The Smell of Africa

So there I was buying shower gel in my new local supermarket in Jerusalem, when my eye was caught by an African scented variety.  I don’t tend to pay much attention to the flavour of my grooming products but on this occasion – already nostalgic for my old home – I thought this was just the thing for me. As I walked home, I began to wonder exactly what it might smell like. These are the scents that I figured must be in it:

• fume of matatu – visitors from Europe were always amazed that I drove around Nairobi with my windows open in a fug of blue, carcinogenic smoke. Didn’t like to tell them that I feared the windows might fall out if not fully wound down
• sewage scent – provides a nutty, sweet background note, particularly on a hot day
• aroma of roasted goat – sweet, meaty and a bit like roasting lamb but with a more sort of agricultural flavour
• the smell of thunder – the great clouds and downpours of the rainy season were always preceded by that sort of piney smell that means rain is coming and it would be best to get to a makuti-roofed bar from which to watch the thunder and lightning
• essence of woodsmoke – with the exception of air-conditioned offices, I don’t think I was ever more than 10 yards from a fire

So imagine my disappointment on getting home to discover that my Africa shower gel made me smell of rather exotic musky, spicy vanillas. Rubbish.

A New Low for Uwe Boll

more about “A New Low for Uwe Boll“, posted with vodpod

No-one was much interested in my scoop from last year that the man widely regarded as the world’s worst film director was working on a project about the Darfur conflict, provisionally entitled “Janjaweed”. Now the trailer is out, and I for one can’t wait to Uwe Boll’s movie “Darfur”.

Set against the genocide in Darfur, six Western journalists visit a small peaceful village and find its people overshadowed by fear. Hearing that the state sponsored Janjaweed militia is heading to the village, the journalists are faced with a difficult decision – leave and report the atrocities to the world, or risk their own lives and stay in the hope of averting a certain slaughter.

Sure there’s a bit of typo in the trailer, his Janjaweed look like they’ve just arrived from Saudi Arabia and the journalists are much better looking than any journalists I know, but who cares? It’s easy to pick holes in films about Africa. At the end of the day this is an action movie that happens to be set in Darfur. I’m not expecting to come away enlightened about the complexities of the conflict. It’s a bit of fun that helps keep Darfur on the agenda.

And it’s great that Boll got there before George Clooney, who would no doubt have made all the same mistakes but turned it into a serious, campaigning movie with a, you know, message.

However, even I am a little uncomfortable with Boll’s decision to cast actual Darfur rape victims as Darfur rape victims. Boll might reckon this was the best way to generate realistic responses to the Janjaweed’s campaign of ethnic cleansing, but I’m not so sure. Now I’m no expert on the Nations guidelines for this sort of thing but I’m sure they might have something to say about making women re-enact their brutal experiences in the name of entertainment.

A New Low

The Congolese army has been accused many times of brutality. Like so many African armies it is a mishmash of different rebel militias teased into a semblance of a national force, while retaining a certain relaxed approach to battlefield law. The deeply flawed United Nations peacekeeping mission managed to overlook their failings up until this week, when even it withdrew its support. (Things are really bad when a mission that has harboured sex abusers and paedophiles decides enough is enough.)

And now we have fresh allegations of abuses. This time the Congolese army has really outdone itself, using a vaccination programme as cover for an attack, according to a press release from MSF:

Last month, seven vaccination sites operated by the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) came under fire during attacks by the Congolese army against the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Thousands of civilians had gathered at the sites. MSF denounces this clearly unacceptable abuse of humanitarian aid for military purposes.

Fishing Boats Armed to Deter Pirates

 

The Lynn Rival (pic supplied by EU)

Somali pirates are back in the news after kidnapping a couple from Tunbridge Wells (my hometown incidentally) as they sailed their yacht from the Seychelles to Tanzania. I hope they are released safe and sound but I can’t help thinking their course was reckless, given the number of attacks on boats and ships – many bigger and faster than the Chandlers’ Lynn Rival.

Now it emerges that some of these other ships have begun using armed guards. The debate has rumbled on for a long time, and  this recent comment piece at Lloyd’s List shows ends by once again arguing that taking guns to sea solves nothing…

In truth, seafarers are innocent targets in a dilemma that can only be mitigated by unified government naval protection and, ultimately, by solving the complex political woes of Somalia and its neighbours. Encouraging seafarers to shoot back would only endanger seafarers’ lives.

But in a press release that I almost didn’t read, from the EU’s anti-piracy  taskforce,  it seems that vessels are now taking things into their own hands. Gone are the unarmed security teams. Now we have armed fishing boats.

In the afternoon of October 27th 2009, 350 nautical miles east of Mogadishu, Somalia a French Fishing Vessel was attacked by pirates in two attack skiffs. The pirates opened fire on the Fishing Vessel. Her embarked military Vessel Protection Detachment (VPD) fired warning shots after which the pirates broke of [sic] their attack.

This is the inevitable result of our collective inability to come up with ways of tackling Somalia’s problems and cannot lead anywhere good.

Brave Thinking on Darfur

I’ve long admired the work of Alex de Waal, reseacher, author and all round Sudanophile. His work has influenced a lot of my thinking on Darfur and helped me draw my own conclusions on this miserable conflict, thoughts which I’ve distilled into a book (now due to be published in February). However his clear-sighted analysis has often turned him into something of a hate figure for the self-appointed saviours of Darfur.  So it’s nice to see him lauded as a Brave Thinker… for his warnings in connection with the ICC indictments

De Waal warned that al-Bashir was likely to react violently, that rebel groups would be emboldened to violate hard-won peace agreements, that the ICC had no way to enforce its indictment, and that the whole thing would be a spectacle for the benefit of Western audiences and would only further destabilize the country. Sure enough, when al-Bashir’s warrant was issued in March, Sudan shut down human-rights groups and international aid agencies (including Oxfam and Save the Children), seized their assets, and declared, “For us, the ICC doesn’t exist.”

