consistently excellent you will succeed. Keep telling stories close to your hea

The bloody trail To The Truth

It’s a rough, tough, brutal business for an entrepreneur; you risk your neck in places where no one wants to go to find stories that everyone wants to know; it’s months of tedium and travelling where one slip can mean death.
This is the news business in Africa that is the life of Kenyan Salim Amin; it is also the cruel business in which his father suffered on his way to an early grave.
Amin will never forget November 23, 1996, the day word came through. His father Mo Amin, a legendary photojournalist, had survived many dangers in more than 30 years on the road, including the loss of an arm in an explosion in the Ethiopian civil war. His life came to a tragic end in the Indian Ocean.
“I was at the gym when I got a call from mum asking me to come home immediately as something had happened to dad’s flight. I only believed it after I identified his body in the Comoros,” he says.
Mo was on an Air Ethiopia flight home to Nairobi when hijackers took the plane. He tried to rally passengers to fight back but the plane ran out of fuel and ditched in the sea, off the coast of the Comoros, killing all but 50 on board.
<div id="attachment_4529" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4529" class="size-medium wp-image-4529" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Salim-Amin-Safari-Rally-Picture-for-TIME-300x186.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="186" />Entrepreneur, Photojournalist, Kenya, Salim Amin, March 2016</div>
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“He was still on his feet when the plane crashed trying to get the hijackers off the pilot as he tried to land in the ocean. The hijackers claimed they had a grenade but no evidence of this was found. Mo was flying from Addis Ababa to Nairobi. He had gone to Addis for a meeting with Ethiopian Airlines as we produced the inflight magazine,” says Salim.
Mo died side-by-side with a friend and fellow journalist. Brian Tetley, who was 61, was a British-born, Nairobi-based, king of the keyboard and bon viveur.
“Brian worked with my father for over three decades and they were very close friends. Brian was often the writer while my dad photographed the major news stories, and they also co-authored/produced over two dozen books together. They were like brothers and travelled all over the world on assignments together,” says Salim.
The plane crash cost Salim his father and mentor; the man who remained a mystery right up to his tragic death, an oft told African story of father and son.
“We had a lot of love between us but I hardly saw him and didn’t really know him very well… we didn’t speak much about personal matters, more about work.”
Taking up the camera, for Salim, was bittersweet.
“I started taking pictures when I was eight years old… that’s when he gave me his first camera,” he says.
With this camera, Salim took a picture that appeared in TIME magazine, making him probably the only 10-year-old African to ever have a picture published in a global magazine.
“I was amazed when I saw it actually in print! If I had had any doubts about what I was going to do before that, then those went out of the window when I saw my work in print,” says Salim.
He started working for the media company his father founded – Camerapix.
“My first pay cheque was from Camerapix… he paid me Ksh5,000 for my first month at work in 1992 (then around $100).”
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Salim has no regrets in an unforgiving business.
“I don’t think I would want to ever do anything else… definitely I would want to be doing the same thing in another life.”
This is a trade where you can very easily die, unsung, chasing a story. Salim had his fair share.
“I remember being bombed by government forces in Sudan during the civil war, which was terrifying, the dangers of covering Somalia in the 1990s during Operation Restore Hope, the loss of my friends and colleagues Dan Eldon, Anthony Macharia and Hos Maina in Somalia in 1993, and the genocide in Rwanda which was the most disturbing and brutal story I had ever covered,” says Salim.
Eldon, an English-born Kenyan photojournalist, with Kenyans, Macharia and Maina, were killed by an angry mob in Mogadishu in 1993, in the days when occupying US forces struggled to keep order.
Another journalist who survived that violent day is Angus Shaw, who spent 40 years covering eight wars, from his base in Harare, Zimbabwe.
“We were at the hotel that morning when we heard an explosion five blocks away. We decided to go down and have a look,” recollects Shaw.
“The Camerapix crew drove ahead of us as we headed to the compound where the explosion took place and as we got there, we saw a swelling crowd. The crowd erupted into extreme anger after seeing the carnage and deaths after the bombings of that narrow street, they started throwing stones at our small press convoy yelling ‘Yankies go home’. Eldon had disappeared inside this angry crowd when they started throwing stones. Every photojournalist wanted the best picture so they hardly paid attention to the possible dangers.”
What followed will haunt Shaw forever.
“I saw a handful of people armed with AK-47 rifles firing shots and I saw a nice young man, Macharia, going down. He had been shot. We realized this was getting out of hand and we started driving away and at that point, they had started shooting at our car which was about 25 meters away.”
Days passed with no trace of the 23-year-old Eldon, last seen disappearing into the angry crowd.
“One morning we woke up to the sight of Dan’s bloody shoes at the doorstep of our hotel. This was a warning to us.”
Shaw says, as they were wrapping Eldon’s belongings, Mo reminded the press corps that covering atrocities was more than reporting numbers.
“When you start wrapping the belongings of your own, then you discover that that’s what people go through all over the world,” says Shaw.
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Salim wishes the continent that gave birth to many great journalists could spare a thought for their hardships.
“I wish Africans would celebrate journalists more… we are seen as ‘lowly’ people and in a corrupt profession by many around the continent, and unfortunately even African media organizations do not celebrate African journalists enough. My father was recognized and decorated more outside Africa than within. We should do more and maybe have a commemoration day each year for African journalists that is a celebration of their sacrifices and contributions.”
Salim found himself at the helm of his late father’s business at the age of 26.
“I had no experience at running a company; luckily my father was good at filing all his work so I had to study his documents and correspondences,” he says.
“The first day was chaotic. We had to re-register and restructure the company. We started by giving everybody their dues, close the company and re-employ them again under the new registered company with new shareholding. It never really struck me that I was now running the company, it just happened as there was no succession plan. I had no choice.”
Salim concedes he has to move with the times.
Media and development expert, Rashweat Mukundu, says the internet is changing the news business.
“Traditional models of doing business are being challenged, yet some traditional elements, that include the human touch, will remain necessary, yet more enhanced by ICTs. We are in an era of either business adapts or dies,” he says.
Bruce Mutsvairo, media professor at Northumbria University in Britain, says Africa should plough its own furrow.
“Our innovations should underscore, support and provide the basis for Africa’s cultural and economic needs. We have to come with our own innovations, even if they get rejected in the West.”
In Mo’s day, it was all about hard news, hotspots and wars. The news business these days is more about fashion and business, says Salim. With more than four million images of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and 8,000 hours of video footage, Camerapix Archive is the largest library in Africa.
“Our only asset is our archives. I am not so sure I would attach any monetary value on the company. It’s a family business that I would not dream of selling.”
Like many in the media industry, Salim struggles to make money as there is a lot of free content floating around.
“We are producing a lot of content; it’s not giving us much revenue as yet. So we have to sell our content to multiple broadcasters. There are more opportunities presented through mobile devices but expensive data remains the main impediment.”
Salim plans to ease himself out of the business to make way for the next generation.
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“We did the first private-public partnership with a local university where we are also helping develop their postgraduate degree. We have just moved into the Multimedia University where our production team is housed; in exchange we are helping them develop their master’s program.”
Another chapter for Africa – a great story that many journalists have paid with their lives to tell.

