Urban rail in Africa: Whether “freedom trains” will solve Zimbabwe’s traffic jam problems, more attention should be paid to what happens when you board at A and get off at B. And don’t forget the bike!

Passengers hustle to take their seats on a bus that is ready to depart from the Road Port bus terminal in Harare for Johannesburg. Vendors are also not to be outdone as they push their way out of the luxury coach that is already in motion for the journey of over a thousand kilometers.

Amid all this jostling, suddenly a loud voice cries out, “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen! This morning I am going to read from Proverbs 10:4 which says, ‘lazy hands make a man poor but diligent hands bring wealth’.”

There is a sudden silence among the passengers who seem to have been taken by surprise. The preacher, Pastor Perseverance Hara of the Pentecostal Association of Zimbabwe, then continues with his sermon before the attentive audience. “I bring the gospel of diligent hardworking to the cross-border traders.”

Pastor Hara ceases work around 4 pm just in time to catch the City-Marimba “freedom train.” There, he continues with his business. And this preacher’s religious business could grow exponentially in the future if his fellow Zimbabweans go for an expansion of commuter train services to unlock the recurring gridlocks created by the exploding number of privately owned vehicles in Zimbabwe’s capital.

Writes Lincoln Towindo of The Sunday Mail: The commuter train service was introduced in Harare and Bulawayo in 2001. The trains serviced inner-city routes and were meant to address the crippling transport shortages experienced then.

They were christened “freedom trains,” ample testimony of their popularity. Images of dozens of commuters exercising “freedom” by sitting precariously on the trains still linger. Such commuters could not afford to sidestep the bandwagon of affordable commuting. The trains ferried thousands of them to and from work for only a fraction of the standard fares charged by competing public transport operators (the iconic kombis).

A decade on, the popularity of the trains is waning following the proliferation of faster transport modes and a marked increase in private vehicle ownership.

“There is no metropolitan area around the world where public commuting is entirely dependent on road transport alone,” explains Harare-based urban planning expert Percy Toriro. “Road-based commuting has to be complemented by rail transport in order to strike a balance in the context of rapid urban development. The authorities need to invest seriously in the area of rail development within suburbs. For instance, the railway line that runs through Mufakose could be extended to include surrounding suburbs such as Budiriro [means "opportunity for achievement or success" in Shona], Glen View right through to Highfield.”

An NRZ conductor Misheki Dhliwayo issues tickets to commuters on the City-Marimba Park commuter train (photo courtesy of The Sunday Mail)

“For landlocked countries such as ours, harnessing such means of mass transportation means we eventually save on energy. In turn, less private vehicles on our roads means that the environment will not suffer much.”

A trip on a “freedom train” from central Harare to Mufakose lasts  between 45 and 50 minutes. Whereas, travelling from the city centre on a commuter omnibus during the late afternoon rush hour takes over an hour, depending on the volume of traffic.

“Commuter omnibus operators plying the City-Mufakose route sometimes charge US$1 during peak hours. Apart from this, the journey is also painful. It is better for the authorities to improve commuter train services,” said Mrs Jessica Maronga, a daily communter.

“I save more by catching the train. Can you believe that I spend an average of US$2 on transport for the whole week? This translates into US$8 per month,” she added, pointing at the adjacent gridlocked Lytton Road.

The National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) operates three commuter train routes in Harare: Marimba Park, Dzivarasekwa and Ruwa [a place of alleged UFO spotting in the 1990s]. It also services the Emganwini and Luveve lines in Bulawayo. A trip into town on the train costs 2 South African rand. The NRZ has also since introduced US$1 multiple-trip tickets. The train coaches accommodate up to 800 passengers.

Many cities around the world have adopted a hybrid system, which incorporates both rail and road.

Zimbabwean transport expert Blessed Muponda: “There is no transportation master plan for the cities, hence the mounting traffic congestion and increased vehicle operating costs. High-density areas are home to the majority of people with limited income, but often lack sufficient public transportation. We need to start with cost-effective rapid bus and commuter train systems with dedicated lanes and bus routes that can improve access to the city and reduce road congestion.”

In South Africa, the Gautrain service was introduced to relieve the Johannesburg-Pretoria traffic

One of the 4-car Bombardier Electrostar trainsets is seen racing away from the camera, past Kelvin Power Station towards Sandton, with an airport-bound train approaching on the right of the picture (photo Eugene Armer, courtesy of railpictures.net)

corridor of congestion and offer commuters a viable transport alternative. The service, which cost an estimated R24 billion, is based on a hybrid system that includes rapid transit buses as well as trains. Independent estimates indicate the number of cars on the N1 highway linking the two metropolises has dropped by 20% with 100,000 passengers using the trains daily.

The service was introduced on the eve of the 2010 World Cup finals. 81 railcars are to be built locally as part of the jobs creation initiative (estimated at an additional 93,000 jobs and set to create more than 3,000 others per year during operation).

Though not everything is that

Map of the N1 highway (South_Africa)

rosy about the Gautrain. The environmental benefits of the project are disputed and the environmental impact assessment revealed that Gautrain would at best be environmentally neutral. South Africa uses coal-based electricity generation and the electricity required for Gautrain would come from outside the Gauteng region. The pollution associated with the generation of this electricity would therefore effectively be exported to the Mpumalanga region, an area already under severe strain from air pollution and other abuses of power.

Critics pointed out that the project would use the majority of available national and provincial transport fundsin a context where massive amounts were needed to deal with widespread traffic congestion and commuter transport problems nationally and in the province. The existing railway system in the province,

Ben Schoeman Highway is the main freeway between Johannesburg and Pretoria

under national rather than provincial control, which serves the majority of the population, was severely underfunded and large-scale and violent public unrest caused by inadequate and old trains had manifested in the province. Critics alleged that options like rapid bus transit could achieve similar levels of service at a fraction of the costs. These matters were never submitted to a public debate as the project was designed and launched within the confines of the Gauteng Government bureaucracy.

In the United States, commuter rail services provide efficient transportation. Scheduled service is on a nonreservation basis primarily for short-distance travel between a central business district and adjacent suburbs. The metro service in New York is renowned the world over for its efficiency.

In Hawaii there’s much excitement about the construction of a new commuter rail link through Honolulu. Closer to home, Zürich has some new trams on the way and in Singapore a French consortium has just won a sizeable contract to supply some new trains for the city state’s transport system.

