Nairobi Notebook

How To Cook A Camel

Somaliland isn't known for its haute cuisine. Ask people here what their staple foods are and they will reply rice and spaghetti. The days of a meat and milk diet are drawing to end as pastoralists succumb to export bans, land rights and of course, climate change.

However, if there is a speciality dish, then it is camel. They say you can judge a restaurant by its kitchen. In which case the omens were not good for my lunch-stop this afternoon. The wooden work-surface was covered with innards, off-cuts and slop from the huge vat of camel, onion and tomato that simmered away on a  charcoal-burner below. Flies swarmed over hunks of meat  and piles of the sour tasting njera laid out on the side  ready to be thrust through the hatch.

The recipe is simple: grill the meat over coals for ten minutes then add to the simmering cauldron of mucky water and vegetables. Eat with soggy njera.

But I was brought up to try eveything once and for a meat-lover the camel meat was more than palatable. A little like mutton perhaps, nice and tender. Not quite so easy to stomach was the  'soup' with its layer of fatty globules on the surface. I drew the line at a slab of fat from between the brain and skull.

My stomach survived the experience and it got me thinking there's probably a book-load of camel recipes out there. I've had a quick scan...here's the pick of the bunch.

1 medium camel
4 lambs
20 chickens (roasted)
150 eggs (boiled)
40 kilos tomatoes
Salt and seasonings

Stuff eggs into tomatoes, stuff tomatoes into chickens, stuff chickens into lambs, stuff lambs into camel. Roast until tender

This though leaves the cook asking several questions:

- Just how big is a medium camel?

- How exactly do you stuff 2 kilos of tomatoes in a single chicken and five chickens in a lamb?

- Are we talking oven roast (how?!) or spit roast? And how many minutes per pound?

Any other recipes out there, send them my way...

Dead Capital

I was driving along Nairobi's Langata Road today. It seperates Kibera, a god-awful place, and Langata, a plush part of Nairobi that is home to  government ministers and the likes.

It got me thinking about the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto who has an interesting theory on title deeds in slum areas such as  Kibera slums. He puts forward a somewhat hypercapitalist argument that governments in the developing world should legalise their squatters. He argues that in doing so governments would liberate what he calls the “dead capital” inherent in their homes and automatically give them a place in the market economy. Slum dwellers would, he claims, have capital to offset loans against. De Soto talks of billions of dollars worth of unrealised capital that could lift slum residents out of their impoverished conditions.

In Kenya, slums like Kibera, which is commonly referred to as sub-Saharan Africa’s largest slum, were until the turn of this century not even recognised as formal settlements. Until the end of former President Daniel Arap Moi’s rule,  Kibera did not appear on maps of Nairobi, instead the settlement was marked as forest…nevermind the fact that Kibera is home to one million people.

I am not so sure de Soto's theory works in a place such as Kibera and in his book, Shadow Cities, author Robert Neuwirth raises certain points that I agree with. To start with, in Kibera the vast majority of residents are tenants and not landlords. Some landlords are wealthier slum dwellers, others are local big-men who over the years have grabbed land and put up decrepit mud-walled shacks knowing there is an insatiable demand for dirt-cheap housing. So who would get the title deed? The tenant or the landlord? And if the landlord then how exactly would those at the bottom of the pile benefit from this liberated capital?

Secondly, Nairobi’s slums are a hive of economic activity. It’s just informal and, most importantly to the residents, tax free. Spend five minutes in Kibera and you will meet women trading charcoal and vegetables, young men hawking anything from stolen mobile phones to second-hand clothing. I am not sure they would want to be above board and legal…that would mean paying taxes and probably put them out of business.

I am not an economist so would be interested in hearing people's thoughts...

How Are We Supposed to Fill the Pool?

The taps were supposed to run dry at 9am this morning. That was the warning - not that I had noticed the double page spread taken out by the Nairobi Water Company. So we have filled every receptacle in the house. I figure 50 litres is more than enough to see us through the 48 hours rationing. Vic, who suffers water-panics if there isn’t water within five metres of her, isn’t so sure. The good people at the water company can’t tell me how long the rationing will last. My guess is a while.

For the time being water is still flowing from the taps, but perhaps we are just draining the tank.

