It’s a haunting image. A terrified woman lies flat on the floor of a coffee shop where she might have been sipping a cappuccino just minutes before. Beside her are her two young children. The woman clings to her son and clutches her daughter by the elbow. Empty bullet casings are scattered around them. But what really makes the picture so powerful is how it depicts a safe and familiar scene as anything but. This is a split second in the life of a mother fighting for her children.
<div id="attachment_2947" style="width: 187px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2947" class="size-medium wp-image-2947" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/RTX13XVR-1-177x300.jpg" alt="" width="177" height="300" />Kenya Defence Forces soldiers comb the rooftop of the Westgate shopping mall, on the fourth day since militants stormed into the mall, in Nairobi September 24, 2013. Somalia&#8217;s al Shabaab Islamist group said on Tuesday its militants were still holed up in a Kenyan shopping mall they attacked at the weekend and there were &#8220;countless dead bodies&#8221;, raising fears the death toll could be higher than 62. REUTERS/Noor Khamis (KENYA &#8211; Tags: CIVIL UNREST CRIME LAW MILITARY) &#8211; RTX13XVR</div>
Nairobi-based photojournalist Tyler Hicks, of The New York Times, took the photograph and, in May, won a Pulitzer Prize for it.  A month after it was taken, the woman in the picture contacted him. They found themselves talking about the mall music.
“In covering conflict, it often isn’t the big things that you remember. It’s not the loud explosions or gunfire that your mind focuses on but often it’s some small detail,” he says on a call from Iraq.
“With all the shooting and running around and people screaming there was this very calm music echoing through the shopping mall.”
The woman told him she spent almost five hours lying in that very place with her children, trying to keep them calm and quiet. She remembers quietly singing along with that same mall music to her children to try to distract them and keep them still.
Hicks has risked his life many times to take the photos that have defined his career but this one sticks with him.
“That picture for me sums up what happened there, this is an attack on innocent civilians. The fear on her face and this amazing scene of her trying to hide and protect her kids,” he says.
Since the mall siege a year ago, Nairobi has been under persistent attack. A few months after Westgate, a hand grenade was thrown on to a minibus in the city suburb of Eastleigh. It claimed four lives and maimed at least 40 others. A day earlier, twin bomb blasts rocked the northern town of Wajir, killing one and injuring three others.
But perhaps some of the biggest attacks since Westgate were carried out more recently, further away, on the Kenyan coast. In July, unknown gunmen opened fire at marketplaces in the coastal villages of Hindi and Gamba. As with the mall attack, the gunmen began shooting at market goers indiscriminately. Both attacks claimed 29 lives. Earlier, in June, gun battles raged in Lamu, a resort town, and a number of buildings were set alight. That attack killed 48.
The Somali extremist group, Al-Shabaab, has taken responsibility for each of those attacks. After Kenyan armed forces, supporting a weak UN-backed Somali force, began pursuing the Al Qaeda-linked militants in southern Somalia three years ago, the group has vowed to fight back.
“Kenya’s operations in Somalia are something of a black box,” says Parselelo Kantai, East Africa Editor for The Africa Report, who’s been following the region’s insecurity.
“Because no independent reports have revealed what is going on, Al-Shabaab’s claims of atrocities being committed there by the KDF [Kenya Defense Forces] cannot be ignored&#8230; that’s the reason Al-Shabaab have given for attacking Kenya.”
In May, the group officially announced their war against Kenya.
Beyond the human cost, Hicks’ image of the woman and children tells another story. The abandoned coffee shop, where the family spent hours hiding, is still abandoned today. The economic cost to business owners within the mall was catastrophic. Many lost everything because they did not have the right insurance policy. Even the mall’s owners lost out, despite their insurance pay outs. Until the mall reopens, its owners will lose around $4.5 million every year.
Also, scores of mall employees lost their jobs because of the attack. The mall’s grocery store, Nakumatt, lost three employees during the shootings and its 150-strong staff was made redundant. A new store in another part of the city may rehire some of them.
It has been a year since Westgate and the aftermath is a difficult reality for its survivors. Life for many in Kenya will never be the same again. But if you look closer at the Hicks photograph with the terrified family on the cafe floor, you’ll see that some hope still lingers.