A Gautrain railcar built and shipped from the UK is being unloaded in Durban. From there it made its way to Midrand for quality and safety checks. There is a specially built track for test runs there

Monocle‘s Tyler Brûlé observes: The only problem with all these lanes and lines being laid around the world is that the destination is frequently neglected. Given all the excitement about how fast a 10-car train can travel from a remote suburb to city centre, or how many people a tram can attract away from their cars, mayors and planners frequently forget about the neighbourhoods and communities that their vehicles stop at.

Brûlé spent some time chatting to US transport secretary Ray LaHood:

-Is high-speed rail really going to come to the US?

- Absolutely, it’s going to happen. You’re going to see it in Illinois, it’s going to happen in California.

The next morning on the Acela train from DC station, he was reminded why the US needs to fully embrace high-speed travel. With news that American Airlines’ parent company AMR had filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as I settled into my seat, I was very happy to be riding with Amtrak despite the tired interior and Wal-Mart style lighting. By the time they hit Baltimore the train was packed with travellers.

In the US, many cities are trying to figure out how to get more people to ride the rails to work rather than jumping in the car. For sure, the rolling stock is part of the problem (why is it that so many American commuter trains look like prison cars?) but the bigger issue is that suburban stations are lonely, windswept places that are anything but inviting. Largely automated affairs with no ticket offices, let alone functioning toilets or cosy places to buy a coffee, rail stations in the US have failed to seize the opportunity to become hubs of commerce and have a life that goes beyond morning and evening traffic spikes.

In Zambia, President Michael Sata, during election campaigns, promised to revive the Njanji Commuter Train Service (suspended in 1998 after two trains collided). Opened in 1991, the line was a money-spinner earning 458 million Zambian kwacha in revenue in 1995 – a typical year – when 2,700,000 passengers were carried. The pledge proved an election winner, according to observers.

Hotel Universo blogs: SALCEF Construzioni Edili e Ferroviarie S.p.A, an Italian company has agreed to put up as much as $14 million just to study the possibility of building an above-ground metro line between Maputo and its smaller neighbor, Matola. Over 200,000 people commute daily between the two cities.

“This company will risk its own capital for the study which should absorb between 15- 20% of the total of 50 million euros that the company will use up to the conclusion of the first phase of the project”, Mozambican Transport Minister Paulo Zucula told reporters.

Here Criticalmassmaputo is alluding to the woman bike fashion from Brazil

If this pans out, Mozambique would become the second country south of the Sahara with such a system. The ten miles or so that separate the cities can take as much as two hours depending on traffic, and that’s when you can catch a minibus. This wordpress blogger suggests with subtlety, “How about bikes?” referencing an interesting blog in Portuguese Criticalmassmaputo.wordpress.com.

As Honolulu presses on with its new rail project and Harare’s urban experts and NRZ officials start discussing their options, Tyler Brûlé suggests that city planners would do well to spend a bit of time in Tokyo’s suburbs and take a few cues from the Japanese rail operators who have built whole cities around their suburban stations. Everything from schools to hospitals, grocery stores to nursing homes are built beside and above stations in Japan.

How about building the first Sign Museum on the continent close to the main railway station in Harare, where the current “Traffic Lights Don’t Work” signs from Kadoma could take their due archival space?

How culture contributes to development: an UNESCO indicator suite

The UNESCO Culture for Development Indicator Suite (CDIS) is a pioneering research and advocacy initiative that aims to establish a set of indicators highlighting how culture contributes to development at national level fostering economic growth, and helping individuals and communities to expand their life choices and adapt to change.

Culture is a dynamic and innovative economic force at the national level as well as globally, helping to generate employment, revenues and incomes, and thus directly boosting economic growth and producing social externalities.

In 2007, these sectors accounted for an estimated 3.4% of global GDP and were worth nearly US$1.6 trillion, almost double international tourism receipts for the same year. Between 2000 and 2005 trade goods and services from the creative industries grew on average by 8.7% annually.

Moreover, the cultural and creative sectors are risk takers, investing in new talents and
new aesthetics, fostering creativity and innovation as well as ensuring cultural diversity
and choice for consumers, and produce multiple synergies and positive spill‐over effects in
areas such as stimulation of research, product and service innovation.

Translating a culture for development agenda into a programme for action will require prioritization and operationalization at the national level and its integration in donor strategies at the international level.

At the national level, this entails encouraging governments, ministries and public agencies to include culture in national development plans and related strategies while at the international level, convincing development actors to ensure that culture’s potential for development (both
transversally and as an economic sector of activity) is addressed in country papers, and policies.

In 2000, when world leaders committed to achieving the eight Millennium Development
Goals by 2015, culture was not included – despite the considerable build up of interest
and advocacy efforts during the 1990s.

Ten years later, important opportunities to revisit development approaches and to strengthen the case for culture’s value in development processes are emerging. 2010 has witnessed a number of
high‐level international conferences dedicated to culture and development (e.g. the
European Union International Seminar on Culture and Development in Girona (May 2010)
held under the Spanish Presidency).

Although the Human Development Index (HDI) (one of the most influential and widely used indices to measure human development across countries) has highlighted the efficacy of aggregate
indices and inter‐country comparisons for advocacy and putting pressure on governments
to address gaps in education, health and other social areas, this approach has proven to
be more problematic when applied to culture, which by dint of its diversity and complexity
is impossible to compare.

Financed by the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation for Development, the CDIS project runs from 2009 to 2012 and combines research, implementation test phases in up to 20 countries from all regions and expert meetings in order to ensure the pertinence and credibility of the Suite.

An important caveat is that the Indicator Suite will not provide the “definitive” picture of
culture at the country level nor will it produce policy guidelines or recommendations: this
is not its objective. Instead, its purpose is to bring the value of culture in development
processes to the foreground of national debate and discourses. In other words, although it
responds to the challenge of explaining the “how”, the UNESCO Indicator Suite on Culture
for Development recognizes that this is only the first step in a much longer process of
integrating culture in national development strategies.

