journalism

Homage to the humble hashtag

March 27, 2012 – 8:03 pm

Sometimes I dig the the evolution of language. But I'm old-fashioned at heart.

Two vertical lines, two horiontal lines. A humble hash. Up until the age of ten, this symbol meant the start of a game of noughts and crosses (or tic-tac-toe, or Xs & Os). As the phones in our house changed from rotary units to push-button ‘modern’ phones, the hash key was a useless appendix in the right lower corner of the keypad.

Now, it’s part of the daily web lexicon, even for those of us who don’t use hexcodes for colouring in. Mental. Hashtags are now rallying points, way markers and content filters for Twitter users. They’re like a firework going up to signify the start of a story for journalists. ‘Kony2012′ is meaningless, but #Kony2012 leads me into a new, interwoven world of current affairs controversy. The rallying point utility is interesting, because the hashtag started as a simple way of organising a group – Chris Messina being the first person (apparently) to stumble upon its utility.

The twitter world has taken something simple, quietly ubiquitous and extremely innocuous and turned it into a central navigation tool for sifting through the global glut of information. It’s worked brilliantly. Its simplicity is breathtaking. Any tweet can contain a word, and it’s an ephemeral nothing, a fart in the wind. But put ‘#‘ in front of it, and it becomes part of something much more tangible and permanent. It can #occupy a space in history.

Not all things shift so smoothly from old and innocuous to new and revolutionary. Not everything is as lean as the hashtag. As we discussed how we need to deliver news content to our professional clients yesterday at HQ, we got a little tied up in terminology. In the process of defining how we deliver content to professional clients, according to their varying needs, we’ve been assigning new definitions to old words, shoehorning brand new processes into old names we’re familiar with to help us sort and navigate. But things change so rapidly, we quickly find the old definitions restrictive and confusing. What’s a ‘channel’ in the new online context? Are we pushing ‘posts’ or ‘stories’ to clients, or will it be all one large stream of content filtered by tag, or several streams filtered by theme? How many different kinds of tags are there? Are tags topics?

None of this confusion is surprising, given that journalism has moved away from providing a finished product to allowing people see  a transparent process. Effectively we’re lifting the bonnet of the car for the first time and showing the world. Except, despite the fact that everyone knows how to drive it, but few have ever thought about how the machine really works, or what bits go with what names.

It’s likely that we’ll never get rid of all the ‘legacy terminology’, even though it might be best, philosophically, to just chuck it all out the damn window and redefine everything from scratch.  ITV have done a nice job of breaking the mould when it comes to presenting news. Their new site was created by Made by Many, and in one of two blog posts on the process, they describe the site brief as one which:

“…left behind the Gutenberg-era baggage of ‘pages’, ‘articles’ and ‘editions’ that most news websites haven’t been able to shake off, as well as reworking some proto-web typologies like ‘navigation’, ‘liveblogging’ and ‘galleries’.

Yup. That’s all good. It’s part of the evolution away from the story as a static, finished unit, away from the traditional structures of journalism to concentrate on the grain of current relevance, and how we present that, and pad it with context.

Ironically, it’s an old way of thinking too, albeit one that the public hasn’t been necessarily used to. Look at how the wires worked for editors & journalists for years. Not complete stories. Chunks of story. The alert first … mfl … the most recent chunk …. mfl …. then the next chunk …. mfl …. until eventually the story ran dry and someone assembled the ‘definitive version’. But we never presented it this way to the public, because it was awkward to filter, and the public were used to consuming their news in one big serving like a balanced meal. Until Twitter. Until news became a finger-lickin’, day-long buffet. But the filtering problem remained.

That’s why the humble hashtag is so impressive. It is the ultimate in organisational efficiency, a single non-linguistic, non-numeric character that has brought calm to the chaos. It will never be matched. For years it sat there on my phone. Dormant. Waiting. All around it, information exploded. The number of sources exploded. And then Twitter comes along, with its atomic deluge of real-time data, each one individually constrained by 140 characters but yearning for discipline, begging for the imposition of order so that it could belong to something with meaning.

