Transportation – Page 4

What Do You See?

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.

Climatisé en Mali

Our good friend Forsty sent in the following picture of a “climatised” bus he took in Mopti, Mali the other day:

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While it may not be the perfect example of an AfriGadget, it still helps to illustrate how people make do with what is available.

For some folks this may just be an unroadworthy vehicle, for others it’s a comfortable bus that will take you from A to B. Hey, and did we mention it’s air-conditioned? 🙂

Toyota Cowrolla

Few things make Monday really special. Here’s a photo posted by Alen Wekesa on Twitter. Alen describes himself as a sassy Kenyan who loves advertising, music and the arts. iPhone, Twitter, Facebook junkie. Soon to be millionaire with a big heart for charity. Reliable. He is in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, but I’m not sure where he took this photo. Enjoy! (Sorry for the dud link earlier folks, here’s trying again)

Follow Alen on Twitter @iAlen

Ancient fishing rafts in Lake Baringo

The Il Chamus or Njemps tribe still exist as they did thousands of years ago fishing in the spectacular lake Baringo using a hand made rafts made of reeds….not a new invention but still something very innovative and obviously successful otherwise it would have been abandoned centuries ago. They are unique people, though linguistically related to the Masai and Samburu, they have broken from tradition and also fish which is taboo among the Maasai tribes who will not even touch let alone eat fish.

Il Chamus (Njemps) Fisherman in traditional reed boat

The raft is made from reeds called ambatch harvested from the shores of the lake and it takes only a day to build one. The balsa wood reeds are strung together and tied using sisal fibres and paddles are traditionally made from planks of hand sized planks of wood. Today most fishermen used plastic pieces cut from used jerry cans. The rafts last for over a year and though they look flimsy and unstable, they are well adapted to the lake which is very flat and calm. How but how they escape from the hundreds of hippos is anyones guess.

Living on the islands in the middle of Lake Bogoria boats are critical or the survival of the Il Chamus. Each boat seems to be one man outfit and men have carved out territories on the lake in which they fish. Each fisherman works in the early morning hours and using line and nets, he catches a variety of small carps and lungfish for home and sale to passing people. In a day one man can catch only a handful of fish and will earn about US $1.50 through sales. The Il Chamus are one of a handful of tribes left in the world that use this kind of traditional method of fishing.

To preserve fish they are smoked in traditional smoking houses. Fish are laid on top of the wire mesh and smouldering charcoal from wood of various indigenous species of trees are placed in the entrance.

Njemps village on an island in Lake Baringo

Il Chamus are agro pastoralists and still live a very basic lives. They move their livestock from islands to mainland – but their rafts can carry goats and sheep but not cattle so they simply drive cows into the water forcing them to swim across the lake, which is 8 m deep. The herd is guided them from rafts.

If you live in Kenya and haven’t been out to Lake Baringo – you are missing an amazing piece of living pre-history.

There’s hardly any information available online on this amazing tribe – if you have any or know where to find more information please let me know.

Cote d’Ivoire takes stock of their own buses

As the BBC originally reported, Cote d’Ivoire now has some new buses rolling around the country; specifically in the capital of Abidjan. While this story is seemingly uninteresting, it needs to be stated that these are their own buses, produced within Cote d’Ivoire by domestic transportation company, Sotra.

Above and beyond employment, the bus engineers from the Ivorian “reaspora” (those who returned to their home country after time abroad) had good reason to build domestically, “In Europe the technology is very sophisticated with lots of electronic devices. In Africa we don’t need this. We just need robust buses because our roads are not very well done like in Europe. This is an African design for Africa.”

There are initial jitters from people about the reliability of the new buses, but given that Sotra has been building water buses and been involved in the transportation sector for some time, the worries will most likely go unfounded.

Miquel Hudin is the co-founder of and lead developer for Maneno, a blogging platform developed specifically for the requirements of bloggers in Sub-Saharan Africa. He writes regularly on African issues at Subsaharska on Maneno.

[H/T Timbuktu Chronicles]