In the first Human Development Report (1990), the HDI originator Mahbub al‐Haq famously

Mahbub-ul-Haq, the HDI originator, gave 5 year plan to South Korea which helped South Korea to progress rapidly

proclaimed that, “people are the wealth of nations”. Twenty years later, the UNESCO Culture for Development Indicator Suite hopes to demonstrate how and why culture effectively and sustainably enriches and adds value to this wealth. 2010 has witnessed great strides in the international recognition of culture’s value in development processes. The Culture for
Development Suite aims to add to the growing global momentum of the agenda, and to
contribute to pushing culture out of the shadows of other development issues so that it is
recognized as a development priority in its own right.

Making sure that Zimbabwe reads II: from Boston via Beira to Harare

Allen Chimombe of Restore helped bring the books and his organization will be using part of the shipment in their work with juvenile offenders

reprinted from Zimbabwe reads site

Today our container, the first since Zimbabwe reads partnered with the Boston-based  Sabre Foundation, arrived in Harare. After crossing the Atlantic (and before that, a chunk of a highway from the Sabre warehouse in Boston to the New York City docks in late October 2011), and traversing a bit of the Indian Ocean along the South African coastline,  58,000 books donated by American publishers and individual friends of Zimbabwe reached African soil in Mozambique.

Zimbabwe Reads-Sabre shipment of 58,000 books waiting to be unloaded in central Harare

From there, crossing into Zimbabwe at Beira, a Mozambican driver (a Tete native, well-conversant in Shona, by the way), Senhor Tiberio (see group photo at the bottom, far right), brought the container to Harare. The Rotary Club in central part of Zimbabwean capital was kind to offer us their premises to store the books, as the container needed to be emptied to avoid extra costs.

It took two and a half hours for a team of local workforce and friends of ours to unload the container. Our project manager Andy Kozlov [and founder of the Steppes in Sync Initiative] joined them to speed up the process, document the event and pocket some details of palette packaging for future generations along the way – Andy said that the historian in him wants to preserve at least a piece of paper numbering the palettes. And appealing to the philosopher in him, Andy compared the slashing through the plastic wrapping to cutting the ‘umbilical cord’ of the culture of reading that our shipment aims to foster in Zimbabwe’s youth.

Zimbabwe reads' Andy Kozlov (far left) compared unloading this container to cutting the 'umbilical cord' of Zimbabwe's reading culture

The whole shipping process from Boston to Harare was facilitated and closely monitored by our Harare-based partner organization Restore that works with the capital’s street children and youth delinquents.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Boston, Massachusetts (USA)

Restore’s head Allen Chimombe also did some stretching today hauling the boxes with us, and they will be using part of the books in their reading programs.

The largest part of the shipment is 40,000 primary school science booklets provided by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. These colorful graded readers, as well as 10,000 McGraw-Hill primary and secondary school books, will be distributed in the Harare and Bulawayo areas by the regional committees there as well as to the Catholic school network of almost 200 schools. A group of nursing schools will receive 370 specialized nursing books. The shipment also includes 30 boxes of fiction and 20 boxes of academic books in the humanities from Harvard University Press that are being distributed to the University of Zimbabwe and hard-hit tertiary institutions.

Beira has long been a major trade point for exports coming in and out of Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia and other Southern African nations. Because of this, the port of Beira is the second largest in Mozambique. The importance of the port was shown during the Mozambique Civil War, when Zimbabwean troops protected the railway and highway from Beira to Mutare in order to continue trade.

For Chornobyl with Love: strumming Ukrainian pain in Japan and relieving the one in Japan

Chornobyl is one of those symbolical places that links Ukraine to Japan. Even more so after the 2011 Fukushima incident.

The Japanese identified with the 1986 tragedy that took place at a nuclear power station in the northern Ukrainian town of Prypiat. It reminded them of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings at the end of the Second World War.

The Japanese had empathy then and continue supporting the children of Chornobyl up till today. One of the children that benefited from these acts of charity grew up between Japan and Ukraine and eventually moved to the ‘Land of the Rising Sun’, got married to a local man, and continues linking the two nations using her artistic talent. The lady’s name is Nataliya Gudziy.

Below we republish an article by Roman Cybriwsky, an Ukrainian-American urbanist, that appeared in a 2005 issue of The Ukrainian Weekly, a North American newspaper for the Ukrainian diaspora.

THERE are more Ukrainians living in Japan than I had imagined when I moved back to the country four years ago after a 10-year absence. Some, like me, are transplants from the United States and other Western countries, dispatched to Tokyo and other big cities by foreign employers with Japanese branches. But many, many others are post-1991 immigrants to Japan, directly from Ukraine or from other parts of the former USSR such as Russia’s Far East, Japan’s nearest neighbor.

They are building permanent lives in Japan and are shaping a thriving Ukrainian Japanese community. Among the most noteworthy Ukrainians living in Japan is 25-year-old Nataliya Gudziy, a beautiful and extraordinarily talented young singer with a fascinating life story. She has lived in Japan since 1999. She has become fluent in Japanese, and sings and writes songs in that language, as well as in her native Ukrainian.

My first encounter with Natalka was about three years ago, when my daughter was visiting me and we saw a newspaper notice about a concert the next day by a Ukrainian singer in a part of Tokyo where we had lived some 20 years earlier. We attended, of course, and were almost literally floored by what we saw and heard. Here was a performance in Ukrainian to an all-Japanese audience of some 400 people, with Japanese commentary between songs about the lyrics, the bandura, the singer’s life, and about Ukraine.

Natalka had a powerful stage presence. We were doubly surprised that she spoke at some length in Ukrainian as well, not because she had spotted us, which she did not, but because she wanted her audience to hear the sound of the Ukrainian language. Her songs reflected love of Ukraine, and her singing voice was as strong, sweet and beautiful as any we had ever heard.

A major theme of Natalka’s work is the Chornobyl tragedy of 1986, which she witnessed as a young girl. Chornobyl has been a big part of her life ever since. She talked about it at length that evening in Sangenjaya.

A Prypiat-set ad by the International Red Cross

Natalka’s hometown was Prypiat, one of the villages in the shadow of Chornobyl that was evacuated after the disaster and then destined for oblivion. Her father had worked in the power plant barely four kilometers away and stayed behind with orders to work on the clean-up. He has subsequently become ill. Natalka and the rest of her family were evacuated to Kyiv where the family continues to live. While still a schoolgirl, Natalka became a member of the song and dance troupe Chervona Kalyna comprising mainly Chornobyl refugee children.

