Markham Nolan | Literary Mercenary

Things change quickly here. It’s seven years since I’ve been to East Africa, but even in 2003, things were moving quickly.

My first visit was as a greenhorn 21-year-old, working for a tiny Tanzanian NGO.

Those two months were among the most isolated of my life. Internet access was sparing and expensive, but fast where it existed. I wrote emails home in rough form on a .txt file, and took a floppy disc to the local internet cafe to copy and paste it home.  Mobile phones were non-existent. Land lines were appallingly bad, and exorbitantly priced for international calls. This was pre-Skype, if you can imagine that. Shocking stuff.

Just two years later, in 2003, I came back for a sailing event sponsored by Safaricom, Vodafone’s Kenyan guise. I arrived in Arusha this time, to catch up with those I had met the time before, and cadged a lift to Nairobi and on to the coast with another competitor, Rob Allport.

Rob worked with the Maasai as a vet, and we picked up a hitchhiker in red Maasai robes to give him a lift en route to Nairobi. During the detour, I saw another Maasai man sitting squatly on a rock on the side of the road. He was draped in the same tartan-like robes and held a dark herding stick in his left hand as he gazed out over his animals. With his right hand, just as we passed, he dipped inside his robes, and pulled out a Nokia 5110, and proceeded to check his text messages.

In two years, Kenya & Tanzania had gone from being a land of paltry phone connection for the average person to being one where every man who could count goats was hooked up to the grid.

In the seven years since, things have sped up further. The two main operators in Kenya, Safaricom and Zain, are locked in a bitter mobile phone price war, and smartphone growth in East Africa is at rates not seen anywhere in the world.  Phones ping constantly, ubiquitously. The average Kenyan spends 25 per cent of their disposable income on communication, and do their banking, pay bills and open savings accounts using their mobile phones (the largest phone operator became the biggest deposit-taking bank almost overnight when they introduced a service called M-Kesho, allowing phone users put small amounts of money aside for a rainy day). Ireland was once the global leader for mobile payments. Now it’s Kenya.

Before going any further, the word Karibu means ‘welcome’ in Kiswahili, and it’s one you’re likely to hear on a regular basis here.

This post issues after a flying visit to Nairobi, where I arrived on Friday after a long journey from Dublin with delays at both ends. In Amsterdam our engines wouldn’t start. In Nairobi, the visa queue moved with all the urgency of cold honey. Thereafter, things picked up pace. Less than twelve hours after stepping off the plane, I was in Kibera meeting with the Kibera News Network team. KNN film news in Kibera as it happens, videoing the footage on small Flip cameras and uploading their edited clips to Youtube. They’re often the first on the scene, and get some great interviews from major events that would otherwise go unnoticed. They deserve more attention than they get.

The KNN team came to my attention through Map Kibera, one of the projects I’ll be examining in detail as part of a project funded by a Simon Cumbers Grant. ‘What you measure, you’re more likely to improve’, an athlete once told me. Map Kibera has helped civilian teams measure every inch of the Kibera slum, mapping resources, sanitation facilities, black spots for crime and everything in between, quite literally putting Kibera on the map. Go to Google Maps, and Kibera’s a blank, just as it is on Kenyan government maps. It is a vast nebula of humanity, hunkered under a wavy canopy of rusting tin rooves and a hum of commerce, music and motorized mayhem. Nebulous things are hard to map, or so the excuses run.

We spent yesterday talking to several Kiberan residents about some aspects of their lives in the city. I passed on what little filming and photographic skills I had to help them with their interviews, and together we set about putting together some material for an upcoming project of theirs. I also introduced them to two Kodak zi8 cameras donated by the good folks at Storyful, which they’ll add to their arsenal.

There was a group of eleven of us tramping around Kibera at times, so I won’t name everyone, but the KNN team was hugely hospitable. They were fun, welcoming, and rightly proud of their home town and the people within it.

Kibera, for its troubles, fulfils many of the slum sterotypes. The houses are small, dark and close together. The roads are muddy. The sewers run as trenches in the middle of alleyways, shallow and fast in some spots, deep and fetid in others. It’s not a nice way to live at times, and the KNN guys, all Kibera residents, acknowledged the problems their home faces. Their whole raison d’etre is to draw attention to the highs and lows of Kibera life in the hope that the good stuff will be recognised and the bad stuff rectified.