The Birmingham of Kenya

The road into Thika stretched before us. The hot, noon sun made the air shimmer above the Tarmac and to one side the first Jacarandas of the season were bursting into colour. An occasional flame tree added a dash of scarlet to the dusty green acacias that lined the verge. Pineapple orchards filled the hills all around.

Not once, if memory serves, was I minded to think of Birmingham – although it is quite a long time since I’ve been there.

A Very Rash Bet

You may remember that a couple of weeks ago I took issue with the standard, lazy size comparisons used for Darfur. If you bother to check the facts (ridiculous I know) then France and Texas are not nearly as accurate an area comparison as Spain. At the time I offered a prize for the first copy to use the Spain exemplar. So hats off then to Andrew Heavens at Reuters in Khartoum…

The UNAMID force, which still only has 9,900 soldiers and police on the ground out of a promised 26,000, has struggled to cover the remote western region which is about the size of Spain.

The largest block of cheese I can find will be on its way to Meskel Square towers at the first opportunity. Unfortunately, it appears that AFP has managed to go one better. After some clever dick pointed out that Turkmenistan was in fact the most accurate comparison, the following appeared on the wires last week…

Another rebel commander lashed out at African Union and UN peacekeepers, who are struggling to provide security in a region broadly the size of Turkmenistan with just over a third of the 26,000 troops they have been promised.

This raises some important questions. First, what on earth was the AFP Cairo desk playing at last week allowing this sort of nonsense through? Comparing Darfur to Turkmenistan is useful only if you know the size of Turkmenistan, and I’m pretty certain that there are some Turkmenistanis (?) who would struggle to identify their own country on a map. Everyone knows how big Spain is – it’s that bit that is tagged on the side of Europe.

Second, and perhaps most importantly does anyone know what sort of permits I’d need to swim naked to Tuti Island without falling foul of the Sudanese authorities? Presumably I should wait for the holy month of Ramadan to end?

Silver for Sudan

Ismail Ahmed Ismail trains at Khartoum's decrepit stadium

Sudan has been celebrating its first Olympic medal after Ismail Ahmed Ismail battled all the way to the line for an 800m silver. The country’s big hope for a gold, the world number one this year Abubaker Kaki, crashed out in the semis but Ismail’s medal shows Sudan could become a real force in middle distance running. How ironic too that he comes from the Fur people of Darfur, one of the tribes suffering most at the hands of the government. Now he’s a national hero.

Finding George

Nairobi’s slums are filled with hundreds of thousands of people living cheek-by-jowl in tiny shacks. Each of the muddy streets looks the same and within minutes the visiting mzungu is completely disoriented. So finding Barack Obama’s half-brother George was never going to be easy. Especially as he had made a point of telling no-one but his closest friends about his famous relative.

I’d already spent two months trying and failing to trace him. It was sickening to discover that an Italian team from Vanity Fair had simply bumped into him at the Obama family home close to Lake Victoria – a place I must have visited about 10 times.

But in the end it was pretty straightforward. The sprawling slums are just like villages. Ask enough people and eventually you find what you’re looking for. So within an hour or so we were sitting down to nyama choma and handfuls of ugali chatting about Kenya’s medal haul at the Olympics.

Darfur: Not the Size of Texas or France

Poor befuddled readers of newspapers can’t be expected to understand straightforward units of measurement so when it comes to geographical area we journalists have a neat (where neat means hackneyed) trick – compare the subject of the article to things the reader might know. Traditionally this has been the football pitch as in…”the Beckhams’ front porch is the size of three football pitches”.

Naturally this is no good for really big things. For areas of Amazon rainforest felled, the traditional unit of area is Wales. See this prime example…

The challenges here are immense and interlocking: an area the size of Wales is chopped down every year; the burning of so many trees adds hugely to the greenhouse gases linked to global warming; global warming itself threatens to shift the weather system and deny the forest the rain it needs to survive.

When it comes to Darfur there are two conventions for describing its vastness. If writing for a British newspaper, it would be expressed thus…

Unamid is planning to build a base for monitors in Sileia and is running long-range patrols across the territory to show locals that it is serious about their security. But the force only has 9,000 people to look after an area the size of France.

American readers, who presumably aren’t sure of the size of France, get Texas, as in…

The success of the African Union mission is critical to allowing aid agencies to help the 2 million people who have been forced into relief camps, said Nicki Bennett of the British charity Oxfam. Fewer than 7,000 soldiers are assigned to an area the size of Texas, she said, so more troops are needed.

But hang on a minute. Has anyone done the maths? Well it has been a quiet week, and I have. So I give you the following size comparison…

• Texas – 696,200 sq km (wikipedia)
• France – 547,030 sq km (CIA factbook)
• Spain – 504,782 sq km (CIA factbook)
• Darfur – 493,180 sq km (wikipedia)

So there you have it. Darfur is in fact almost 200,000 sq km smaller than Texas. Or a bit more than two Wales smaller than a France. From now on I shall only ever compare its size with that of Spain. And will rather tediously be encouraging my colleagues to do likewise. Or of course they could compare it with 82,196,666 football pitches.

(I’ve got a funny feeling someone may have multiplied the Imperial area of Texas (268,820 square miles) by the number of kilometres in a mile (1.609344) – rather than the number of square kilometres in a square mile – to get an incorrect metric area (giving 432,623 sq km) and a skewed comparison… but who knows?)