I have a talk that I give when people ask me to speak on AfriGadget at conferences that is called, “What do you see?”. It’s a visual and interactive quiz where I take the audience through different images of AfriGadget and ask them what they’re looking at. It’s a lot of fun, and it proves to everyone why it’s so hard for people in the West to come up with contextually relevant life hacks in Africa.
Below are some images from an old family friend who has spent his life working in rural Southern Sudan and Kenya. Under each image you’ll see why it’s interesting. By the way, I too missed the relevance of the flip flops at first glance…
Making use of available resources for a hinge. I really like the way that Ben has used these old slippers and shoe for the hinge of his small kiosk/shop at Butere.
This old chair at Mahanga in Western Province shows the ingenuity of the local carpenters in making use of available resources, with the carton and stuffing from sisal and wood shavings.
Using available containers in a nursery for medicinal plants in Asembo area of Western Kenya.
Making use of a Fanta bottle to channel water from the rainwater downpipe to a storage container in Nairobi.
A special thanks to Roger Sharland of REAP East Africa for sending in the pictures.
More pictures from TMS Ruge of Project Diaspora, this time of a crude hammer used to crush stones in a quarry outside Kampala, Uganda. It’s made out of an old engine gear.
I love African beer. I really do. Even when bad Nigerian beer knocks me down for a week, I am always back for more.
Maybe it’s the efficiency of drinking from 1/2 liter bottles or the romance of relaxing beer-in-hand while watching Simba sex. Either way, a cold Club, Tusker, or White Cap is the only way to end a day.
That’s why I’ve always noticed how beers are opened in Africa. My preference is for the minimalist method of using one bottle to open another, a trick I use to constant amazement in the lower 48.
However, most African restaurants and bars employ boring commercial bottle openers, plain and unassuming in form and function. You have to really be on the lookout to find creative beer release mechanisms - and recently I was rewarded for my vigilance.
Having a cold beer after Togo’s National Run to the Border Day sprint to the Ghanaian border, I noticed that my server was using a non-standard bottle opener.
A first in my observance, she employed two screws in a wooden peg to pop the bottle cap on my Guinness. What simplicity, ingenuity, practicality!
I was in awe until I had a thought: What if she could use only one screw?
Wayan Vota is part of Inveneo, a non-profit social enterprise whose mission is to get the tools of ICT into the hands of organizations and people who need them most: those in remote and rural communities in the developing world.
Bush camping is one of the greatest pleasures of living in Kenya – only if you have the right equipment. On a recent hastily planned trip to Lake Magadi hot springs we discovered too late that we’d forgotten the jiko (charcoal cooking stove). Stopping in Magadi town which serves only one industry, the Magadi Soda Company, we had one made for us right there and then in a very active jua kali workshop.
It starts with a discarded gas cylinder
I always wondered where the metal for jiko’s came from - In this the many discarded gas cylinders are chopped into segments to make up the body of the jiko.
Welding the finishing touches
There seems to be no power shortage here, a mess of electric cables and metal and wooden waste remnants from the soda company is an active business for about 20 artisans making furniture, gates, and jikos for the staff of the soda company.
Everything was home made including the tools
Corporate safety message hasn't quite translated
A ten minute job turned out into a one hour event and a thousand shillings later ($20) we take off proudly with our extremely heavy stove. That’s when we discover that there is no charcoal to be had in this part of the world anyway. We ended up with a 3 stone fire.
A flat piece of salty earth was our camp at the "Community campsite"
At dinner time we realized that we’d forgotten most of the food anyway (camping note to Paula: don’t believe him when he says “I already put it in the car” ).
Magadi is spectacular for bird viewing
Nevertheless, the hot springs were fabulous.
Don't believe the guide books version of the hot springs as "tepid" - these springs are excruciatingly hot
The Jiko came home and has not yet been used - and thinking about it now … should I be worrying about cooking on something made from gas cylinders? Is it just iron or could there be lead in this?
Not all inventiveness is utilitarian (or, business can be fun and fun can mean more business…).
Such is the case with this video by Eric Kabera – the maker of the genocide film “100 days” and inventor of Hillywood - Rwanda’s version of Hollywood. In it he interviews Alphonse Maniriho, an unschooled young 23 year old with an idea: take the classic “Black Mamba” bicycle and completely customize it.
Being a smart young businessman, Alphonse uses his unique bicycle to his advantage, getting extra business from young men who want to ride with him so they can listen to the beats along the way.