Highlight of the day was meeting a man called Mike Aziz. Mike was a KNN interviewee in a story produced by Joshua on a fire in the area. I recognised Mike and we bumped into him at one point when the KNN guys were filming some material on that topic. He was gobsmacked (as were the KNN crew) that I knew his face from an online video, and we interviewed him in English for the piece.

On to Mombasa, where I’m currently visiting Komaza, a sustainable forestry NGO based in Kilifi. I visited Kilifi in 2003, and plenty has changed. More on that, Map Kibera and the rest a little later.

Editors/producers interested in contacting Markham for material from Kenya & Tanzania, please email Markham (dot) Nolan (at) gmail (dot) com or call +254-732-580-147.

I’m a coffee drinker, you see. Black, two sugars. I have been for a long, long time, and had my most intense cup of coffee back in 2001.

The beans were grown, picked, dried and roasted within 100 metres of where I drank the coffee, in a small house on the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro. I had gone out to volunteer for a small Tanzanian NGO, a wide-eyed soft-palmed child of south county Dublin, naive to the ways of the world. And when I asked for coffee, someone came with a sandcastle bucket full of beans and boiled some grounds in a pot. I didn’t sleep for 36 hours.

But the intensity wasn’t just in the heavy shot of caffeine or the syrupy black aroma, it was in the back story.

In that village of Kilema, near Moshi, I met a man called Henry. Henry was in his seventies, a well-spoken Tanzanian man from the Chagga tribe, who had returned to Kilema after a working life in Dar Es Salaam. Henry had worked in the ministry of finance in Tanzania, and had a greater grasp on macroeconomics, or any economics, for that matter, than I did. I had just finished three displeasing years of law and had escaped my life in Ireland for a jaunt in Tanzania.

As we drank coffee that would blind a heavyweight wrestler, Henry told me about his farm. It was meant to be his pension, a small holding of a few acres on which he grew coffee, the local cash crop . Only the cash crop wasn’t bringing in what it used to. In fact, Henry had reverted to barter, subsistence farming. Coffee yields were down. In their heyday, the fields were producing twice what they now gave up each harvest. From the days of more, more, more, when farmers were encouraged to use poisonous amounts of fertiliser to sate western demand for dark little beans, things had changed. Back then, demand for coffee was high, but supply was lower than it now is. Vietnam had yet to get into the coffee-growing game, and Brazil was producing only a fraction of  what it now puts out. Prices were high.

And organic farming had yet to make an impact. So the chemicals were poured on, stripping the land of its innate fertility to produce more yields, more often. Biodiversity suffered, snakes near disappeared, but no matter. They were churning out the arabica beans to beat the band, and the money was rolling in.

But then Vietnam started doing the same, and the price of a bag of coffee dropped by half. And then we westerners said ‘we want organic’ which meant that fertiliser had to go.

Crops dropped by a quarter as the bleached soil took time to recover from years strung out on heavy chemicals.

Acre for acre, the land was now producing one dollar for every eight it had coughed up at the peak. And Henry, God love him, had retired to meet with a coffee-growing recession, and found himself selling bananas to neighbours to stay alive.

Clichéd as it may seem, I think of Henry’s story nearly every time I buy a bag of coffee. And in a month’s time, I’ll be back on Kilimanjaro again, among the coffee trees, to see how things have changed. Or if they’ve changed at all.

Just a very short note to mention a documentary showing at the IFI this Sunday. Blind Man Walking features Mark Pollock (pictured), the blind adventurer that just won’t quit. I met Mark while doing a feature on him ahead of his race to the South Pole, in which he became the first blind man to reach the bottom of the world on foot. He had previously run several ultra-marathons including the Everest Marathon, the Gobi March and other unmentionably long endurance races. Blizzards and white-out conditions meant little to him because he couldn’t see anyway, he said.

We hit it off, and after he got back, and I’d shifted a business, we started working together on some things including sponsorship pitches, his website, revamping the copy and figuring out the best way for Mark to begin using social media to further his business, despite his blindness. Like everything, he took to it like the proverbial duck, and was tweeting away no end once he got his mitts on an iPhone. Himself and Mick Liddy, with whom he did the Round Ireland yacht race earlier this year, videoblogged their race and the prep for as long as they had battery, all of which is stashed on the team’s facebook page, here.

The documentary will be screened without Mark being present, however, due to a fall he sustained not long after finishing the Round Ireland. Mark’s currently battling away in physio in the UK with his usual can-do outer skin on, just taking every day as it comes, surmounting challenges as they appear. It’s in his nature.