‘This’, said the hashtag, ‘is my moment’.

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journalism

Worth losing sleep over

March 16, 2012 – 9:29 pm

Man, busy few weeks. Busy year, actually. In the space of a week recently at Storyful we had Super Tuesday, two new staff coming on board, a new site design tested and put live, a new app tested and put live and all the usual stuff of daily newsgathering. The team I work with have been working like maniacs recently, putting in silly hours. They’re a phenomenal group. But, yeah. We’ve been busy.

As I woke up on Wednesday, our CTO Paul Watson, who’s off on paternity leave, shared an article that really hit home. It was entitled: ‘What’s love got to do with it? For startups, everything.’, a post from Gigaom, detailing how sites like Fab.com and Kickstarter found their mojo by refocusing on what they were really passionate about. Given that last few weeks have been an energy-sapping but exhilirating blast in Storyful, the post was well timed.

We’ve found our groove this year, by focusing on what we love at Storyful – telling stories and helping others do the same, getting closer to the truth, and helping our clients do the same.

As a group, there’s a buzz when someone finds the hinge-point of a story hinges and making connections. We don’t necessarily love being first, we love being the first to best bit of a story. When we can hook a professional client up with contacts or content that help them blow a story wide open, that is a buzz.

We’re in a process of evolving the site and our processes to allow readers and others who want to be part of that journalistic process to join in more deeply. We love the concept of open, collaborative journalism, and how that opens up new worlds to traditional media. We love working with organisations who value innovation and want to push the envelope of how journalism is practised. And we love the people in the field who we’ve met who have the potential to be part of it and change the trajectory of stories.

That’s a lot of ‘we love’. Going back to the GigaOm article, and Paul’s tweet – do ‘I love’ what I do?

For a journalist who came from newspapers & magazines, from film photography and traditional editing, I love what I’ve learned in the process of shaping and iterating a live news website. I love that in the past month I’ve been speaking to platform pioneers from Bambuser, Soundcloud, YouTube and more, and their counterparts in traditional pillars of news media, from The New York Times to Channel 4. I love interacting with the likes of Afghan twitter journalist @combatjourno, or Syrian video activist @AlexanderPageSY, or Ugandan journalist Rosebell Kagumire, who set us straight on the recent #Kony2012 debacle. (Ain’t that latest development a hoot?) They’re the ones closest to the story, at the vanguard of social newsgathering.

Sometimes it’s exhausting. Sometimes fruatrating. My hair’s greyer than it was two years ago. But what I’ve always loved about writing and storytelling is finding a new way to say something, a different way to tell the story. That’s what Storyful’s all about, so it’s what I do every day. Lucky me.

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travel

Real-time Nils

September 25, 2011 – 1:47 pm

Meet Nils. Nils had skin like soaked leather and more stories than the Bible. The wrong side of 70, he had been a teacher, an organic pig farmer, a baker. He had lived lives. Our paths crossed at the end of my first holiday this year. We had flown from Dublin to Greece, rented a five-year-old 50-foot charter boat and pottered about three islands near Athens for five days when we met Nils . Nils had been sailing for two years, bobbing south from the east coast of Denmark to the Greek islands in a 17-foot bathtub. He has owned the boat since 1974. His children, now in their thirties, learned to sail in it. Since leaving Denmark, he had sailed the canals of Europe and emerged into the Med, and on the way met with charity and criminality and all manner of humanity. Nils had not been home in a long, long time and wasn’t sure when he’d see Denmark again.

For two years he’d been living on his barely sailable boat without water, without a toilet and by the looks of things, without much sunscreen. A friend  had helped him sail the Musse-to,  no bigger than a luxury couch, direct from Menorca to Sardinia in waves bigger than a house. And when we reversed into a med-moor spot at Korissias on Kea, we tied up between Nils’s poky bathtub and an 80-foot superyacht. Nils had a bottle of cheap brown liquor stashed under the cockpit bench. The superyacht had a fully-stocked bar on deck. We were somewhere in between. When we reversed into the gap, Nils offered us advice and caught a mooring line. The super-yachties offered us angry looks and contempt.