The Cruel Business Of Telling Stories And Bloody Shoes

When Mornay Walters met FORBES AFRICA in 2013, he was the cellphone wielding Jeremiah who warned that your business wasn’t safe from hackers. This was the year when Edwin Snowden, the former CIA employee, blew the whistle on global government surveillance programs. From the streets of Sandton to the stock markets of New York, Snowden revealed that no text, email or Facebook account was safe, unless you had military-style protection.
“You are fighting a shadow war. It could be a kid in a basement or it could be a highly skilled team; you don’t know,” says Walters.
“The reality is communication in the internet has changed drastically from where we were five years ago, to where we were two years ago, to where we are today. Ultimately it’s about one thing, data.”
Walters went into business at the right time, with the right app, to protect classified government installations; he realized he could do the same for businesses. With a team of 15 programmers, he created Seecrypt. It protects metadata, the information embedded in every SMS and email, to make it almost impossible for hackers, or governments, to get your precious secrets.
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Two years on, Walters’ small team of 15 has grown into a $130-million company that is home to 130 geeks; another world for the man who grew up in a Free State farming town that you would struggle to find on Google Maps.
“If you look hard yes, when I lived in Sasolburg the population was only 26 thousand people, today there is only 113 thousand people, 20 years after I left for the big city,” he says.
There are plenty of people to protect: whether it’s Facebook’s 1.49 billion users; WhatsApp’s 800 million users; Twitter’s 316 million users; or Instagram’s 300 million users.
“Personal data is the new black gold,” says Walters.
“You don’t know what you have until you’ve lost it. Ask any A-list celebrity what’s the first thing they want back, privacy… We can tell you horror stories about the perceived way how they take information from you, how they can harvest your address book for example. Listed companies have made billions, yet don’t charge a cent for their product. One has to ask where the money comes from, is your privacy worth the price of your app?”
Think of the app like armor-plating on a Range Rover, says Walters.
“The smallest grain of information that leaks out of that process could affect what we have… Every night, we have what we call sweep attacks. It could be a kid, an automated bot, or a person that hits our system. We spend an enormous sum of money on unified threat management. We do our own penetration tests.”
“We see it as flattering. We are getting interest from the US and China. Literally every modern nation is tapping on our front door or poking us from the side.”
Believe it or not, the company also encourages the people they want to crush.
“We have what we call honeypots, where we trap hackers, and they think they are getting into the system, so we can learn more about them,” says Walters.
So even if you are shopping in Africa, look over your shoulder, he warns
“Credit card SMS notifications can betray you. With SMS notifications you can track someone through a shopping mall. But that information is sent in the non-secure to me. If you are a high-end user, then these texts could make you a potential target. They display bank balance, your name and location. It’s a problem.”
“That’s the thing about cybercrime. It’s invisible. It’s only when I use your information publically against you that you will find out about it. While tech is making our lives easier we are exposing ourselves in a glass box. You are literally walking naked in the streets.”
Whether it is on your child’s Xbox or their cellphone, Walters believes access to the internet is an integral part of our lives, like oxygen and water.
“Your TV has a camera on it; your Xbox has a camera on it. It’s been demonstrated that one can be hacked and you could see into a living room. These things most people are oblivious to. We don’t even realize it,” he says.
It’s a thriving business that has taught the international market never to underestimate an Afrikaans accent from the Free State.
“We are dealing with customers who have never dealt with South Africa. We are naturally underdogs&#8230; The benefit of South Africa becoming the next Silicon Valley is that we’re cheap. We can develop software cheaper and pay developers more,” he says.
“I spend more time in an airplane than at home. But we are so excited about the opportunities coming our way; we expect to become a 500-man company in the next two to three years. It’s not an easy road. But we have made some good impressions.”
Walters’ business is a far cry from the start-up app run by a crew of 15. His next stop: becoming th