At the invitation of a Tokyo non-governmental organization called the Chernobyl Children’s Fund (CCFJ) [a civic group based in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward], the group toured Japan in 1996 and again in 1998 to raise funds for victims of the disaster. Natalka was singled out for her rare singing talents and returned to Japan again in 1999 for a solo series of fund-raising concerts. That led to her staying in Japan and making it her new home. In 2003 she married Yoshiro Yamada, who is her manager. Before the wedding ceremony in Kyiv, Yoshiro was baptized into the Orthodox faith and given the name Roman.

A tireless performer, Natalka has now sung in more than 300 venues in every imaginable part of Japan. She always performs in Ukrainian native costume and plays her bandura as she sings. I sometimes see Natalka on Tokyo subways going to or from a performance with her heavy bandura in its case over her shoulder and a travel bag with her costume for the evening in hand.

Reaction of a Japanese student to the chapter in “Prominence English” featuring images of Nataliya Gudziy and her family

Natalka always explains her instrument to her audiences, as well as her clothing, always making sure that her audiences distinguish what is Ukrainian from Russian and teaching about Ukraine’s distinctive culture. Her standard repertoire includes songs about the bandura such as “Vziav by Ya Banduru” and “Hrai, Banduro, Hrai,” as well as such popular Ukrainian songs as “Chornobryvtsi,” “Ridna Maty Moya” and “Misiats na Nebi.” Her songs also include her own original musical and vocal compositions such as “Mamyna Pisnia” about the family she misses in Ukraine.

She also performs Japanese songs, including her own compositions in that language, and translates Ukrainian songs into Japanese. “Chornobryvtsi,” for example, is sung half in Ukrainian and, seamlessly, half in Japanese. Because some Russian songs are well-known in Japan and audiences expect it, she also sings a little in Russian. Young people in Japan are coming to know Natalka not just through her singing.

Amazingly, she has come to be a chapter in a popular textbook for the study of English, “Prominence English” published by Tokyo Shoseki. Lesson 5 in that book is called “For Chernobyl with Love” and recounts in learners’ English the story of the nuclear plant accident, the evacuation and demolition of Natalka’s home village, and Natalka’s biography. There are photographs of Natalka and her family in their home in front of their “yalynka” (Christmas tree) a makeshift cemetery in Prypiat, and a child’s drawing of “black rain” over Ukraine. To test readers’ comprehension, the chapter has review questions such as “What happened to the green forests where she [Natalka] played as a child?”

Natalka has already released five CDs. The first two, unfortunately, are no longer available. I am lucky to own a rare copy of “From Chernobyl,” a collection of Ukrainian songs about the disaster and about nostalgia for a distant, lost home. There are similar themes in “Sertse,” her third disk. The printed matter for both includes haunting black and white photographs of what little is left of Prypiat by noted Japanese photographer Ryuichi Hirokawa [founder of the CCFJ]. Her fourth CD is

Tokyo, June 10 2011 – Ryuichi Hirokawa walking on the street near “Days Japan” magazine’s office, where he works as editor-in-chief. (Photo courtesy of Jeremie Souteyrat)

“Nataliya,” a mix of themes and languages. It includes her beautiful Ukrainian composition about her mother and ends with stirring renditions of the religious classics “Ave Maria” and “Amazing Grace.” The fifth CD is “Merry Christmas,” a selection of Christmas and religious songs, mostly in English.

Natalka is now working on a sixth CD. To be released in 2006, it is timed for the 20th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster. She will make the CD in a duet with her younger sister Katerina, who lives in Kyiv and was born in Prypiat just one month before the 1986 disaster.

After Katerina, also a singer and bandura player, arrives in Tokyo this coming autumn, the two sisters will undertake a two-bandura concert tour around Japan as they work out the details of their joint CD. Natalka is also beginning to plan a concert tour in North America, hopefully in 2006. She has never been there and knows few people, so the planning is slow at present.

…

In March 2011, after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 20,000 and triggered the nuclear crisis, Gudziy quickly sprang into action. On March 22, she posted a YouTube video calling people to volunteer to house mothers and children evacuating from Fukushima. In the video, which has attracted over 45,000 views, the performer asks nonprofit organizations and local governments to set up a home-stay support system for families who live close to Fukushima plant so they can live without fear of over-exposure to radiation. She says there is no way to asses the extent of the radiation released until the plants have been sealed.

Gudziy performed live in Fukushima on July 25. She told the Toyo Keizai business magazine at the time, “I think children and pregnant women should move far away from the plant. The effects of radiation sometimes only appear several years after initial exposure, like it did with my classmates.”

Up till August 2011, Gudziy has recorded 8 albums, produced a CD book, and a successful cover of “Somewhere,” the theme song from Hayao Miyazaki’s Academy Award-winning 2001 movie Spirited Away.

Since 1995, the Chernobyl Children’s Fund has been donating the proceeds from a calendar it

Executive director of the CCFFJ Mari Sasaki holds the 2012 calendar by Ryuichi Hirokawa. (Photo courtesy of Hiroyuki Takei)

publishes every year to provide continued assistance to the Ukrainian and Belorussian children, who still suffer from the radioactive contamination that resulted from the accident.

CCFJ has taken a slightly different approach to publishing the 2012 calendar keeping in mind the Fukushima disaster. Ryuichi Hirokawa’s 17th annual calendar depicting the smiling children who live near the doomed Chornobyl nuclear plant is particularly poignant and meaningful this year, carrying powerful messages.

The organization prints 3,000 to 4,000 copies each time. Until now, many of the visuals portrayed the harshness of life in the area, with images such as abandoned buildings and children afflicted with thyroid cancer. The photos in this year’s calendar are not accompanied by captions to provoke memories of the tragedy. Instead, the cover photo is of a smiling girl with a long scar rising up as it stretches across her neck. She got it after receiving surgery to treat thyroid cancer.

The final page features messages to Japan. ”I’m sad that what happened in our country has happened again.” “I hope no Japanese children get sick like me.” They come from Ukrainian and Belorussian children who have received surgery for cancer and other ailments through support from the CCFJ.

Zimbabwe Tourism Trends and Prospects

Zimbabwean tour operators started receiving business inquiries as Zimbabwe and Zambia prepare to host the 20th session of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) general assembly in 2013.

