nigeria – AfriGadget

Bulb 2.0 and Maker Faire Africa 2012

For the price of Kshs. 30 /= (EUR 0.27 or USD 0.35) you’ll manage to pick up this kerosine lamp from a kiosk in Kibera, Kenya:

Certainly a great visual update to the famous tin can paraffin lamp which sells for a slightly higher price and requires additional soldering. Kerosine (or paraffin) lamps are the alternative to modern solar LED lights, and also to the (otherwise great) daylight indoor illumination via filled water bottles (invented by Alfredo Mozer in Brazil in 2002).

Thx, Majala!

In other news: Maker Faire Africa is coming up again. Yay!

Maker Faire Africa on November 5th and 6th 2012 in Lagos, Nigeria. If you are a maker, please consider registering with their website. Further info will be available soon.

Oh, and if you’re on Facebook, please check out our recently relaunched page. All are welcome! 🙂

Rim Stoves: Cooking MamaPut Goodness

I love street food. Everywhere I go, from street markets in Russia, to back alleys of Beijing to side streets in Skopje, to the boulevards of Bamako, I make it a point to eat as many meals from roadside stands as possible. Ghana and Nigeria are no exception. In fact, I love me a MamaPut.

Its only where Mama herself is there to put more of her good eats on your plate, that I really feel I’m getting a good meal. Why? Because I can see ever step of its preparation, talk with the chief personally, and share the transcending bond of food with my fellow man and woman.

Now I wouldn’t call myself a street food expert – I’m not discerning enough for that title, but I am observant in the different styles of edibles vendors. In West Africa, I’m particularly impressed by the stock street food cooking apparatus. Simple, cheap, and recycled, I present to you the “Rim Stove”.

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Using the steel rim off a car wheel as the basic starting point, three metal legs are wielded to the outside of the rim. Inside, a metal grate is added to the bottom to hold in the coals, and some form of pan or kettle stand is wielded to the top.

I’ve seen several variations on this theme, but the basics are always the same – the Rim Stove burns charcoal that’s been ignited in the middle of the rim, fed by air from the bottom and heating a cooking container sitting either on the pot stand or the coals themselves.

During on extending brainstorming session, I even tried to think of improvements to the Rim Stove – how it might burn hotter with less customization. My only solution? Make sure a Rim Stove is cooking chips for your fresh grilled fish.

Mubarak Abdullahi’s home-made helicopter takes Nigeria’s Kano Plains by storm

Yahoo! News (among other sources) carries a story from October 21st about Mubarak Muhammad Abdullahi of the Kano Plains of Nigeria who has built a working helicopter over the last 8 months using scrap aluminum and parts from a Honda Civic, an old Toyota and from the remains of a crashed Boeing 747.

This inventor has had no formal training in flying and his helicopter has never flown higher than 7 feet of the ground. In an interview, he talks about how the machine works:

“You start it, allow it to run for a minute or two and you then shift the accelerator forward and the propeller on top begins to spin. The further you shift the accelerator the faster it goes and once you reach 300 rmp you press the joystick and it takes off,”

Mubarak is ambitious however and has embarked on a new project to build a better helicopter that will be able to make 3 hour flights. He hopes to get support for his project from the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) and other Nigerian government bodies.