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.

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.

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.

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.

No buses go into Kibera.

Public transport deposits people at the fringe of this giant slum.

The few roads that penetrate the periphery narrow after a few hundred yards to become pedestrian paths.

On the interior, there are no paved surfaces; every track is, at best, packed mud underfoot, coated with brown slime when it rains. In many areas, it’s compressed garbage and organic waste, human and otherwise.

Pedestrians dodge their way through the narrow lanes, ducking under the tin eaves of wattle-and-daub houses, skipping over open sewers and around playing children. Kibera is a maze of pathways, a hilly, mud brick labyrinth of streets with no names.

There are no street signs, no directional pointers, making it nearly impossible to navigate for anyone unfamiliar with its contours and landmarks. Buying a map of Nairobi won’t help: ibera is simply not there. Outsiders need insiders to find their way around.

‘‘You get somebody who will guide you inside.

Otherwise, if you are looking for a place and you do not have someone to direct you, you will get lost,” says Douglas Namale, a Kibera resident involved in mapping the massive slum. ‘‘Kibera is not seen anywhere on the map. It is not classed as a place where people are living. If you go looking at any of the maps we have of Nairobi, Kibera is seen as a jungle.”

The name Kibera derives from a Nubian word, kibra, which means ‘‘forest’’. After World War I, the land on which Kibera now stands was forest, granted as living space to Nubian warriors, proxy fighters used by English settlers.

Kibera grew informally, with other Kenyans renting from the Nubians, and the land became subdivided, parcelled smaller and smaller as the population grew. Partly because of its embarrassing colonial history, Kibera has seen development pass it by.

Its existence is barely acknowledged by Kenyan authorities any more. Services are spartan, the gaps filled by a loose matrix of charities and non-governmental organisations. Land rights are non-existent.

By not recognising the town or its residents’ right to land ownership, the government largely evades responsibility for it.

For somewhere that doesn’t exist, Kibera makes headlines often enough, and mostly for the wrong reasons. Trains periodically derail on the line that cuts it in two, rolling over houses in the process.

Fires romp through the tightly-packed houses unchecked, leaving nothing behind. Bodies are dumped there, often a result of murders from areas outside Kibera, but the stigma of violence has been impossible to shake ever since riots in the wake of the 2007/08 Kenyan elections.

Bad news is as synonymous with Kibera as open sewers and grubby street urchins.

However, pro-active Kiberans are forcing outsiders to look at their home in a new way, and using new media to take their story to a global audience.

Two of these, the Kibera News Network (KNN) and Map Kibera, have begun filing local news reports online via YouTube, and mapping the slum using open-source geographical technology, opening up an impermeable urban jungle for the first time. In doing so, they’re colouring in the black-and-white image that most people have of the slums.

Google ‘Kibera News’, and you’ll find short films from the KNN staff. Whenever news breaks in Kibera, KNN volunteer reporters head to the site armed with small hand-held Flip cameras.

The team are all Kibera residents, locals of the 13 suburbs within the slum.

None of them receives any pay for their work, and some have small businesses or work other casual jobs.

Amateur as they might be, their reporting skills, coupled with local knowledge and a passion for their hometown, mean they are able to get greater detail than any of the professional Kenyan networks, which gloss over slum life in broad strokes.

Rather than report an outbreak of fire, for example, the KNN reporters link the fires to problems of informal (read: stolen) electrical connections or poor education on fire safety.

While other stations report only the extremes, the disasters or stories of escape from the slum, KNN’s tales of everyday life give Kibera a more human face.

On their YouTube channel, you’ll find the tale of Jey Jey, a local jeans designer, next to stories of how Scientologists are using the Scouts to infiltrate the townships.

With their small cameras, they visit clinics offering circumcision as an HIV/ Aids measure and internationally renowned artists living in the slum, but then will move right on to a cover the opening of a new bank in Kibera.

With reports recorded, the team head back to their offices to edit the footage on hand-me-down computers with the most basic of software and upload it to YouTube. After only a few months of the project, their skills are already improving exponentially.

Some of the team have an eye on making a jump to Kenyan TV, or the likes of CNN, as reporters or cameramen, and take their training workshops very carefully.

Others, like Joshua Ogure, want to see KNN grow to become a resource of record. Joshua is tall and speaks slowly, every sentence considered carefully.

‘‘I want us to grow as a media organisation,” he says. ‘‘I want to see KNN grow to be as big as CNN.”

After only a short time in operation, the KNN reporters have caught the eye of global organisations.

The International Red Cross commissioned KNN to make a film about Kibera to launch their annual global report, with KNN reporters involved in a lengthy debate with government about how to improve slum life after the showing of the documentary.

That video was seen by thousands of people, marking the high point so far of KNN’s reach, and a new realisation of how far their simple internet video can go. But they must go further.

KNN’s video reports make everyday life visible and real to the outsider, but they lack the analytical, statistical detail that campaigners and lobbyists crave. They want harder data, lists of Kibera’s needs and wants which they can use as leverage on politicians and donors.

As a blank on the map, Kibera has proven hard to quantify, in every sense.

A recent government census saying there were perhaps ‘only’ 150,000 people living in Kibera caused uproar, challenging the round million figure most often bandied about.

The lack of mapping makes a census itself a pointless task. Without roads or postal addresses, rough estimates are all there is.

This is where Map Kibera comes in. The organisation has begun the process of cataloguing the slum on a freely-available online map.