Zimbabwe has been suffering from negative publicity that has impacted negatively on its attractiveness as an investment destination. “This is a very important conference for us. This endorses the country as a tourism destination,” hopes Karikoga Kaseke, CEO of Zimbabwe Tourism Authority (ZTA).

During the 19th session of the UNWTO General Assembly in South Korea held October 8-14 2011, Zambia and Zimbabwe won the bid to co-host the next session. About 5,000 delegates from six regional commissions of the UNWTO – Africa, the Americas, Pacific. Europe, the Middle East and South Asia – are expected to attend the conference. The 2013 UNWTO general assembly will be held in Livingstone and Victoria Falls. Currently, the two nations do not have sufficient capacity to accommodate the expected number of delegates for the October 2013 conference.

According to reports, the proposed venues for the event would be Elephant Hills Hotel in Zimbabwe and the Convention Centre at Royal Livingstone in Zambia. Neither venue can accommodate more than 2, 000 delegates. Issues that also immediately come to mind include accessibility of the resort towns by air especially in the wake of challenges bedevilling Air Zimbabwe.

It appears to The Herald‘s senior business reporter Martin Kadzere that there has been reluctance by the government to increase private flights into Victoria Falls and this might cause Zimbabwe to lose out to Zambia. There is also a number of levies and regulations that, the operators claim, affect their capacity to provide an efficient and competitive package to visitors.

Tourism consultant Herbert Nkala warned that lack of preparedness could result in UNWTO withdrawing Zimbabwe’s hosting rights. ”As a word of caution, Zimbabwe won the bid to host the [Africa] Cup of Nations some years ago but their rights were withdrawn due to unpreparednes.”

Finance Minister Tendai Biti allocated USD1 million for the preparations. He also made provision to assist the Victoria Falls Town Council to address the water and sewerage issues as well as rehabilitation of roads. ”However, while the minister has made a commitment, the USD1 million is far below what the industry had been expecting,” said one tourism stakeholder in an interview with The Herald.

Tich Mudzonga, who presides over the Hospitality Association of Zimbabwe and the Inbound Tour Operators of Zimbabwe Association (Itoza), said the sector has been receiving inquiries from its foreign counterparts since success of the co-hosting bid was announced last year. ”The industry is already receiving enquiries on possible partnerships from outbound tour operators mainly from the traditional markets in Europe, the United Kingdom and the Americas. Immediately, the perception of Zimbabwe as a tourist destination has skyrocketed following confirmation of winning the bid.”

Mudzonga said the sector should maximise business opportunities as the world’s tourists focused on the two countries.

Africa will be hosting the event for the second time after successfully hosting a similar one in Senegal in 2005.

The new logo of the Hospitality Association of Zimbabwe

Now what is the current situation with the hotels in Zimbabwe? The tourism sector is yet to hit 50% in average occupancy rates three years after the country dollarised. Resort hotel occupancies averaged 50,2% over the 15-day period to January 3 while national hotel occupancies were at 38%, weighed down by the low performance of city hotels, according to figures released by the ZTA. Victoria Falls had the highest average of 77%, with about 15,000 visitors in the resort town.

Tich Hwingwiri said the Christmas and New Year holidays were eventful and brought brisk business to the industry. Resort hotels and lodges were fully booked during the period, he said. The highest occupancy average was 99% on New Year’s Eve.

According to Hwingwiri, most of the hotel operators in Victoria Falls attributed the growth in occupancy numbers to the annual Falls Fest, an arts festival, and other promotional packages put in place by operators and bus companies.

ZTA CEO Karikoga Kaseke observes that the tourism sector was coming from a low base where there was negative perception about Zimbabwe, but the situation had improved owing to aggressive marketing by players in the tourism sector. “We are however not happy about city hotels’ performance, (over the festive season) which failed to beat the forecast of 45% occupancy.” City Hotel occupancies over the period were at 28%.

Hotel group Rainbow Tourism Group occupancies were at 33%, with finance director Paschal Changunda saying the period had good occupancies for the resort hotels, which were mostly fully occupied for the period. He said the performance of the city hotels, which were generally quiet during the festive season, broadly diluted overall occupancy rates for the group. Of the occupancies, Changunda said, 70% were local while 30% were foreign visitors.

Rainbow Tourism Group embarked on a $15 million recapitalisation exercise to retire its short-term debt and complete refurbishments projects. Changunda said the company was neither technically insolvent nor in the process of being liquidated. “The company is transacting normally and operations are actually profitable. However, the interest burden continues to weigh the company down and this is part of the reason we want to recapitalise.” The company started at 39% in average occupancy rate and in 2010 it was between 40-42% and is now around 47%.

Apart from targeting occupancy rates, another direction to consider for the tourism sector in Zimbabwe is focusing on untapped destinations like the sites of religious significance in the country.

Something is already being done in this realm. The Zion Christian Church (ZCC) Mbungu shrine situated in Masvingo was certified last year as a religious tourism shrine by Minister of Tourism and Hospitality Engineer Walter Mzembi. He said, “Locally, we have the Johanne Marange Apostolic sect that attracts huge numbers on annual meetings in Manicaland. They attract people from other countries and we look forward to ZCC growing in other countries.”

Mzembi has set a target of five million tourist arrivals and a 15% gross domestic product contribution from the tourism sector by 2015, a move which he said would be achievable especially with the 2013 UNWTO general assembly visitors drawn from over 200 countries.

Religion in Zimbabwe blogger Joan Musikavanhu adds the following sites to the list. Apostle Guti’s ZAOGA has a prayer mountain in Bindura and Prophet Uebert Angel‘s Spirit Embassy has a prayer mountain off Beatrice road, about 60 km from Harare, called the Eagle Mountain. Roman Catholics go to Mutemwa in Mutoko.

Religious tourism is an USD18 billion hospitality market, and 300 million travelers worldwide go on faith-based vacations, and cruises.

Read here to learn more about the global efforts to promote faith tourism:

"Mexico the place you thought you knew" campaign aims to re-pitch the country to its regular visitors, the US tourists in particular, after the image has been tarnished by the international media as a result of the war on drugs

About the 1st International Conference on Religious Tourism and Development of Pilgrimage Culture that was held last year in Mashhad, Iran.