Sailing is funny in the variety of folks it attracts, and despite being a massive stereotype in itself, there’s no pigeon-holing sailors. A small boat does not equal a humble human and a superyacht sailor is not necessary a big-shot asshole. With Nils, what you saw was what you got. We spent an hour chatting on the dock on a Friday morning, me hung over and sweating, he unflustered and in a pair of black boxer shorts. He told me about his favourite free-range sow and his theories of freedom, the delinquent kids he taught and chased across Denmark, his wife and kids and his generous state pension. He told me how he had no house, no car, just some furniture in storage and some good friends back home. We talked about money and the joy of good coffee and the crude, salt-bleached tent that protected him from the sun.

Then I went to make some coffee and Nils came and joined us for that and we talked some more.

I spend my days scanning social media for news and contacts, collating stories from afar via YouTube and Twitter, helping journalists around the world get closer to stories they would have reported on from a hotel rooftop in the past. I connect with sources and witnesses around the world via every online means available to me. My conversation with Nils came on the last day of a week on a boat, with no email, no phone, no internet, no nothing – I was in a state of blissful disconnect. His stories were the best I’d heard all year. Although I monitor the most interesting stories from around the world in ‘real time’ every day, spending some real time with an interesting person is always more rewarding than any virtual connection.

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Africa

Sunk

September 10, 2011 – 10:33 pm

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, mostly due to full-time duties over at Storyful.com. Today something happened that linked the last year at Storyful and my trip to Africa immediately preceding that together – the tragedy in Zanzibar.

It was the main news story of the day, a boat carrying 800 people which capsized, tossing them all into the sharky waters between the Zanzibari islands of Unguja and Pemba. I’ve been to Zanzibar twice, learned to scuba off the beach where today hundreds gathered hoping for news of relatives and friends. And what’s most bizarre is that a year ago, I sat drinking cocktails on the beach in one of Stone Town’s favourite tourist bars, watching the very ship that capsized on Saturday being unloaded and reloaded by hand.MV Spice Islander - the fatal ferry

As you can see in the pic, the boat was driven up on the beach, with its ramp lowered onto the sand. Guys shuttled back and forth on the sand carrying on their backs barrels, fridges, carpets and stacks of coloured mattresses (which became liferafts for today’s survivors). Trucks backed down to the beach, and the team of ad hoc beach dockers hoiked superhuman loads down across the soft sand, onto the rusty metal ramp and into the bed of the ship.

When the name of the ship was mentioned, I found it hard to believe that they had the name right. Putting together our news alerts for Storyful clients, I contacted Twitter sources in Zanzibar seeking confirmation that the boat was the Spice Islander, a craft clearly not build for carrying the number of passengers that were on board. Zanzibar is served by numerous ferries from the mainland, all of which are sea-buses with rows of seats. Most are high-speed catamarans. The Spice Islander, by comparison, was an ocean-going flatbed truck. But sure enough, the sources came back confirming it (despite hoax pics suggesting a different vessel had sunk).

When we watched it from the bar, we never saw it fully-loaded, and it was gone the next morning. Boston architect/designer Joe Liao, on the other hand, looks like he took a trip on the Spice Islander at max capacity, which is something that the spirited traveller in me would, at one point, have been happy to do, even though I’d be looking back on it now considering it to have been a lucky escape.

It’s quite bizarre to think that any number of those workers may have been on board today, and the spectacle of its loading, which we sat marvelling at over vodka sundowners, was its fatal undoing. Zanzibar’s a small place, and such a high death toll on the island will send reverberations around the community there for years to come.

 

 

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Africa Simon Cumbers travel

The Town that Doesn’t Exist

December 30, 2010 – 2:11 pm

With all the mania since I’ve been back from Africa, I never got around to posting this piece, on my time in Kibera. I’m busy working with Storyful at the moment, hence my time’s limited. Incidentally, there’s a Viewfinder feature on the people mentioned in this piece on Storyful right now. Go check it out.
Sunday Business Post, November 7, 2010

In the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, up to a million people live in a place that doesn’t exist. It does not appear on any government maps. It receives the bare minimum of services.