The doco was shot by Ross Whitaker, an award-winning Irish filmmaker and a good friend of Mark’s, and he’ll be doing a Q&A session after the event, which should be interesting. Mark has a capability to talk and talk and talk without any noticeable pause, which makes editing film of him in flow a real challenge. When I made a short intro film for their Round Ireland challenge (below the fold) I had to tell Mark to shut up and stick to the script. Repeatedly. I needed short, snappy, editable soundbites, not ineresting but meandering philosopical observations. That, apparently, was the style that Ross encouraged when Mark was doing diary pieces for the documentary. But they had an hour to fill. I had four minutes.

I watched Mark as he took on the challenge of the Round Ireland, dealing, in a very short timeframe, with the multiple challenges of sponsorship, equipment, and the little challenge of learning to sail from scratch. All the while, he was self-analyzing and seeking out any tiny opportunity for personal growth, and relating fresh obstacles to ones he’d conquered in the past. It was an impressive show, and a small challenge in comparison to walking to the South Pole. And no doubt, rendered in glossy imagery on a big screen, Blind Man Walking will bring all that to life.

Go BOOK IT.

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When I left Ireland to go travelling in 2006, Ireland’s property boom was at its giddy height. People were shitting themselves that if they didn’t buy now, they’d never own a house and end up living under a bridge or, worse yet, with their parents. They were racing each other to get on the property ladder, outbidding the next dupe for grab-bag cardboard box houses in satellite towns a poxy commute from Dublin. (You can see these developments now in Guardian features on Ireland’s ghost-towns – bus tours are imminent). I had no money, and no intention of trying to stretch what I had to buy a malodorous little hutch on the fringe of society, valued at its weight in gold.

So I filled my backpack, my girlfriend did the same, and we headed for South America. Of course, we couldn’t resist the lure of the ladder for long. In Bariloche, Argentina, we did the numbers. And we bought a tent (pictured). Here’s an edited version of our bitchy little missive home.

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After two months on the road, we were beginning to feel like escape artists. Our friends are back home, joining Ireland´s fastest-growing club, Club Property Ladder, and we are off here with nothing to our name but two backpacks so full they are screaming for mercy. But we got nervous.

So we did the mature thing. We invested in a home. Nothing flash, you understand; with the market being the way it is we first-time buyers can´t be choosy. We just reckoned that now is the time to get our foot on the ladder, so that in three years’ time we can trade up for an extra three square feet, three feet nearer Dublin´s city centre, and feel really smug, and maybe even rub it in the noses of people who were a few months later than us and can´t afford to make the jump just yet. Peasants.

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For the last few years I’ve been a solid lurker on the boards.ie photography forum, which is a profound source of photographic help, information, inspiration and the rest.

Rain from Markham Nolan on Vimeo.

Marooned as my garden office temporarily became an island, I got out the camera and started shooting out the door in frustration.

Good thing I didn’t have a gun to hand. Nerdy details over the fold.

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There’s an aul saying that football isn’t life and death – it’s much more important than that. It’s a lazy cliché, but with the post-mortem of Africa’s first world cup, many will toot their horn, saying that football could be responsible for breathing new life into the continent.

In a bar on Friday night, a friend told me how he was amazed at the ubiquity of football when he was working in Ghana, where every flat patch of dust became a soccer pitch, and anything solid and spherical was used as a ball. Football was everywhere, a complete leveller.

The picture above is a genuine African life-and-death soccer situation. The flat patch was, at one stage, the bottom of a dam near the village of Kilema, a coffee & banana plantation area on the lower slopes of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro. The dam was drained after a tragic death where a young boy fell into the waters and drowned, and a separate, safer, area was set aside further uphill for storing water.

The dam floor had been flattened by sediment, and after drainage it became a grassy, level clearing. What was abandoned due to death came alive again as soon as a set of posts were set up, and every evening we were there, the old dam would fill with kids playing soccer until the light faded.  The ball was knackered, the leather worn to scrubby suede, and turning up with a puncture kit and a pump made a Californian friend of mine a local hero.

That’s all I got on this topic, I’m no soccer fan. But I am a fan of Jessica Hiltout’s marvellous video series created ahead of the World Cup. One is embedded here. Go find the rest.

Joy Is Round from THE AMEN PROJECT on Vimeo.