The Vatican chooses Mexico for the VII World Congress on the Pastoral Care of Tourism. By doing so, the Vatican may be helpful in the Mexican efforts at improving the image of the country, especially among the US citizens, one of the biggest populations visiting Mexico on holiday breaks.

 

 

Consequences of illegal downloading for local media industries, international media investment and global cultural trade

This article appeared in an August 2011 issue of The Economist

Global Pirates (image courtesy of The Economist)

At least two music shops were looted during the riots that swept Britain earlier this month. In north London, a warehouse containing CDs and DVDs was set on fire. This was devastating for shopkeepers and local residents. But the British media industry may note, cheerily, that its products are still seen as valuable enough to risk a prison sentence. In many countries it is hard to conceive of looters stealing music or films from a store. In a few, it is difficult to imagine that a warehouse filled with recorded music would even exist.

Since 2000, when the file-sharing service Napster first became popular, digital piracy has dogged the media industry. Over time piracy has become more diverse and sophisticated. In some countries, rather than swapping files on peer-to-peer networks, people now stash their loot in private “cyber-lockers”. As broadband speeds have increased, pirates have gone from downloading single songs to grabbing artists’ entire catalogues. Watching pirated television shows and films online has become more popular, too.

Yet piracy has not exactly swept the world. It is endemic in some countries but a niche activity in others. In some places the tide is flowing; in others it appears to be ebbing. In response, media firms are moving their resources from country to country, with potentially large consequences for the global flow of popular culture.

Media piracy is more common in the developing world than in the rich world (see chart). The most piratical countries are places like China, Nigeria and Russia, where virtually all media that is not downloaded illegally is sold in the form of knock-off CDs and DVDs. But there is also great variation among rich countries. Piracy is far more widespread in the Mediterranean than it is in northern Europe, including Britain. America may be the least piratical country of all—oddly, since Napster was born there.

This chart is from August 2011

One reason is cost. A recent study for America’s Social Science Research Council found that DVDs of The Dark Knight, a Warner Bros blockbuster, were selling in Russia for the equivalent of $75 (if adjusted to take account of differences in GDP per head). In India the DVD was on sale for the equivalent of $663. Legal differences are another reason. In Germany it is easy to fine somebody for downloading music illegally; in Spain it is almost impossible. A final cause, the most intangible but probably the most powerful, is culture. In some countries copying is broadly regarded as theft; in others it is not.

Media companies care less about the causes than about the consequences. Consider Spain, which is western Europe’s leader in piracy. Last year IDC, a research firm, found that 92% of 16- to 24-year-old internet users (and fully 70% of 45- to 55-year-olds) in Spain admitted to using peer-to-peer networks. Music sales have collapsed. In 2010 barely 10m CDs were sold in the country—down from 71m in 2001. Digital sales are puny, too. “You can have a number-one album in Spain with 3,000 sales,” notes David Kassler, who manages EMI’s operations in Europe.

The result is that big labels have pruned their Spanish operations. Universal Music has shed a third of its Spanish staff. Max Hole, who runs Universal’s businesses outside America, says the firm is “holding out” in Spain, but largely in the hope that it will discover an artist who appeals to Hispanics in the United States. Mr Kassler says EMI is spending five or six times as much in Germany, a low-piracy market where music sales are declining more gently—by 11% between 2006 and 2010.

DVD sales have collapsed in Spain, too. Xavier Marchand of Alliance Films, an independent movie outfit, says that Spain has become a “1950s market” where almost all the money is made from cinema showings and broadcast-TV rights. Jeff Blake, vice-chairman of Sony Pictures, says it still makes sense to release big-budget family films like The Smurfs in Spain. Such films are reliable box-office magnets and sell relatively well on DVD because parents use them as electronic babysitters. But dramas aimed at young men are dicier. As a result, says Mr Blake, the Spanish “get fewer films on fewer screens, with less marketing support behind them”.

As media companies pull out of Spain, they are beefing up in South Korea. That country is the world’s 12th-biggest music market, a notch behind Spain. It will almost certainly overtake the Mediterranean country this year. Korean recorded-music sales, which collapsed in the first half of the last decade, have risen for each of the past three years. Sales were worth 207 billion won (then $179m) in 2010—up from 134 billion won in 2007.

South Korea has the world’s toughest anti-piracy laws. Almost every measure under discussion elsewhere—threatening to cut pirates’ broadband connections; blocking pirate websites; forcing youthful downloaders into education programmes; clamping down on cyber-lockers—has been done in Korea. Legal music-streaming and downloading websites have sprouted, providing many more honest ways of getting hold of music. The Korean experience may be unique: anti-piracy laws have not had such a clear effect elsewhere.

A few years ago international music firms had almost no presence in the country. Now they are coming back, according to Mayseey Leong, regional director of the IFPI, a music industry umbrella group. Universal Music began investing in Korean music in 2009. Sony Music has launched “The Secret Garden”, a music-heavy TV show, and used it to tout new singles. Warner Music Group has signed JYJ, a Korean boy band, and is exporting its schmaltzy pop to the rest of Asia.

As music firms move resources from one country to another, domestic markets are being reshaped. In 2010 Korean groups accounted for 76% of CD sales in that country, the highest share for at least eight years. In Germany, too, domestic acts’ share of the recorded-music market has risen steadily, from 29.5% in 2001 to 49% in 2010. In Spain the balance has not changed much. But the number of albums by new Spanish artists to reach the annual top 50 has collapsed, from ten in 2003 to none in 2009 and 2010, according to the IFPI.

The same is not, however, true of film. In many countries, including Spain, the domestic film business is subsidised by the government, limiting the impact of declining DVD sales. In Russia, a high-piracy market, home-grown films have lost a lot of ground to Hollywood imports. But that is at least partly because Hollywood is marketing more heavily in the country: DVD sales may be virtually non-existent, but so many screens have been built that it is now worth their while.

Hollywood’s global influence has, of course, long been resented. The worry for governments is that cultural industries like music will eventually go the way of film, with impoverished local outfits failing to compete with mighty international media giants. It is probably not a coincidence that the first country to enact a “three-strikes” law against media piracy was South Korea, a country with considerable pride in its exports, cultural and otherwise. Nor is it surprising that the first European country to follow suit was France, where worries about cultural purity and independence flow like wine.