Making Millions From Paranoia

On any given day, you can find Mike Lawrie sitting on the patio with a cup of tea in his hand or watering his plants. His wife, Christine, plays scrabble on Fridays. He prefers to dress in khaki shorts and a cotton shirt in the summer heat. This is the 75-year-old who brought the internet to Africa, making it possible for kids, and their parents, to watch movies, play games and surf the World Wide Web from their homes.
His vigour as the father of the internet in South Africa is reflected in his twilight years. He also brought the internet to this retirement village in Pretoria where he is teaching his neighbors how to use their cell phones.
“We’re having a whale of a time doing it. It’s keeping me busy. But today for the first time, one of the old ducks came with a Samsung S4. She’s got a grandchild who lives here with us, and he knew exactly how to use this phone. This kid can’t be 10 years old. It’s fantastic. If I told this kid, 10 years before you were born, there was no internet, he would look at me and say ‘what the hell are you talking about?’”
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When the sun was high on this summer day, the friendly and polite Lawrie offers a glass of iced water and biscuits on his shady patio, ringed with dozens of succulents in pots.
Lawrie’s journey begins in Cape Town where he grew up with a flair for mathematics and science. He struggled to find a job, until he turned to punched card machines, the primitive form of computer programming.
“It was the early computer stuff. Ever wondered why there are 80 columns on a screen? It’s from the punch card system,” says Lawrie.
Along came 1962. Computers were into their second generation and were a little smaller; they could now fit into a lounge, recalls Lawrie. He was one of the few people in South Africa who could work on them.
A purchase made by Rhodes University of an ICT 1301, in 1965, changed everything for Lawrie. The computer had to have a technician. It meant 25-year-old Lawrie moved to Grahamstown, from Cape Town, with his wife, on her 21st birthday, to babysit the ICT 1301 at the university’s computer lab.
“You had to rattle electronic circuits to check for faults. You hit it with a hammer… tap, tap, tap… if the computer still runs it means there is nothing wrong and you move onto the next one. They made them to last. It was a great machine to work on. It taught me computing through and through. These days techies haven’t got a clue about how a machine works.”
The backwater could’ve been the last place you would expect a computer techie to thrive, but Lawrie did.
“Grahamstown has no great industries. It has no electrical noise. Electrically it’s a quiet town. We arrived in November and came back to Cape Town in December, and told people about this pokey little town. The next year we went home, to Cape Town, the same streets you have lived in all your life now looked narrow.”
To say Lawrie is a mere techie is an understatement: he brought the net to Africa, as an experiment, in his own time.
“The doing of it was pure technical. It was fun, it wasn’t a project. It wasn’t our job at the university to specifically do it. It was never part of the reports for the university. The main thing was to run a computer service in the university. Low and behold we tweaked the system and got it working.”
Lawrie took the first step in  linking the world in Grahamstown. With 100 meters of copper wire he set up a primitive computer network that connected the physics department to the university mainframe. He then tried to connect something a bit farther, his house, two kilometers away.
“We found out that if you take two wires from Telkom, then the South African Postal Service, you can put five volts in this side you get five volts on the other end. If you jumper it, [the computer] thinks a modem is connected to the other end.”
By 1985, Lawrie developed an internal email system. Academics could now speak to each other on campus through their computer. Its commonplace now, science fiction then.
The next phase took three years, Lawrie wanted to connect to other universities. The issue was some used IBM computers; the university used a VAX operated computer.
“Low and behold we got the thing to work, using IS protocols. This was magic, connecting two independently controlled computer systems. By 1988, we could take a VAX computer, take an email, put it into our homegrown system, pull it out again, pull it through a sausage machine and then make it an IBM mail and send it off to Potchefstroom,” he says.
It dawned on Lawrie that the system had the potential to send an email around the world.
Lawrie contacted a network called Bitnet that agreed to let South Africa join their network. But, he first needed to get approval from Uninet, run by the CSIR, the government research facility that spearheaded network projects in South Africa.
“I took this proposal to the board, and the board laughed me off. They said I was out of my mind, because Bitnet is run by countries that have a stance against apartheid and would be shut down.”
“I was cheesed off and I don’t get cross that easily. I decided the best thing to do was never to go to a committee again. It’s so easy for a group of people to say it can’t be done.”
Lawrie found an alternative solution in FidoNet, a TCP/IP freebee package designed by Randy Bush in Oregon, in the United States (US), which was smuggled into South Africa on a floppy disk by a friend named Pat Terry.
“This was luck beyond belief,” says Lawrie.
With floppy disk in hand, Lawrie also needed to negotiate an account with the University of Delaware to give him access to the internet. From his computer in Rhodes, Lawrie was able to send mail to Delaware, to Bush in Oregon, to a Unix system, and then over FidoNet.
“The point about the FidoNet was in the testing phase of getting ‘some’ form of international email to work prior to releasing the email service for general use to Rhodes staff and students. This testing was in 1988, the service to Rhodes folk was operational early in 1989.”
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“We are now at the point where I can sit at home and I can log into our mainframe, create mail and send it to someone in the US. You would sit at eight o’clock at night and type an email out to this guy, he doesn’t know when it’s written, and writes back. In his email he invites me to come to this conference saying he wants me to come and talk about what we are doing. I then reply back and say great. He then writes back, how did that mail get here so quickly? How could the interchange of email to Africa be so quick? It was like instant. This guy was expecting to get a response from me in three weeks and he got it in about two minutes. This opened eyes all over the place.”
On November 12, 1991, at 10.44AM, Lawrie set up the first permanent link to send mail, via file transfer protocol (FTP), it was a long walk to the internet for Africa.
“He’s quite an anomaly. Even at that time he was a visionary,” says Dinesh Balliah, New and Social Media lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand.
In 2003, Balliah came across Lawrie when reading archives for her master’s degree.
“I found on the internet a bunch of usenet groups, which were archived, by whichever browser was there back then. They were literally archives of text messages sent by individuals over the internet.  One of them related to South Africa. It related to the original internet work that existed in South Africa at that. I became interested in following this trail, it became a forensic trail. I picked up people’s names and eventually it led me to Rhodes University where the network was started.”
All roads lead to Rhodes. At the end was a meeting with Lawrie and two days of lessons in internet history. It prompted Balliah to write a book on the history of the internet in South Africa.
“I’ll never forget he told me once ‘Everyone at a university complains about how students are only downloading porn, and I look at them and say at least they reading something’. It’s always been his approach. He will complain about how much students consume data, but his approach is let them just play,” she says.
Back in the retirement village, Lawrie is as happy as an email on a server. He presides over the most internet savvy retirement homes in the country.
“What was I driven by? I don’t know. It wasn’t a pioneering nature. It definitely wasn’t the politics of it that motivated it. What’s this concept of emails and why would one want to sit at a computer, type something in and see it somewhere else. How do you go about selling something in a world that doesn’t use email? So I didn’t set about selling it. I set about making it work,” says Lawrie.
You can take the technician out the computer lab but you can’t stop him from joining the dots.