A quick list of customizations:
A watch, set in an old shoe polish can
Lights, that flicker in the front and back at night
Radio, for his passengers to listen to
A little background on what being a taxi man is in East and Central Africa is probably important for most who haven’t been to Africa. They have a seat on the back of the bicycle and use that to take passengers around. In East Africa they also go by the term “boda boda” (because they originated around the border of Uganda and Kenya).
Bonus: at about the 8:30 minute mark there are some nice videos of the wooden bikes used around Africa.
I’ve written about handmade tools in Africa before, but it didn’t generate a ton of interest, so I’ve not followed-up on it very much in my travels. I was really happy to see that another person was intrigued by this though, Kevin Kelly has a post where Tom Ritchey, master bike frame builder, sent him pictures of hand-made tools he spotted at bike shops in Rwanda.
Fabrication is an important skill in developing nations. Along the whole process you see reuse taking place, even down to the tools being used to create the items in question.
A Kenyan micro-entrepreneur recently told me:
In the sixties, during the space race between Russia and the U.S.A the Russian Engineers, when told there was no more money for the budget philosophically said “now we have no money then we can think” and they were able to be tremendously creative when compared to the Americans despite the limited funds at their disposal. This is the same approach I use in my initiatives.
As I’m not the only one who thinks these are pretty cool, I’m digging into the AfriGadget Flickr Group to pull out a picture that I never published here on the blog. These are small engine repair tools built to work on motorcycles, generators and lawnmowers (among other things):
And finally, a video of Bernard, one of the local small engine repair guys in Nairobi (who’s shop has since disappeared) talking about how he makes some of the tools:
Gikomba is a part of Nairobi that is well known for metal working. I had been meaning to come this way for a while, and today afforded me the perfect opportunity to drop down into Gikomba and see what kind of enterprising activities Kenyans were up to.
I ran into a George Odhiambo, a bulk fabricator of everything from wheelbarrows to chisels. The chisels caught my eye, primarily because one of them looked a lot like a shaft straight out of a Land Rover. It turns out that they reuse multiple types of iron for their goods, including leftover pieces from old vehicles. Nothing goes to waste here.
Even more interesting to me (probably because it moved and did stuff with fire), was the bicycle-turned-to-bellows that kept the fire going that would heat the metal rods. It’s a fairly simple, yet ingenious contraption that utilizes old materials with a little bit of engineering. The thing runs all day, every day too, so it’s made to last.
The chisel pictured below is a stone chisel, used in quarrying and squaring stones in the quarry’s dotting the country (most houses in Kenya are stone). They cost about 350/= ($6) to make, and sell for about 650/-= ($11).
We hope you enjoy these pictures of toys from Kenya and Ghana. They are a sampling of the pictures on the AfriGadget flickr group. The materials used to make these toys are scrap metal, tins, wire, and pieces of leather.
The Bamboo Bike, an endeavour that aims at building bicycles in a sustainable fashion using bamboo as the primary construction material, is a joint project run by Craig Calfree of Calfree Design, a high tech bicycle design firm based in California and The Earth Institute at Columbia University.
The bicycle is the primary mode of transport in Africa and it is used for everything from personal transportation to moving medicine and the sick to hospital. Sadly, the design used in most of Africa has not changed for the last 40 years to take into account the different ways in which the bicycle is used. In fact, most bikes in use in most of Africa today are based on a colonial British design tailored to individuals travelling short distances on smooth roads.
While making bike frames based on bamboo is not a new idea, most bamboo frame designs simply use bamboo for construction material in a traditional bike frame design. Leveraging the unique properties of bamboo such as its strength and flexibility to meet the specific needs of populations local to various parts of Africa is one of the primary rationale behind the Bamboo Bike project.
The team working on the Bamboo Bike project in the US, Ghana and Kenya among other locations have a interesting blog (last updated in the summer of 2007) that chronicles the struggles of the project team while on site in Africa.
Project gear including Bamboo Bikes and clothing is available on the Bamboo Bike and Calfree Design websites.
There’s a really interesting story about a man in Kenya who claims to have created a plane from scratch.
Using a Volkswagen beetle engine, and aluminium sheets for the body, Mr Gachamba made a single seater plane.
He tested it out at an airstrip in Nyeri and sure enough, it took off. Caught up in the excitement of the minute, he decided to fly to his home in Mathira.
A few minutes into the ride, he noticed the engine was overheating. He decided to turn and in the process the low flying plane struck a tree top and crash landed. He was injured in the leg and has had a limp since.
I’d love to see pictures of this plane, though I’m doubtful of there being any as this happened in the 70’s. Either way, a fun story. Right now he’s building his own Hummer from an old Datsun engine and “wheelbarrows, wheelchairs, metal pipes and other vehicle accessories”. At 75 years old he’s not slowing down at all!