Using open-source technology called Open Street Map, their mappers have tramped the paths of Kibera, tagging churches, schools, chemists, clinics and water sources with GPS coordinates, and adding them to the online chart.

What was once a white, kidney-shaped space on a map is now peppered with icons for various resources.

The few towering street-lights, major navigational landmarks, stand out, as do water tanks and mosques.

The tapestry of life in the slum is gradually being embroidered in rich, online detail. Again, it’s local knowledge that counts.

Kiberan residents were recruited to map their own suburbs, like 21-year-oldHassan Yussuf from the Mashimoni area.

Mashimoni means ‘‘hole’’ in Swahili, the area originally a quarry for material used in the building of the slums. Sure enough, it still sits in a deep hollow, its topography reflecting its history.

Mapping his home area was an enjoyable process, not least for the kudos Hassan gained. ‘‘Here in Mashimoni, I’m known, I’m like a celebrity, I’m known everywhere,” says Hassan. ‘‘It made it easy, I enjoyed the whole process.”

It wasn’t all plain sailing, however.

Kibera has not been mapped comprehensively in the past, but scrutiny has come in fits and starts, usually motivated by government plans that might not be in line with what residents want.

Houses have no numbers, so a number daubed on your door can indicate a countdown to its destruction.

When people come around counting shops and measuring distances, the usual result is evictions by the authorities, arrests, and even jail time.

As a result, mappers on the streets in Kibera were put on the defensive on a regular basis.

‘‘When I had the GPS, people were scared,” says Hassan. ‘‘They asked what am I doing.

They might think that I am doing something with the Nairobi City Council so I can set up them so they end up in court. Other people asked them: ‘What are you doing?’ So I told them I’m mapping. ‘What’s the benefit of mapping?’ they asked.

So I told them.”

Among other things, Hassan’s mapping led to reallocation of resources, moving NGOs to the areas in Kibera where they were needed most. ‘‘Through the mapping, I established that there was 20 organisations here that did not benefit the people living in Mashimoni,” he says. ‘‘It was like a highlighting.

So we said: ‘There is no need to be operating in this area – if you can, you should work with other people’.” On a personal level, Hassan’s recruitment has led him on to a career, and a route to prosperity.

‘‘Growing up in Kibera, there’s a lot of hustling,” he says.

You must do a lot of work to upgrade yourself. If you are not keen, you will end up in the street.”

Since volunteering with Map Kibera, he has won a scholarship to study geographical information systems at university, and is on the path to becoming a professional cartographer.

Mapping has shown him a path out of poverty, and away to help raise his neighbourhood in a similar fashion.

‘‘The moment I will leave is when I feel everything is in good shape.

Then I will be proud of myself.

As for mapping, I am doing it now as a passion, and I must return something as a thanks to the community. I will push all the stakeholders to do something for the Kibera community.”

The project of mapping Kibera is far from over.

Whereas regular maps chart right turns, the Map Kibera team are trying to chart human rights, or rather where they are absent.

By pointing out what little exists, and where it is located, attention is drawn to the real blank spots, where the government must step in and effect change.

But as a street map, the Map Kibera chart is, arguably, useless. Paths are so narrow as to be indescribable on paper, so the map lacks detail.

The mappers argue that in Kenya, directions are given in terms of landmarks rather than street names or left/ right terminology, so the laying out of Kibera’s maze is inconsequential.

‘‘The houses are squeezed, so it’s very difficult to identify a path,” says Regina, another mapper.

Kibera is also in constant flux, so the map evolves regularly on a micro level.

With no legally-enforceable land rights, parcels of land are grabbed when they become available, ownership of homes can change hands with little notice, and buildings appear and disappear constantly.

Large institutions remain in place for some time, while all else is subject to change. ‘‘It’s so hard,” says Kevin Otieno, ‘‘because you can map a place as a school today, but the next day you go there you find it has been changed to something else, maybe a butchery.

What we normally do is change things every day.”

Linking both projects is a live website called Voice of Kibera, which is where the greater slum population can put their shop, event, school or news item on a living map of the slum.

Notifications, once verified, appear immediately as a hotspot on the map with links to more detail.

Again, Voice of Kibera relies on free online platforms.

Ushahidi, a mapping alert system developed just a mile from Kibera, powers their website.

Locals text in news alerts to the Voice of Kibera team with a description of its location.

They plot it on the online map and, if it’s newsworthy, alert the KNN news team and staff from the Kibera Journal, a local newspaper.

Mobile phone usage is high in Kenya, with many people spending 50 per cent of their income on communications, so uptake has been good.

‘‘It acts like a media tool for the community, where people show information, videos, whatever, anything pertaining to the community,” said Frederick Ubari, who works for the team behind Voice of Kibera.

With these simple websites, Kibera is now more accessible than ever before.

s they move on to replicate the model in other slums in Nairobi (Mathare is next) the hope is that copycats will do the same the world over.

The tools they use are free and available online. The means are inexpensive. The results can be massive.

A bus will drop you at the edge of Kibera, a human and urban forest, leaving you lost on the fringe. But, thanks to the pioneering work of Map Kibera and the Kibera News Network, there is now away for everyone to get into the heart of everyday life in slums, and see what successive governments have long claimed was not there.

With excuses and barriers removed, all that remains is to act.

Markham Nolan’s travel to Kenya was assisted with grant aid from the Simon

Cumbers media fund

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.

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-

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

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.

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.

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.