Officially, this city within a city is an uninhabited ‘forest’.

But the residents of the Kibera slum are no longer happy to be anonymous. Using free social media technology such as YouTube, they’re doing what no one else will: putting themselves on the map. read more »

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Africa Aid/Development economics travel

Trade delegation

October 4, 2010 – 2:36 pm

Heading north-east to Thika to interview a coffee cooperative, I took a matatu (Hiace bus) from central Nairobi early on a Thursday morning. As I headed off, I had no idea that the road I took would be one of the most interesting things I observed that day. The ‘Thika Road’ has acquired legendary status in the Kenyan press. It is being seen as a major victory for the Kenyan government, a sign of Kenya’s movement into the future. When it is finished, sometime in 2012 if the hype is to be believed, it will become a main artery to the north-east from the Kenyan capital. There is no doubt that it will be one of the best roads in the country.

Despite only a few hundred metres being visibly paved with tarmac at this stage, it is already being hailed as a shining jewel in the Kenyan infrastructure, one other African countries hope to mimic. But it’s also a triumph that the Kenyan government can take little credit for.

The smart move, it seems, has been to get the Chinese build it, to delegate the job.

SinoHydro are overseeing the project, and their countrymen are clearly visible in their blue overalls, dotted among groups of Kenyan labourers as foremen, or driving shiny 4X4s.

What’s completed of the road, or even that which is in a halfway state, is of good quality. The road network at large, in comparison, is a slapdash criss-cross of pockmarked byways, and reflective of that is the battered national fleet. All vehicles become old before their time, aged by the terrain and kept alive through the palliative care that passes for mechanical maintenance here.

The sight of a Mini Cooper, of which I’ve seen only one, is a bizarre folly. Among the clapped-out, or soon-to-be clapped out vehicles bouncing around Nairobi, a glitzy, expensive little hatchback built for smooth city streets makes little sense at all.

But the Thika road will add to the Tsavo Highway (The Nairobi-Mombasa stretch known as the ‘China Road’) a second high-standard stretch of motorway across Kenya, built largely by Africa’s favourite trade partner – the Chinese. To overly compliment the Chinese influence puts one at risk of belittling African workers, their ineptitude an inferred corollary of the efficiency and capacity of the high-powered immigrants.

A more optimistic analysis would suggest that Kenya may merely have spotted a good thing, a source of skills transfer and, at the same time, infrastructure. Much-needed infrastructure.  Kenya has a long way to go to bring its road network up to scratch, by employing Chinese help to get it done, the by-product could be a drastically upskilled construction force. And that model is replicable across a variety of sectors.

And to the cynic, it highlights the continuance, best use and positive reversal of a tactical choice that has been a long-standing favourite here, from colonial times on to the present day. Delegation.

But that simplifies things far too much. The fact is, China and Kenya’s trade relationship pulls them ever tighter together as time passes. It has done more to enable commerce and development, the visible sort, than anything other international intervention on a surface level. Mobile phones are now ubiquitous, many of them cheap Chinese knock-offs of familiar designs. Their ubiquity has led to a price war between operators, opening their use up further to customers. The number of motorbikes on the streets has increased by a factor of five, nearly all of them ersatz Chinese brands that would struggle to sell a single unit in Ireland or the US, where top-line marques have things cornered off. The short-lived phones, the bikes, and the tuk-tuks that now pepper the cities, are an environmentalists nightmare. There is no way of recycling end-of-life phones in Kenya, meaning they end up on the side of the road, leaching heavy metals into the watercourse, and  all of the bikes are two-stroke affairs, spewing particulate matter into an already smoggy atmosphere.

But they are a new vector to prosperity for many Kenyans. Someone who can stockpile enough Kenyan shillings to buy a motorbike can become a revenue-generating piki-piki motorcycle taxi driver. Phones allow access to markets (an anomalous term – see this quasi-relevant post) and save on unnecessary journeys, a godsend when two valuable hours or more could be lost making a redundant trip by foot.