Downloading music and films illegally from the internet appears an innocuous act—hardly as egregious as looting. But the legions of pirates are quietly reshaping world culture even so.

____

To illustrate how the reshaping is being done in Africa,  Steppes in Sync offers you to look at an example from Zimbabwe. In this Southern African country, one can sometimes hear that the government sees no harm in the piracy of the Western media productions. It is seen as a just response to the  sanctions imposed on some Zimbabwean officials by the EU and the US.

Larry Ndoro, a Zimbabwean branding and advertising entrepreneur, notes that some pirating companies in Africa not only managed to remain anonymous, and yet make high profits, but also put a human face to their brand. Discussing the branding strategy of one such group “Captain Jack Sparrow” in a recent issue of Hello Harare!, Ndoro observes:

I think piracy makes all the work and effort that artists put into their products null and void but I must admire the resourcefulness of our anonymous entrepreneur.

As I settle down into my sofa, popcorn in hand to enjoy my Friday movie night, random people from different walks of life recite this now popular mantra on my TV: “You are watching Jack Sparrow… You are watching Captain Jack Sparrow.”

Who is Captain Jack Sparrow and how did he take on giants like Rainbow Video and win? Many a time as I swing by the flea markets for a bit of Sunday shopping I overhear clients asking the vendors: “Is this a Jack Sparrow DVD?” Many other pirating syndicates have since opened but Jack is definitely king of that castle.

In The Pirates of the Caribbean films, Jack Sparrow is a notorious witty (and somewhat demented) pirate who eludes the clutches of death and of the law through the most innovative and creative means. In the case of the Zimbabwean Sparrow, the name is a clever play on piracy that immediately identifies the nature of his business. This is about the brand.

In addition, Jack’s products are well-packaged. And, unlike others in his business, Jack carries a measure of quality on the back of each disc case sold under his brand –  honest percentages from 70% to 100%.

Jack has also come up with his own series of catchy jingles that you now hear kids across the social divide singing.

In an industry where the shelf life of your product is less than 30 days, Jack has ensured that he provides his fans with the latest movies. Through use of Twitter and Facebook he gets input from the clients and supplies them with what they ask for at a moderate price.

Destination marketing: lessons for Zimbabwe

This article by Andy Kozlov appeared in the January 2012 issue of the Hello Harare! magazine

Did you ever ask yourself why your husband goes to London on business trips? Or why he never takes you to Paris, although you’ve been talking about it since that first time when he took you to a restaurant in Sam Levy’s? God forbid, I am not implying that he has a small house somewhere in Kuwadzana. What I would like to share with you is my thoughts on destination branding and how this fancy-phrased strategy shapes the way we plan our holidays and, in fact, our lives.

Why is it that a romantic trip for two often has its end in Paris and not in Mandalay (Rudyard Kipling’s famous “on the road to Mandalay”) or Batumi? (Can’t think of any poems by Kipling or any other English author about this tourist destination in Georgia).

Think about it: was South Africa spending millions on preparation to the World Cup to just find itself with a bunch of world-class stadiums and airports or it was a long-term investment alongside the ‘rainbow nation’s’ re-imaging efforts?

Currently, there are 204 states in the world and each of them is competing for people’s minds, luring you to come and spend your holiday budget, or invest in a local business. Understanding this, governments are spending millions on destination branding campaigns, and, so far, few succeed. To get effective result, a nation needs much more than a thirty-second jingle played on and on over CNN.

A nation that plans to undertake a deliberate branding activity must realize that the key to branding is creating trust — of doing something consistently well over time — with minimum or no disruptions in quality and delivery of the goods or services.

Truth be said, each of 204 states already has a brand. The trick is to learn how to manage it. Brand awareness consists of brand recognition (eg: recognize a country, Tanzania) and brand recall (recite from memory the brand in a product category. eg: Brazil for carnivals or Marcopolo luxury coaches). A nation must create brand awareness through repeated exposure and burning the brand in the minds of the brand message recipients for later recall.

According to Simon Anholt, a nation branding expert, there are three areas that people want to be reassured about when forming their opinion of a country: technology (people like modern countries, modern countries with some history that are able to compete in the modern world), education (people think in very personal practical terms these days: shall I go there, work, study there, receive decent educational qualification in the English language that is valued internationally), environment (people tend to disrespect countries that disrespect the environment).

Africa was one of only two continents to record economic growth during the recent global downturn and its growth rate is likely to exceed 5% this year, according to the Harvard Business Review. The number of households with discretionary income is projected to rise by 50% over the next 10 years. As businesses that operate in Africa become more successful and their employees grow weary of the usual recreation destinations like Europe and South Africa, more and more middle-class Africans will opt to spend their vacation budgets on the next-door resorts. The element of discovery is a major factor here.

With a growth of 6% of the tourism sector, the continent hosted 50 million visitors in 2010 (the year of South Africa’s World Cup). In the coming years, hundreds of thousands of African travelers will be looking for an unconventional answer to the “where to go” question. The nations that will be smart to tap into this flow are going to profit on a scale never seen before. According to the UN Steering Committee on Tourism for Development, tourism spending contributed $10 billion to the world’s least developed countries in 2010 alone; while nearly 17 million travelers sought out new and unique international destinations. These numbers are a drastic shift from a decade prior, where the numbers came in at $3 billion and and 6 million travelers, respectively.

I have a feeling that you, our dear Hello Harare! Reader, are also asking yourself where to go this year for a vacation. Valentine’s Day is around the corner and you might also be wondering where to take your beloved. Somewhere fresh and new, hmm?

Would you consider western part of Africa as one of your options? Odds are high that your opinion of Nigeria or Ivory Coast is as high as your idea of Bangladesh and Belarus. This is exactly what prompted Gordon Triegaardt to found Traveltroll Africa, a Joburg-based tour operator that specialises in tours to West Africa. According to Triegaardt, “West Africa is what East Africa was ten years ago but without the animal pool.”

I am going to say something that has, probably, long been on the mind of many – we’ve had enough of safaris and game parks. We long for diversity, and so do the tourists that consider Africa as an option for their vacations.

Going back to Triegaardt’s creation, West African “countries are in the infancy stage of tourism development and yet have the infrastructure to grow tremendously, and they are developing and growing daily. It’s safe, it’s fun, it’s interesting, it’s beautiful and the people are warm and friendly.” I learned about what Traveltroll does leafing through Horizons, a British Airways in-flight magazine, on my way from Harare to Jozi, quite a way from West Africa, yes?