Once Upon A Time There Was No Internet…

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<h3>How long did it take to get to the top?</h3>
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Nearly two decades. I began my career at sea as a cadet in 1996. I then worked on cargo ships, shipping bananas between Ecuador and California, before starting my career in the cruise industry in 2001 as third mate. I worked my way up the ranks, from second officer, first officer navigation, first officer deck, first officer safety, chief officer safety to staff captain (deputy captain, second-in-command). I then joined Celebrity Cruises in July 2015 with my promotion to captain.
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<ol start="2">
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<h3>You have made history as a female captain…</h3>
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I honestly did not expect the overwhelming response of support and sheer enthusiasm for my promotion, but I meet people on a daily basis who tell me how much it means to them to see me in this position. It is a very humbling experience, and I really enjoy sharing the story about where and how it all started – with my dad, who told me I could be anything I wanted in life. I meet fathers who let me know that they tell their daughters the same thing. I meet grandmothers who have so much faith in their granddaughters and want to share my story with them. I enjoy speaking to young women and watching their faces and reactions as they come to the realization that becoming a captain of a cruise ship is a possibility for them.
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<h3>What is your greatest high on the high seas?</h3>
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The ability to actually maneuver the vessel – the arrivals and departures from ports are an adrenaline rush!
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<h3>What is the roughest weather you have encountered at sea?</h3>
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I have found that the term ‘rough’ is relative as everyone has a different definition, but one of the most important lessons I’ve learned is not only applicable to going to sea, but also on land: Mother Nature is to be respected. There are several things that we can control but Mother Nature is not one of them. However, we have great, expert means of being able to make predictions and plan accordingly. The safety of our guests and crew always comes first, and we do not take chances.
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<h3>How is it like to be away from family for months?</h3>
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My contract is three months onboard and three months at home. I have the opportunity to invite my family to come sail with me when possible. Onboard, I have a family of 950 crew members. You can say we are a support system of our own. More than 65 different nationalities and backgrounds working together and supporting each other – they are truly special relationships.
When I am home, I can do anything I want, including travel, visit friends and family or learn a new hobby – there are plenty of those on my list! Also, communication has evolved so much since I began sailing; it is easier than ever to stay in touch with loved ones, they are only just a click or phone call away. Life onboard, doing what I love, is nice. Many things are taken care of, such as laundry, meals, cleaning, scheduling. When I go home, it takes a bit of time to adjust to making my own bed, sitting in traffic or going to the grocery store to buy ingredients to cook a meal.
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<ol start="6">
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<h3>What’s your typical day aboard the ship?</h3>
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Days at sea are great for me to meet as many guests as possible. I like to walk throughout the ship, go where great events are taking place, talk to everyone and find out where they are from and how their cruise experience is going.
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<ol start="7">
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<h3>Would you recommend this career for other women?</h3>
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Women are in the ranks. They have been since I began sailing. The opportunities are increasing for everyone, with more ships being built and positions opening up, and I believe you will see more female captains in the cruise industry soon. It is an incredible career, and I recommend it for anyone who has wanderlust in their veins, enjoys meeting new and interesting people, and experiencing the world by an awe-inspiring mode of transportation – cruising. Think about how you feel when you witness a perfect sunrise or sunset, now that is what it feels like to be at sea every day.