So the bikes, the phones and the roads (along with myriad other examples including the toilet roll in the header shot) are all representative of something that China has cottoned on to ahead of all other countries: Africa is not merely a pauper continent, it is an extremely valuable market. The margins may be slim and the RPU low, but there are millions of people on the continent, heretofore abandoned by global commerce.

Kenya may not have oil, it may not have strategic importance, but it has 40 million consumers and a growing middle class. And despite our prolonged ‘engagement’ with the African continent in Europe and America, China somehow got to them first.

Markham is on a prolonged journey through Kenya and Tanzania partly funded by a Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund grant.

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Africa journalism Simon Cumbers travel

Slumming It

September 21, 2010 – 6:16 am

Before I am lambasted, a caveat. The phrase ‘slumming it’ is haughty and deplorable at the best of times. I use it here in knowing irony that it’s been chosen as a Facebook photo caption by more than one ignorant gap year student or blundering slum tourist who’s pointed and shot at the slums. And in my short time working with the guys in Kibera, there was a steady trickle of conspicuous white people up on the railway tracks, snapping away at ‘chocolate city’, the nickname given the view of rusty corrugated iron rooves of the slum.

The debate over slum tourism, poverty tourism – call it what you like – provides rich pickings. There’s a pretty comprehensive digest of it here. And it crept up on me while I was walking home after doing some food shopping in the local supermarket about ten days ago.

I’ve been staying a ten-minute walk from Kibera. At 7am, the road outside the house is a conveyor belt for Kibera residents heading to work in the city or the surrounding suburbs. They pour out in the early morning, on foot and in matatus, and commute back in the evening. We were walking with the evening tide of people: myself, a student doctor from the UK, an English artist, and two Irish lads out for a short voluntourism stint, combined with a climb of Mount Kenya.

I had been in Kibera for the last few days, meeting with the Map Kibera and Kibera News Network teams and doing some work with them on editing and shooting stuff in Kibera. The Irish lads were keen to go and ‘see’ Kibera. The doctor and the artist both had things they wanted to ‘do’ in Kibera. She was doing some work in a clinic in the Kiberan suburb of Ushirika, and the artist wanted to meet Maasai Mbili and establish a link with them for a future project.

In a knee-jerk, I found myself extending an invitation to the ‘doers’ to join me, and almost in the same breath, trying to dissuade the other two from going in at all.

‘There’s really nothing to see,” I told them, uttering at once the truth and a complete lie. Kibera is just a town, after all, made famous not for sights nor history but primarily for its poverty. Of course, I had found Kibera a fascinating, visually compelling place, and had been viewing it through a camera lens for days as I filmed with KNN. It is colourful, vibrant and different. So to say that there was nothing to see made me a complete hypocrite.

But it spoke to my gut motivations. I’m not in favour of having a quick, purposeless gawp at relative poverty. If that’s what you go to do, all you will see is poverty, you won’t get any context.  If a rich American tourist strutted through my back garden taking photos without permission or without bothering to stop and say hello, I’d heave a plant pot at his skull and feel justified in doing so. If he was invited in by a neighbour and was genuinely interested in something about me, I’d probably put on some coffee.

In working with the KNN guys, I was able to interact, learn and contribute, much as the doc and the artist would be doing. I gave back, in terms of advice on editing, camerawork and planning. I helped the KNN organisers establish links with a major international NGO. I also felt very uncomfortable using my camera unless the guys gave me the go-ahead, and really didn’t feel comfortable taking obvious, cliched shots that one might expect to come away with after days spent in Kibera. It felt wrong, so I didn’t do it.

If you read Brian Ekdale’s ‘Before you go (if you must)’ points on visiting Kibera, one of the more striking directions he gives is: ‘Leave your camera at home’. Dead right. Had I done that? No, but then again, my purpose for going in was to document. So I couldn’t leave it. But at the same time, I wasn’t going in just to grab a few snaps and head off to Dorman’s coffee shop for a latte and a contemplative sigh. I’d got to know a gang of great people who I hope to stay in touch with for a long time to come. I had respected their work before arriving, and it was great to be part of that.