A Picture Of Fear  That Still Lingers

It was a hard road to business for Bheki Kunene who grew up poor in the streets of Gugulethu, on the fringes of South Africa’s wealthy tourist city of Cape Town. He was selling peanuts at just 15 years old and then graduated to fruit and vegetables.
When he finished high school, Kunene had to pay his own way to college. There was a new baby in his family which ate up the money needed for fees. Scholarships were his only way to get a higher education and he got one at the Ruth Prowse School of Art in 2006.
“I got a scholarship to study graphic design which paid for everything provided I get above 75% for all subjects,” says Kunene.
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As part of the course, he had to do a six-month internship at a graphic design company. Instead, he put up R600 ($57) and a computer with two other classmates to start their own business called Mind Trix Media, specializing in web development and design, printing, marketing and developing mobile applications.
His classmates soon left but Kunene quickly landed his first big client – AAA Shuttles. He had to create a website and develop other projects for the tourism company, all on his own. His deadlines for the projects were very tight and he worked tirelessly to prove himself. Ismail Louw, the owner of AAA Shuttles, paid a 50% deposit for a website.
All was going well. But a knock on the door two weeks into the business turned his life upside down.
It was a summer’s morning on a Saturday in December 2010 and Kunene was printing t-shirts. Two detectives walked in. Kunene assumed that they were friends of the local pastor and they were just coming in for a small chat.
“They started asking me questions of where I was the previous night. Then they told me to take off my rings, belt, shoelaces and I knew something was not right,” Kunene says.
To his horror, the detectives arrested Kunene for murder.
“When I got to the police station, they told me they’d torture me like no-one would believe. Each morning it was another torture,” he remembers.
“The more I cried, screaming that I knew nothing about a murder, the police would continue to torture me, claiming that all criminals cried and said that they knew nothing until they were tortured into confessing. But I was telling them the truth.”
The police would punch him in the ribs and stomach. Once they tired of that, they would cuff his hands behind his back and force him to his knees while standing on the cuffs which pulled and squeezed on Kunene’s wrists.
After spending about five days in a tiny cell, the police released him.
“They told me they found the real culprit who had dreadlocks and they thought I had cut my dreadlocks the night before. I cut my dreadlocks a few years ago,” he says.
Kunene immediately went home and was worried about his first big client. He called Louw explaining his ordeal.
Luckily for Kunene, Louw was sympathetic and he kept the contract. It took about three weeks for Kunene to recover from the torment.
Business soon picked up. Word of mouth helped him gain more clients, partnerships and even make his first million rand. Soon, the awards started rolling in. Kunene made it into the top 10 national finalists of the South African Breweries Kick Start Business Competition. This is where he learned how to run a business and met Virgin’s Richard Branson and other motivational entrepreneurs.
“I learned some of the most basic foundation things from these guys. They kind of taught me the frugal lifestyle. They said ‘keep it silent my friend, live below your means and just study,’” Kunene says.
“Each day, I read for an hour and each time I walk down the road I’ve got audio books in my head and I’m learning more each day I’m reading. And I do some of the things these guys taught me.”
One of the best bits of advice Kunene took from the speakers was for him to go see a psychologist immediately after he made his first million because he grew up poor.
“You’d be like the tender guys, up one moment and the next they’re down,” the businessmen told him.
“You have to do it differently if you want to be like us. First thing, go get yourself counseled, understand what you are in now. Next step, learn about investment. Read more and read more,” Kunene remembers.
One question he asked Branson and co was what wealthy people did with their money.
“They said, we take our money and make more money for us. Then we take the interest and buy the fancy stuff. It’s not our money.”
For now, Kunene is earning his future interest with Mind Trix, the company he started from his mother’s house. It then moved to Loop Street in Cape Town’s central business district, and then moved back to the township where it started. Today, it has clients in Zimbabwe, Angola, Vietnam, Italy and the United States.
When I meet Kunene at their offices on the ground floor of a double-storey house, he tells me he hardly does any of the corporate work anymore, but solely focuses on running the business. He hopes to open five more offices and avoid any more painful misunderstandings w