Kate-etch

7 Questions With…

A handful of times over the past century a watch brand has been able to claim rights to building the most complicated timepiece in the world.
In September, Vacheron Constantin unveiled the Reference 57260 pocket watch, which took a team of three master watchmakers (as well as hand and dial specialists) eight years to build.
Estimated at $8 million, the Reference 57260 (named for its 57 complications and Vacheron Constantin’s 260th anniversary) was commissioned by a collector in the Americas who wishes to remain anonymous.
He challenged Vacheron Constantin’s Atelier Cabinotiers division to create the world’s most complicated watch, with some specifc functions, includ- ing a Hebraic perpetual calendar and an unusual split-seconds chronograph (to time multiple events at once). Such technically advanced feats have never been incorporated into a watch before. Approximately two inches in diameter and crafted in an 18-karat white gold case that weighs about two pounds, the Vacheron watch nearly doubles the previous record for most complications in a timepiece: 33. Inside the gleaming hull reside more than 2,800 tiny mechanical components that make up the all-new movement (which took nearly two of the eight years spent to assemble). All told the timepiece claimed 10 new patents.
And while the Reference 57260 is undeniably an incredible feat of precision, technology and craftsmanship, its creation prompts the question: “Why would anyone want to wait eight years for a watch to be built?”
The answer has roots dating back to the 1920s and 1930s, when two of the richest and most competitive men in the world, automotive mogul James Ward Packard and banker Henry Graves, commissioned top watch brands to create the most complicated watch in the world.
Those timepieces (created by Vacheron Constantin and Patek Philippe, respectively) took years to build and resulted in what have become record-breaking works of art. (In November 2014 the Henry Graves Supercomplication pocket watch, which Patek Philippe made in 1932, sold at Sotheby’s Geneva for a record $24 million.)
“This challenge links back to those great collectors who are credited with pushing brands to create the unimaginable and produce some of the greatest watches in the world,” says Juan Carlos Torres, CEO of Vacheron Constantin. “And the fact that it is an American who commissioned this watch is fascinating.”
As was the pressure to build the world’s most complicated timepiece. “Because the most complicated watch before this one had 33 complications, we set a goal of 36 complications,” says Dominique Bernaz, head of the Atelier Cabinotiers division. “As we worked together, I would regularly ask my team if they thought we could do it, and they would smile and nod yes. We were halfway through the project before we knew just how many complications the watch would have, because the project kept evolving.
“Each complication is a special accomplishment,” adds Bernaz, “but putting them all together into one watch, that was the real challenge.”
So will this pocket watch spark a new rivalry in watchmaking among 21st-century collectors? Time will tell.

FO110215_018

The $8-Million Pocket Watch

We meet Ofuakuor Ofuatey-Kodjoe, popular as Ofie Kodjoe, in her beautiful home in Tesano, a suburb in Accra famous for one of the country’s first sports clubs. A person with multiple talents deserves multiple adjectives to describe her. Suffice to say she is one of the most pleasant, inspirational, witty, intelligent and down-to-earth personalities you will meet in Ghana.
Kodjoe has had a multifaceted career, from being a corporate executive at the Black Entertainment Television (BET) Networks in New York and an award-winning singer to launching three successful businesses and her own radio show in Accra.
Kodjoe, along with her brother and sister, were raised in New York; her dad was a professor of political science and her mother a nurse. The family’s plan was for Kodjoe to attend law school but she changed her mind half-way and switched to medicine. She finally ended up studying political science and African studies.
That was not the end of her academic ambitions. Her real aim was to study music.
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“When I was 19, I went to my dad and told him I wanted to go to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, he looked at me like I had six heads and said ‘no’,” says Kodjoe, who was too scared to fight, and instead settled for her dad’s career choice – political science and African studies – a decision she regrets.
She went to the City University of New York; her dad ensured she excelled in all subjects. She would rehearse with a band after class while still achieving 18 credits in school. After graduation, the logical progression was corporate America because music was not as lucrative as she had hoped. She managed to get into BET, one of the biggest media houses in America, rising to the position of Director of Corporate Travel and Corporate Services.
Alongside, Kodjoe still maintained her love for music.
“I was with a band and I was singing so I had this corporate parallel to my creative side and I loved it.”
But tragedy struck, and it changed her life. The first setback was when Kodjoe’s brother died of cardiomegaly (an enlarged heart condition) in his sleep. Two years later, her father underwent heart surgery to fix a broken valve; he also suffered from a kidney condition.
“I realized we didn’t have that much time left with him, maybe two years, so we decided to come back home,” says Kodjoe.
It was her father’s wish for the children to relocate to Ghana to give back to the country he so loved. It was a traumatic period. The loss of the two men in her life took a toll on her.
In Ghana, Kodjoe set up a management consulting business with her business partner to teach young Ghanaians to become successful in the workplace and also advice organizations on getting the best out of their workforce.
She set up another company, Moka Entertainment, which got its big break when BET came to Ghana to do a reality show. Its success led to various production contracts. Kodjoe was falling in love with music again. Her sound is a cross between Afro Jazz and Neo Soul. The highlight of her career was opening for the BET Celebration of Gospel event in Los Angeles and also for BET Walk Of Fame, which was celebrating American icons like Smokey Robinson.
She has also performed for the President of Liberia. In her weekly radio show on the hit ‘adult alternative station’, Atlantis Radio, in Accra, she spends her time covering inspirational topics that encourage listeners to look at the upside no matter their ordeal. She spends her time mentoring young talent through her management label, which has a roster of top R&amp;B singers from across Africa. Her biggest regret though is the lack of support for music.
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“I didn’t have the guts to say I don’t care what you think, I am going to do it anyway,” she says of her journey into it.
This regret led her to found yet another company, Onyx Management, geared towards helping young people understand their purpose and passion – even if they have to fight to make it happen. Her motto is live life, love life and live love.
Accra’s youth stay tuned.