We are told the dams are running dry. Ominously, we are supposedly in the middle of the long rains. But they have failed to materialise. Indeed right now the sun is blazing its way through my window and my study feels more like a greenhouse. There is not a black cloud in sight and we have a long wait until the next rains are due in November. It doesn’t take a hydro-engineer to work out that the rationing will have to increase in the coming months if the rains do indeed fail.

No doubt the water bill will continue to rise even though our water consumption falls. The same happened when I lived in Kampala. Again the trigger was erratic rain patterns and low water levels in Lake Victoria, the source of Uganda’s hydro-electric power. The load-shedding got so bad the power grid was turned off every other day, industry was crippled and we lived by candlelight. But that didn’t stop our bills nearly doubling. If anyone can explain which law of economics this follows I would be very grateful.

So I guess we’ll blame this latest inconvenience – how after all are we going to keep the compound’s swimming pool topped up? – on global warming and Kenya’s insatiable demand for firewood.

I remember talking to an Kikuyu lady, Elizabeth Kinyanjui, around this time last year. Her hands were calloused from a  lifetime's  farming  in the tea-plantation clad hills of Limuru just outside Nairobi. Once upon a time she could mark the days she would plant her crops in the calendar. That is how reliable the rains were. Now she has no idea when is best. Back then apparently the hillsides were covered in trees which would "pull the rain down". Elizabeth is not a scientist but she has got the basic gist.

 

 

Early Stampede

I have it on good authority that the smart money is on an early wildebeest migration this year down in the Masai Mara. Light rains during the current wet season mean the savannah grasses will dry earlier...and that means the wildrbeest may chance their luck across the Mara River a few weeks earlier than normal. The crocs are already licking their chops.

The migration cannot come soon enough for the Mara Conservancy. They have been facing a financial shortfall to the tune of $50,000 a month since Kenya imploded in January. At the begining of this month their bank balance read zero for the first time. To cut costs night ambushes are suspended and daytime anti-poaching patrols are shorter than usual. There is a nervous sense among the rangers that they are leaving the backdoor open to poachers who are becoming increasingly brazen as the conservancy becomes stretched beyond its limits. I joined the rangers on patrol this week. The frustration was written across their faces as they discovered traces of a poachers camp. The charred remains of a warthog and blackened embers suggested the rangers were a just a few days too late.

Helping keep the conservancy afloat is Joseph Kimojino, the ranger usually in charge of keeping safari vehicles a respectable distance away from the animals. But with so few tourists to monitor he is turning his attentions to fundraising through a blog. Three months ago Kimojino could not even turn on a computer. Now he regularly scores 500 hits a day (cue my face turning green with envy!) and has raked in $47,000 in donations.

You can find Kimojino's blog at http://www.maratriangle.wildlifedirect.org

Mara Politics

The Masai Mara remains empty of tourists. The Mara Serena happens to be booked out, not by foreign visitors but by a large NGO. I’m not sure what is wrong with a hotel in Nairobi. Perhaps the good people who are supposed to be “alleviating poverty” are trying to resuscitate the reserve, give the jobless staff at the Serena something to do, but I suspect this is another example of frivolous NGO spending. But that’s another story for another time.

Rangers with the Mara Conservancy say the last time the Mara’s savannah plains were as deserted as they are now was in 1998 – the year Al Qaeda struck the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salam. Those were dark days in the park’s history. The Mara’s ecosystem was, as it is now, worth big bucks and “corruption was bringing the reserve close to total collapse” recalls ranger Joseph Kimojino. Poachers were allowed to decimate the wildlife populations as local big-men vied for control of the tourist dollars.

So when the Mara Conservancy took over the management of the Mara Triangle –roughly one third of the reserve – few fancied the chances of its CEO Brian Heath turning things around. I am told that Dr Richard Leakey, himself a former head of the Kenya Wildlife Service – only gave Heath a couple of months. The politics behind the Mara were just too dirty. Heath could not survive.

But he did and the Mara Conservancy has flourished – until, that is, the post-election crisis once again put off foreign tourists – and Heath has won over both his staff and surrounding Masai communities. Tourist dollars are going where they are supposed to – back into the conservation of the Masai Mara.

But there remain dark forces at play. One lodge apparently considers itself beyond paying the conservancy the usual park entry fees. I am told the owner has had the High Court (one can only imagine a large sum of money exchanged hands) slap an injunction on the conservancy to prevent them collecting the gate fee. Just how short-sighted are these money-grabbers? Are your political careers and personal savings accounts really worth more than Kenya’s best known asset?