Accused And Abused

The sun beat down on Marco Broccardo and his fellow walkers, Alex Harris and David Joyce, as they crossed the Empty Quarter, from Oman to the United Arab Emirates. They were determined to make history as the first people to walk unsupported across the Arabian Desert. They traveled light – one set of clothes for 40 days – and sweated in 51 degree Celsius heat amid silent dunes.
As he closed his eyes to feel the breeze on his skin, he remembered a time when the demons of drug addiction led him to dark places that almost ended his life.
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It was downhill from the age of 13. Broccardo experimented with drugs and alcohol on the streets of Johannesburg. It wasn’t long before he was hooked. He broke into houses, stole from employers and sold off anything that wasn’t nailed down in his parents’ house.
“In my most desperate times I would’ve done anything for drugs. If you had told me to kill someone, I would’ve killed someone. I even thought of killing my own parents to get the inheritance.”
He also got tangled in drug cartels, borrowing from one to pay another.
“The Israeli mafia came to my house with guns one night when I was sleeping and my parents were downstairs. They wanted their money. So obviously my parents paid them.”
In an act of desperation he pretended he had been kidnapped, expecting his parents to pay ransom which he would use for drugs. The plan failed when his mother, who had also attempted suicide, stood firm.
“She told them, ‘its fine you can kill him. Just do me a favor, don’t bother me again.’”
Shocked at her response, Broccardo decided that he was going to show them. That night he took an overdose of painkillers. It was the first of three suicide attempts. The second was almost the last.
“I went into the bathroom and I pulled out the razor from my shaver.  I was sitting in the bath, it was a quarter full with water, and I thought ‘let me just end it’.”
Broccardo stabbed his arm, ripped across and cut his femoral artery. Blood sprayed everywhere as he slowly drifted away.
All of a sudden there was a jolt to his heart as the hands of paramedics revived him. He woke up in Johannesburg General Hospital to the angry gaze of his parents. Again he lost consciousness, woke up in theater as doctors put in an artificial vein. The next stop was the psychiatric ward. Over the years he had become a master manipulator who had fooled many psychiatrists. This time the psychiatrist saw through him and sent him to Sterkfontein Psychiatric Hospital, a place for the criminally insane.
“I remember walking into the common area where the TV was and guys were arguing about the TV and what they were going to watch but the TV wasn’t working. I thought to myself, ‘gosh these guys are crazy’, and three weeks later I was arguing about the same thing.”
After six weeks in Sterkfontein, Broccardo was released for a month, for good behavior, to complete a nature conservation course.
“It was the longest I had been clean since I was 13. I didn’t think about using when I was in the bush, I was really enjoying life.”
Soon after his release, he worked at a game reserve in KwaZulu Natal and when things went south, his father got him a job on a plot outside the city. After a brief visit home, his mother gave him money for his journey back.
“I went straight to Hillbrow with the petrol money she had given me and I started using that whole afternoon. And in this process, because the car was a bit messed up, I would phone her from a ticky box (public phone) and tell her that I had gone so far and the car had broken down.”
When the drugs ran out, Broccardo was so desperate he planned to rob a petrol station with his father’s gun. Instead he exchanged the gun for $140 worth of cocaine with a drug dealer.
“As I was driving I started to feel a bit strange and I knew I normally felt that way before I had seizure. I had already had two major car accidents because of seizures. In one, I crushed my legs and was told that I would never play sport again and walk with a limp.”
Suddenly everything went black.
Broccardo woke up on the side of the road surrounded by emergency vehicles and a policeman demanding his name.
In the hospital there was no fury like that of his mother.
“She came up to me and slapped me in the face and she said to me, ‘Why can’t you just die? At least if I knew you were dead, I could bury you and I would know at least you weren’t hurting yourself or anyone else.”
His family sent him to rehab and asked him not to make contact. Broccardo vowed he wouldn’t leave until he got clean.
He spent three years at Noupoort Christian Care Center where he got clean, became a counselor, met his wife and found faith.
“For once, I could be accepted by someone who knew all the bad things I had done and still died for me on the cross… The story of redemption is what my whole life was aiming towards. It changed my life.”
Broccardo spent a few years working in sales and banking but wanted more from life. His dream was to use his story to help addicts.
At the age of 24, Broccardo started Mountain Heights, a center that counsels addicts.
“This crazy idea of climbing mountains and walking across deserts, doing things that are physically challenging and insurmountable, can be overcome. Addiction is just another mountain.”
He struggled to find sponsors, so he started Eurocom, a new media and mobile marketing company, to bankroll his dream.
With backing from Eurocom, Broccardo has climbed three of the seven summits (Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Kosciusko in Australia and Aconcagua in Argentina) and walked across the Arabian Desert though heat and sandstorms. Music, sermons and bible verses kept him going.
“It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life but [while doing] it I hated every minute of it. It was hard, it was backbreaking, it was tiring. There wasn’t a day when I wasn’t counting how many days until it was over.”
At the end of the 1208-kilometer journey, the three men reached the coast of Dubai. They dipped their feet in water and wept.
Broccardo put himself through hell on the streets of Johannesburg and survived to become an entrepreneur. Luckily for him, it didn’t kill him but only made him stronger.

Tag: August 2014

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

A Picture Of Fear That Still Lingers

Accused And Abused

Drug Deep Mountain High