Ofie1

The Corporate Creative

Watching Allegro Dinkwanyane irrevocably hooked to the internet, one would be encouraged to say that the world of the millennial, really, is the World Wide Web. And for the enterprising amongst them, this is where the heart – and all the money – is.
You could call her a poster child of social media; Dinkwanyane makes a living off it offering PR services for the rich and famous.
Her entrepreneurial journey started not in an MBA classroom, but in journalism school, when she was given an assignment to start an online blog. Impressed, her lecturer encouraged her to keep at it.
After diligent research, planning and a lot of soul-searching, Orgella Media was born out of her university dorm in 2011. Orgella? It’s her name spelt backwards.
“I was inspired by Oprah’s Harpo because it’s her name spelt backwards. From the time I saw it, I started writing my name backwards and realized there is a good ring to it,” says Dinkwanyane.
Orgella Media started as an entertainment blog and has now diversified to include public relations (PR), charity and property divisions.
The world of PR today is no longer merely handing out paper press releases in five-star summit rooms. PR strategies are aggressively built around blogs, tweets, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Google+. And this world Dinkwanyane most understands as she aspires to be one of the online world’s greatest PR mavens.
“The world of online never stops. You need to know what is happening in the world and most importantly sharing some news with the world,” she says.
Dinkwanyane’s public profile increased in 2015 representing the likes of South Africa’s hip hop sensation Anatii, news anchor Thabile Ngwato and Nigeria’s singer Saeon and hip hop artiste Yung6ix.
The 25-year-old runs her business in Johannesburg; a long way from home. She was raised in Limpopo, South Africa’s northern province. Life was not easy. Her parents divorced when she was 12.
“I knew my parents were going to divorce. As a kid, you can always sense these things. It was hard for my mum moving from being a housewife and now left alone with four children. My dad basically decided he didn’t want to be a father anymore. I haven’t seen him since I was 12. He didn’t want us. He woke up one day and decided he didn’t want to be a father anymore,” says Dinkwanyane.
After her parents’ divorce, being daddy’s girl, Dinkwanyane often called him on the phone, even though he never returned the gesture.
“I knew his number by heart and always called but after two years I asked myself ‘I am the kid here and why I am the one making all the effort’, and I stopped. I haven’t spoken or seen him since.”
Watching her mother transition from housewife to bread winner inspired her.
“Our standard of living changed. We went from having everything we needed while staying with my father in Pretoria to moving back to Limpopo. My mother is a qualified teacher but had been a housewife for years so she didn’t have a job. I didn’t let that put me down. I worked hard in school and everything I did.”
Time came for Dinkwanyane to enrol into university, but there wasn’t enough money for it.
“I knew I wanted to study at the University of Johannesburg but my mother didn’t have money to pay for student residence accommodation on campus for me. I had to travel from my sister’s house in Kempton Park to class every day which is in the east of Johannesburg yet the University is towards the north.”
Dinkwanyane’s mother worked hard to give her a university education. When the opportunity presented itself for her to start Orgella Media, she knocked on all doors to find mentors – and experience – in the media industry.
“TV personality Carol Manana mentored me for about two years. I got to see how TV is made and I enjoyed it,” says Dinkwanyane.
But success was still elusive. Money began flowing in with Orgella Media, but Dinkwanyane realized she could not fund it fully. Clout was important in the impenetrable corridors of business, so her contacts referred her to people with deep pockets willing to invest.
“I went to them but all the people did not believe or understand social media or what a blog was. I knew the blog will run with or without them. I had to find other means.”
She taught herself graphic design and learnt to make business cards. As she endeavored to grow her business, Dinkwanyane received an offer to work for TRACE MUSIC as a journalist. She worked here for two years whilst running her business on the side.
In November 2014, she quit.
“There comes a point when you see that in whatever job you are in there is no longer any opportunity for growth. I needed to concentrate on growing my brand than helping the success of someone else’s,” she says.
From then, she fully committed to her business. The sacrifice paid off, as it has grown “tremendously”, she says. Her website gets five million hits on average every month, and she has had 50 clients since inception.
Her advice to start-up entrepreneurs? “Love what you do, ask questions, be patient, find a mentor and engage with your target market.”
Cyberspace – Dinkwanyane has found her niche in it, and looks like she is here to stay.

