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?)

Chasing Shadows

Today’s Standard splashes on mounting suspicion that someone in Kenya’s anti-terror police unit tipped off Fazul Abdulla Mohammed, a key terror suspect, just as officers were about to swoop. They arrested a family thought to be hosting Fazul in Malindi even as his dinner was cooling on the table. But there was no sign of a man wanted for his role in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya.

This wasn’t the first time Fazul had slipped the net. But what was remarkable was the timing, coming just days before the 10th anniversary of the bombings and on the weekend the BBC World Service was airing its commemorative programme. Police even managed to snatch his laptop containing a pretty revealing diary,(thanks to Shashank for this).

On deciding to undergo jihadi training in Pakistan: “I said to my mother: ‘I have heard that some Comoro young men have graduated from military colleges in Pakistan.’
‘Who told you this?’ asked my mother….’All I want you to do is enroll in the university and to focus on any specialization that you deem appropriate. After you finish your studies, if you get an opportunity for military studies, there is no objection.”…
To be utterly frank, I wished to be a physician. However, I knew that Allah does what he wishes.

So it’s just a pity that my friends with the small earpieces tell me that Fazul was holed up in southern Somalia, protected by the Shabaab, during the weekend in question and was nowhere near the beach resort town of Malindi. The security services case is undermined further by the fact that his three hosts were released on police bond yesterday – unlikely if they were really thought to have been abetting an al Qaeda operative.

Saving Dafur II

My lurch from left-wing idealist living in Britain, to right-wing realist in Africa continues apace. This time it is The Spectator that seems to have nailed the analysis of Darfur…

The exclusive focus on bashing the government has emboldened the rebels, encouraging them to keep up the fight and shun the negotiating table. The peace process, as a result, has collapsed. Though uncontroversial among seasoned Sudan watchers, such a view is politically incorrect in the West, where the debate has been held in the shadows of a glossy campaign long on sentiment and outrage, short on measured analysis.

How to Operate in Sudan

Soldiers wait for President Bashir to arrive in El Fasher, Darfur, last month

Two contrasting views of operating in Sudan. Jennie Matthew of AFP describes her frustration at trying and failing to travel to the Merowe Dam where last week 200 families said they were deliberately flooded out of their homes.

As always, the man from external information couldn’t have been nicer.
– Official: “Merowe dam? Ok. We’ll write a letter to the dam authorities asking if they can take you up there.”
– Me: “Really? You don’t need anything from me? No passport? No photographs?”
– Official: “No, no. Don’t worry.”
An hour later he apologised but now was not a time for journalists to visit.

Meanwhile Blake Evans-Pritchard reckons that journalists only have themselves to blame:

We were talking particularly about journalists that have got into trouble in Sudan in the past, to which I voiced a hypothesis that this was more because they were loud, arrogant and failed to understand the Sudanese psychology. It is not difficult to avoid getting thrown out of the country if you know how, and maintain at least a couple of friends in high places.

Sudan is probably my favourite of the countries in my patch. It is a fascinating story and a very different part of Africa to the places where I spend most of my time. But there’s no doubting it’s not the easiest of places to operate. The government is starting to learn the value of the international media but things are changing very slowly. Of course the best solution is to visit frequently, build up personal relationships and work out who can help you and when.

But often that’s not possible. So here are my golden rules for getting around:

• Always allow about double the time you would normally for pretty much anything
• Always use a trusted fixer and pay them ridiculous sums if it means they will dump their current client for you
• Never assume you will come away with the stories that you originally planned to write. They will mostly fall through, but you will probably get something better anyway
• Don’t expect anyone to answer a coldcall. A text message first goes a long way
• Don’t bear an uncanny resemblance to the previous BBC stringer who got kicked out
• Never attempt sarcasm with the good people from the Humanitarian Aid Commission. Particularly when denying you work for the BBC. Particularly at airports in Darfur. You will find yourself frogmarched off the plane while startled passengers look on (according to a good friend)
• Never, never – not under any circumstances, ever – point out to a government official that Allah probably has better things to do with his time than oversee the scheduling of interviews or production of travel permits (as my friend once did when told for the umpteenth time his travel permit would be ready tomorrow, insh’Allah – God willing). That is poor behaviour on many levels

Phone 4 Me

Has anyone tried the Sonim XP1 phone, which Time seems to be claiming as a “tough gadget”? My current Samsung U600 is pretty wrecked after four months. Its screen is scratched to pieces after a couple of trips to Sudan, a week in the DRC and a lot of battering in my pocket. Battery life is lousy too. My Motorola has just given up the ghost after being dropped in Khartoum, although it never really recovered from falling into an open sewer in Kibera in its first week.

I don’t need a phone that survives at -20C or can be driven over. But a casing that keeps out dust, and a no-glare anti-scratch coating on the screen looks pretty useful.

You Know You Have Been a Mzungu in Kenya Too Long When…

1. “Very OK” has become a standard response to a variety of questions
2. Matatus are no longer a welcome bit of colour on the roads. They are a pain in the arse
3. You have stopped picking out politicians who might be Kenya’s best hope
4. You can’t remember the last time you filled your car’s petrol tank. 1000bob will do you just fine
5. You don’t need to look at the Java House menu any more. You know it off by heart
6. You prefer White Cap to Tusker, even though there is no discernible difference
7. You have an idea for a business that involves either beads or safari holidays
8. You have learned enough Swahili to say, “Come here,” “Mow the lawn,” and “No, not like that.”
9. You visit any new restaurant in Nairobi within a week of it opening
10. If you knocked down a small child in your car, you know you wouldn’t stop. Unless it was white