TMS Ruge puts it most concisely: “You really want change? Put down the camera, walk up to anyone in that slum, get to know them.” It’s a good threshold, and one I can say I’ve met. And in doing so, I pushed beyond the veneer that the snapping tourist sees. Not far, mind, Kibera is a nuanced, complex place, and like any neighbourhood, you’d have to live in it for a long time to ‘get’ it.

A few days in an area does not make one an expert, nor any kind of authority.  But having spent a week in Kibera, I’m beginning to understand how to begin to understand it. And understanding that’s where I’m at is very good beginning.

-ends-

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Africa coffee freelance Simon Cumbers travel

Strange Brew

September 18, 2010 – 3:37 pm

When it comes to coffee, Kenyans don’t know what they’re selling. Their coffee is among the best in the world, but most locals here have no idea. Solomon Kamau took me on a walkabout of his coffee co-operative this week near Thika, about an hour north of Nairobi. It provides around 8,000 smalhold farmers with processing and support for their coffee crop, with enough trees in their extended network to produce 8million kilos of beans in a good year.

They’re aiming to sell their coffee directly to the coffee consumer overseas in the coming months, because by going direct, you cut out the middleman, and the farmer gets more money. So says Kamau.

But Kamau, general manager of the co-op, doesn’t drink coffee. His farmers don’t drink coffee. Kenya, on the whole, doesn’t drink coffee.

And that could be a real problem for the coffee industry here.

Kenya is a tea society, from the milky, sweet massala brew I had while waiting for Kamau in Thika, to black gingery stuff, and everything in between. Coffee, in comparison is costly and unpopular. The growth of the middle class in Kenya means that its consumption is on the up, but I’ve been told that a lot of the bagged coffee in stays on supermarket shelves so long that it goes bad before it ever has a chance to be brewed.

Where I’m staying, the staff who do drink coffee are instant coffee drinkers. When I bought a small percolator and started making real coffee in the kitchen, there was a lot of inquiring as to how this odd little machine worked. The results spoke for themselves. I felt like a missionary, seeking conversions in unspoilt territory.

But back to the farmers, and the co-op manager who don’t drink coffee. Kamau and I talked about growing the beans, and the grading of the beans, and what difference you might get in terms of taste from one end of the scale to the other.

Kamau, pointing from a lovely, obvious AA-grade bean to a manky, gangrenous-looking little peaberry, confidently told me ”There is no difference in taste”. Coffee coinnoisseurs would disagree, as would the global coffee market. AA coffee beans, on a typical day, can fetch five dollars a bag or more. AA beans are the coffee stereotype we know and love, a smooth, consistent brown oval with a delicate ‘S’ mark down the middle. TT-grade beans, in comparison, look like picked scabs or excised warts. If you opened a bag and it was full of TT beans, you’d send it back with a compensation claim for nervous shock.

The look of the bean, and the taste when roasted, are among those things that  coffee traders lfind incredibly important, and it’s what guides their bidding. And sure enough, when I went to a coffee auction last week, roughly a million tonnes of coffee was raffled off. The coffee that tasted like armpit (according to one trader) and looked like crushed beetles was all but given away.

But back to the tea-drinking coffee farmer. Imagine, for a second, an Irish potato farmer who didn’t eat potatoes, and instead ate only pasta. It seems ridiculous. Or a Chinese man, standing knee-deep in his paddy field, who had never tasted rice. Would you buy their product? Would you trust them to know how to grow what you wanted?

I asked Kamau what made a good coffee bean, how you could get a crop to produce consistent quality. The answer came in basic agricultural terms. Fertiliser. Good husbandry. And, to their credit, they are looking into the new Batian variety, a hardy plant that is disease- and drought-resistant. They also splice one strain of coffee plant with a good root system with another that produces a better bean. But how that relates to a cup of cappuccino isn’t even a mystery, it’s a totally alien concept.