Saying It Backwards, Like Oprah

Out of high school and straight to flying school, Nicole Swart seems to have figured out her aspirations at Concorde speed. She acquired her pilot’s license at the age of 19, when most girls are only just beginning to dream of high-flying careers.
Starting out as a receptionist in a cleaning company to save enough for her instructors’ course and clock up enough flying hours, Swart is today officially the first person on the continent to be awarded a license to fly drones – and she is only 23.
To the uninitiated, a drone is an aircraft without a pilot onboard. Its flight is controlled either autonomously by inbuilt computers or by remote control. Two weeks after remotely-piloted aircraft systems were integrated into the South African civil aviation airspace, Swart was handed the license.
Any comparisons with Star Wars and military drone strikes are quickly dispelled by her; it’s a world away from being mere instruments of war.
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“Drones used to be for the military and transporting things, now they’re for crop-spraying. The more advanced the equipment, the more weight it can carry. I don’t foresee drones carrying passengers soon but maybe in about 50 years,” says Swart.
She holds the ‘highest’ pilot’s license – the airline transport pilot’s license. When she’s not flying planes or remotely-piloted aircraft, she is working as a testing standards officer, aviation personnel standards, at SACAA (South African Civil Aviation Authority).
“With flying, it is all about hours. I built up 1,500 hours which is enough for an airline transfer pilot license after I reached the threshold of instruction. I began with the Civil Aviation Authority and was placed in the Unmanned Aircraft department where we had to do research and help develop regulations,” she says.
Working with unmanned aircraft ignited a new passion; Swart went into training and saw an opportunity to learn about drones.
“I didn’t know about it before. They took off in 2007 – the military used it and now unmanned aircraft are in South Africa. It’s crazy,” she says.
A lot of the theoretical components were similar to manned aviation but from a technical point of view, it was an entirely different world.
“The flying side is very different from manned aviation. With an aircraft, you are physically inside it. If you turn right, it turns right. With drones, you have to imagine yourself in the aircraft. It isn’t as easy,” she says.
“This is where aviation is heading to – the future is in unmanned aircraft. You get different types, from 50 grams to seven tons – the range of drones is crazy. I flew a two kilogram remote controlled drone. Basically training is to understand the concept but my interest is in the complex ones where one uses data links and satellites and GPS points,” she says.
South Africa is one of a handful of countries around the world to have introduced comprehensive regulations to guide remote pilot operations.
“Being a third world country, no one expected us or anyone in Africa to be developing regulations. It is a huge deal – we are getting feedback from other countries. They want our advice on how to regulate their countries.”
For Swart, getting her drone license is just the beginning for breaking gender boundaries. She’s setting out to challenge the jokes about female pilots by flying right through the glass ceiling.
“People joke about gender but in the flying world you have to work harder and prove yourself. Once you enter the world you will do anything to be a part of it and work your way up. When I was a student there were 10 girls out of 300. When I left the school, there were 100 females,” she says.
Swart is only just embarking on her journey. She holds the first drone license on the continent and is on her way to becoming a commercial flight pilot, a flight instructor and examiner, but her first few flights have stuck with her.
“I didn’t think I would be ready for my first solo flight – I didn’t even know it was happening. They call the route a circuit. The instructor told me to stop – I thought I had done something wrong but he said ‘now you are flying by yourself’. It was the best feeling of my life. Every time you take off you get a rush and no two landings are the same. I have never experienced anything greater,” she says.
“Once I had a gear emergency, my gear wouldn’t come down which is quite a big deal as you need your wheels. I followed steps and all my training paid off and I had to handle the emergency and land safely.”
Needless to say, she made a safe landing – following protocol to a tee without breaking a sweat. The sky certainly isn’t the limit for this pilot.

Nicole-033

Something To Drone About

By now, you’ve probably seen or heard of The Adventures in Zambezia. The animated film made by Triggerfish Studios, in Cape Town, has become the highest grossing South African film, beating others such as District Nine and the Academy Award winning Tsotsi. The film earned R6.3 million in the first three weeks of its release in South Africa alone and sits at over $28 million dollars worldwide.
South Africa is leaping into the multi-billion dollar animation industry, producing three animated movies in the last 5 years: Jock of the Bushveld, Lion of Judah and The Adventures in Zambezia.
Triggerfish Studios’ CEO and producer, Stuart Forrest, is excited.
“We’re at the beginning of a big disruption in Hollywood. We’re starting to see a new wave of media. It hasn’t finished playing out as yet as the big studios have had so much power and have managed to still hold onto that.”
Trigger Fish has been called Africa’s DreamWorks and Pixar, but Forrest says the company would rather develop their own style than copy America.
“If we were in the States, we wouldn’t be able to do what we are doing now… Our challenge is here, our voice is here and our heart is here. We want to lead the way for Africa on the world stage.”
The studio’s success with The Adventures in Zambezia has not come easy.
“The processes to raise funds are very labor intensive and expensive. We are moving to a model where we will release four or five films [a year] as we will be producing multiple projects and planning ahead more efficiently,” says Forrest.
Forrest believes that the secret to making a successful animated movie lies in their obsession to create films with compelling stories and heart-felt messages.
“Creating a film is like lightning in a bottle. You’ll only know if it works when you open it,” says Forrest.
In 2012, The Adventures in Zambezia won the “Best South African Feature Film” award at the 33rd Durban International Film Festival and also closed South Africa’s largest animation film festival, Kunjanimation.
Daniel Snaddon, the director of Kunjanimation, says that the idea behind the film festival was for animators to have their work celebrated while in the hunt for investors.
“The collaboration started off with the French Institute of South Africa, we then partnered with the National Film and Video Foundation, Westgro Financial Services and, our sponsor, the French Season South Africa,” says Snaddon.
The Kunjanimation film festival has evolved from a two day event with one workshop to a five day event with many workshops.
“It’s great to have the French as our partners. They’re the only non-Americans entering the arena to have cracked the genre. They made a movie called Despicable Me [with a $69 million budget] which grossed over $500 million at the box office.”
Snaddon says the reason South Africa is not where is should be in the industry is because many financiers look at the numbers and are not sure how they will add up. Animation is a risky business.
“You’re never really sure what the demand is going to be for any film. It only takes one big hit. Look at New Zealand for example. There was nothing, then there was The Lord of the Rings and now it is one of the go to places for filming.”
“Steve Jobs bought Pixar and lost a lot of money, his personal money, before they made a profit. It took 10 years and as soon as Toy Story hit he made all his money back and then some. It’s a question of having a long-term plan.”
Although there are many colleges offering diplomas in animation as more and more students are entering the industry, jobs are scarce.
“I’ll be honest; most of them will not find jobs. They’ll end up specializing in something else, be it web design or graphic design.”
“The lack of jobs in the industry has driven many talented animators to migrate to Europe or the USA where they comfortably live; going from project to project. People in South Africa who focus on one specific area of animation are quickly head-hunted by large companies overseas,” says Snaddon.
The Adventures in Zambezia was among 21 movies that competed for the Oscar for Animated Feature Film at the 85th Academy Awards earlier this year and it recently won Best Feature for Children at Anima Mundi 2013 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
On October 25, Triggerfish Studios will release their second animated film, Khumba. The film is already making waves on the international circuit with its premier at Annecy International Animated Film Festival in June as well as its screening at the Toronto International Film Festival.   FL

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Taking a chance on a fleeting flash

It made a thundering entry in 2010, turning heads with those iconic gullwing doors and wheel-spinning performances without the hint of a turbo.
I loved its raw, rumbling power and obnoxious presence. I smiled modestly when crowds gathered at shopping centers – only to find out that they really wanted to see the gullwing doors in full flight.
And then they giggled rudely as I extricated my two-meter frame from the low-slung cockpit.
The SLS, in various guises from Blackbird, to Roadster to the Final Edition last year, sold well and still seemed to have many more years before its sell-by date.
But she has gone. So goodbye SLS and hello AMG GT.
But here’s the good news. AMG have developed their second in-house sports car, with matching performance and more refined driving and racing features, which will leave you with about $75,000 in your back pocket.
The difference is that you won’t be driving a so-called supercar, which comes as a huge relief because it is the most difficult word to define.
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So a Nissan GT-R, with the performance to embarrass virtually all the Italian hotties, is a mere sports car while it seems anything with a price tag of $250,000 or more is a supercar?
The two-seater AMG GT, kicking off at a shade over $120,000, puts you squarely in the classic sports car fold where the Porsche 911, the Jaguar F-Type R, the Audi R8 V10 and the daring BMW i8 are just some of the rivals in hot pursuit.
And thank goodness the AMG GT doesn’t feature those fly-through doors – after all, that look goes back to the 1950s. And they’re bad for your back!
It is being labeled as the 911 fighter and it could give you a headache trying to decide between the two. That’s if having a couple of back seats isn’t a major consideration.
While most sports car manufacturers have busied themselves with making their steeds look more menacing with toothy bear grilles, the Porsche people have focused on classy, flowing lines. This is not a physique that lays down the gauntlet at the lights.
The Merc does have a more macho look with sculpted and slanted LED high performance headlights nestling next to the three-dimensional “diamond” radiator grille and above the daunting Airbus A380-like air intakes.
Head of Design, Gordon Wagener, calls it a “setting in which the driver can experience the consummate combination of beauty and intelligence.”
The design ethic extends to the interior with the cockpit and controls being compared to a fighter jet – albeit a lot more sophisticated and comfortable!
As you pour yourself into the hip-hugging driver’s seat, you are embraced by the high wing-like center console and fairly close windscreen which make you feel like an integral part of the GT’s DNA.
The controls are conveniently spaced on the inclined V-shaped center panel and it’s a huge relief that Merc didn’t opt for the gear lever on the steering wheel. So wrong for a performance car!
I couldn’t understand why some scribes complain that the gear lever it is set too far back on the center panel… then I remembered that my seat is virtually pinned to the boot! So perfectly designed for me – if not for my wallet!
But it’s under the protracted bonnet that the real difference between the SLS and the GT is discovered.
Out goes the naturally aspirated 6.2-liter V8 and in comes the new 4.0-liter bi-turbo produced under the “one man, one engine” principle.  In sheer calculation, it’s not quite such a powerful brute, but test it on the track and you are left in no doubt that the GT is ferociously fast and the handling is much more precise.
With a dab of your right foot you are rewarded with a kick in the back akin to lighting the boosters of a Lightning fighter jet. The GT will hurtle you to the ton in four seconds and the S shaves off an extra two-tenths of a second.
I hope you don’t test the top speed of 304 km/h along Sandton Drive. You have to keep a beady eye on the speedo with this Merc as it tends to gallop when you think it is at a canter – and the traffic cops don’t see this as a valid excuse…
What is a sports car without an aural accompaniment and the throaty roar, which makes Metallica sound effeminate, certainly hasn’t been lost in AMG’s second production.
Turbochargers don’t always improve the exhaust notes, but some careful tuning and variable exhaust flaps (activated at the flick of a switch) make sure that you keep the neighbors awake – and green with envy.
But the GT is also quite happy to quietly poodle along to the golf course on a Sunday morning. And, believe it or not, two sets of clubs can fit in the hatch-like boot.
What is in short supply is visibility. So if times are tight, scratch the Burmester high-end surround sound system at $5,500 off the extras list and get the reversing camera at a mere $400.
The Merc AMG GT is going to demand attention wherever you go and hitting a trolley at the shopping center is going to spoil the show.
The GT is just the start. A Roadster is on the drawing board, possibly a GT3, and expect more exciting variants to boost the division towards a target of 70,000 performance cars by 2017.
But the classic sports car niche is also competitive.
Jaguar has left behind any remnant of its conservative, regal image with the F-Type R V8, which has jaw-dropping looks and also blurs to 100 in around four seconds. It is in the performance and price range of the AMG GT.
And that’s where the Audi R8 V10 is just on the fringe of the classic pack. Audi has launched a new offering which is futuristic, angular and very Star Wars, which we will only see later this year. While the all-wheel drive car is bound to be swift (3.5 seconds or less) it will probably also push the classic sports car budget at a price of around $190,000.
So many decisions… so little time. And to present you with even more of a dilemma there is the BMW i8 gliding quietly onto the starting line.
It is the bravest production from BMW for many years with a galactically molded shell made from carbon fiber reinforced plastic. And the interior is just as evolutionary and exotic. You are given the alternative of going green or putting your right foot down and engaging all the horses – much to Al Gore’s disgust!
So there you have it. Spoiled for choice and what an enviable decision to make.
My virtual money is on the AMG GT. I was in love with the SLS and the GT comes in at an extremely combative price. All that was good about the SLS is enhanced and refined. What was questionable, like those gullwing doors, is siphoned off.
Maybe that’s why it is the World Performance Car of 2015.

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