Educating Kenyan farmers about the value of their crop, and what makes a good bean, thence a good cup, will be part of the process in bringing the industry along. At the top, the marketeers are already being upskilled, with American taste experts flying in to help the people selling the coffee understand what they’re selling and how to tell the a-grade espresso bean from the Maxwell House mank, and market accordingly. The marketeers are at the top of the coffee tree. The knowledge has yet to make its way down to the roots.

Markham is on a prolonged journey through Kenya and Tanzania partly funded by a Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund grant. Editors/producers looking to contact Markham for material or contributions from Kenya should email markham [dot] nolan [at] gmail [dot] com, or text +254 732 580 147

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Africa podcast Simon Cumbers travel

God’s Cabbie

September 7, 2010 – 9:40 pm

It’s amazing what business prospects strangers will pitch to you in East Africa. While walking along the street, I’ve been given the option to sponsor the university education of total strangers, and help them fund major business investments, often within minutes of having met someone. And for that reason, I’m out.

I had another Dragon’s Den experience on the road from Mombasa to Kilifi last week. Komaza, the NGO I was visiting in Kilifi, had recommended a driver to pick me up at Mombasa airport, and Osito appeared when I walked off the plane, friendly and prompt.

We chatted for the journey, and when Osito heard I was a journalist, and better still, one shooting video, he got excited. He hoped that I’d be able to film a music video for his Gospel group, or, better yet, find them a sponsor. I didn’t have time or money to fulfil his wishes on the spot, but we recorded a bit of his singing in the hope I could put it to some use.

Have a listen to Osito.

Nota Bene: This podcast was edited at midnight after a long day tramping around Kibera, while waiting for videos to render in Final Cut. Apologies for levels, popping, etc.

Markham is on a prolonged journey through Kenya and Tanzania partly funded by a Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund grant. Editors/producers looking to contact Markham for material or contributions from Kenya should email markham [dot] nolan [at] gmail [dot] com, or text +254 732 580 147.

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Africa podcast Simon Cumbers

Long Train Running

September 5, 2010 – 8:15 am

I’ve done two bona fide ‘classic’ journeys in my time travelling. The first was a slow boat along the coast of Patagonia, which didn’t go exactly to plan and now this, the Mombasa-Nairobi train journey. The train is an old iron snake, split into first, second and third classes, with those up front having cabins and access to a dining car for meals. €36 buys you a first-class ticket, 13 hours of relative comfort, and a 500-kilometre passage from the sweltering coast up to Kenya’s capital on the Maasai steppe.  That’s good value.

‘Classic’ travel denotes a certain olde-world charm, a sense of nostalgia. It’s a warm reminiscence of a simpler time before digital displays on train platforms, laminated plastic timetables and the swiping of smartcards. It’s steam and smoke, and polished chrome.

Of course, any owner of a ‘classic’ car will tell you that classics break down on a regular basis, are slower and less efficient than modern cars, and unless kept immaculately, demand that you sacrifice some comfort for the sake of aesthetics.

All this was present in spades when I arrived at Mombasa. I had already received a phonecall warning me not to turn up on time for the 7pm train, which would not be there, so I arrived at 8pm as per revised instructions, and would find myself hanging out on the platform until well after 2am the next morning, in hopeful expectation of a train appearing out of the dark.

When I arrived, there was a singsong going on, with a teacher from Kaugi Primary School on the guitar leading 40 or so primary school children in some folksy hymns. I took out my sound recorder to capture some of it, and drew a crowd (pictured above).

The podcast below gives a better impression of it, so I’ll leave you to listen to it.

Thirteen hours on a train is not something I’m accustomed to. The train bumped happily along the tracks, and sleeping was akin to lying down on a bouncy castle full of sugar-mad kids at a birthday party. You were gently rocked, not in the typical back-and-forth, but vertically up and down. Similarly, I felt seasick for the first six hours at the far end, having grown accustomed to the movement underfoot.

In Nairobi now for the next while, and looking forward to meeting some interesting groups of people over the coming days.

Markham is on a prolonged journey through Kenya and Tanzania partly funded by a Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund grant. Editors/producers looking to contact Markham for material or contributions from Kenya should email markham [dot] nolan [at] gmail [dot] com, or text +254 732 580 147.

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