Some nations get so smart that they start to advertise foreign destinations as their own. Another Joburg-stemming entrepreneur Mervin Senior, owner of Mbizi Park and Lodges (off the Airport Road in Harare), is being critical of South African advance on the continent and suggested the following for Zimbabweans to take destination marketing in their own hands.

To illustrate his position he paints the following picture of Mt.Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. “Your nearest port of departure is Nairobi, advertised straight into your face: “Come to our beautiful mountain Kilimanjaro, Kenya.”

Reflecting on Zimbabwe: “You look at the advertising of Vic Falls (VF). Where do you think it

Simon Anholt, a nation branding guru

is?..South Africa.” World Cup promo campaigns had it simple – come to see Victoria Falls when in South Africa for the World Cup! “Now instead of allowing people to fly from London to Victoria Falls or from Jo’burg to VF or from wherever to VF-this should be banned. They should land in Harare or Bulawayo. They should build a new airport at Kariba so that people could go to VF, to Lusaka in Zambia. I think that that airport has to be built by both Zambia and Zimbabwe and share VF.”

Hello Harare!‘s Joseph Bunga recollects that it was exactly the case: people travelled through Harare to get to VF.

Soon there is going to be another tourism player taxing on the tarmac of the international airport in Harare. Emirates Airlines, the largest airline in the Middle East, operating over 2,400 passenger flights per week, will fly to Harare via Lusaka from its Middle East hub in Dubai, starting February 2012. Read about it in our next issue.

You can write to Andy Kozlov on andreakozlov@gmail.com

Destination marketing: lessons for Zimbabwe

Both artisans and businesses: “Manifesto of Free Radicals” by Behance’s Scott Belsky

We came across an interesting manifesto several days ago. Manifesto of Free Radicals by Scott Belsky, CEO of Behance and author of the bestselling book Making Ideas Happen. It resonates with the way the Steppes in Sync people see the world and act in. At one stage, our founder Andy Kozlov came up with The 10 Commandments of Development Communicator to describe our principles.

“In the past, those with Free Radical tendencies were described as either “freelancers,” if they worked alone, or “mavericks,” if they worked in an organization. The stereotype was that of a lone ranger that shuns responsibility. Today, Free Radicals are emerging as extremely capable leaders across industries. Sure, they’re authoring their own professional lives with great authority, but they are doing so with a deep appreciation for collaboration and shared resources.

In large corporations, I find Free Radicals questioning the norms and building a reputation as honest and action-oriented individuals; they’re trading antiquated (and opaque) information-sharing processes for the ease and transparency of Google Apps, they’re leveraging social media to gain market insights faster (and more cheaply) than the research department, and they’re always pushing for more freedom and progressive work practices that value meaningful creation over meaningless face time.

 

Who Are the Free Radicals? A Manifesto.

We demand freedom, whether we work within companies or on our own, to run experiments, participate in multiple projects at once, and move our ideas forward. We thrive on flexibility and are most productive when we feel fully engaged.

We make stuff often, and therefore, we fail often. Ultimately, we strive for little failures that help us course-correct along the way, and we view every failure as a learning opportunity, part of our experiential education.

We have little tolerance for the friction of bureaucracy, old-boy-networks, and antiquated business practices. As often as possible, we question “standard operating procedure” and assert ourselves. But even when we can’t, we don’t surrender to the friction of the status quo. Instead, we find clever ways (and hacks) around it.

We don’t create solely for ourselves, we want to make a real and lasting impact in the world around us.

We expect to be fully utilized and constantly optimized, regardless of whether we’re working in a startup or a large organization. When our contributions and learning plateau, we leave. But when we’re leveraging a large company’s resources to make an impact in something we care about, we are thrilled! We want to always be doing our best work and making the greatest impact we can.We consider “open source” technology, API’s, and the vast collective knowledge of the Internet to be our personal arsenal.Wikipedia, Quora, and open communities for designers, developers, and thinkers were built by us and for us. Whenever possible, we leverage collective knowledge to help us make better decisions for ourselves and our clients. We also contribute to these open resources with a “pay it forward” mentality.

We believe that “networking” is sharing. People listen to (and follow) us because of our discernment and curatorial instinct. As we share our creations as well as what fascinates us, we authentically build a community of supporters that give us feedback, encouragement, and lead us to new opportunities. For this reason and more, we often (though, not always) opt for transparency over privacy.

We believe in meritocracy and the power of online networks and peer communities to advance our ability to do what we love, and do well by doing it. We view competition as a positive motivator rather than a threat, because we want the best idea – and the best execution – to triumph.

We make a great living doing what we love. We consider ourselves as both artisans and businesses. In many cases, we are our own accounting department, Madison Avenue marketing agency, business development manager, negotiator, and salesperson. We spend the necessary energy to invest in ourselves as businesses – leveraging the best tools and knowledge (most of which are free and online) to run ourselves as a modern-day enterprise.”

You can find the full version of the manifesto right here

Making sure that Zimbabwe Reads

A Shona children's reader. Shona is a native language of a major ethnic group in Zimbabwe.

this article by our founder Andy Kozlov appeared in the January 2012 issue of the Hello Harare! magazine

What books did your kids read during the vacation month? Spud, or maybe another book from the Harry Potter series? Well, it’s sad to admit but for many Zimbabwean schoolchildren the only reading materials are textbooks, a problem that Hello Harare! decided to help tackle.

By June 2011, UNICEF successfully completed its distribution of 15 million books to all the estimated 2.6 million primary school students in Zimbabwe. In November, they launched a new donation of books to over 2,000 secondary schools.

As Ian Attfield reported on his DFID blog, one speaker at the launch joked that the international donors should be called ‘friends’ or ‘partners’ instead of ‘donors’, which conjured up images of blood transfusions!

So, 7 million books should reach every corner of this country in time for the new school year starting in January. This distribution of textbooks will enable the government to achieve its target of one textbook per pupil in six main subjects: Mathematics, English, Science, Geography, History and indigenous languages. The textbook to pupil ratio has stood at 1:10 in most secondary schools, while an estimated 15 % of schools in rural areas have no textbooks at all.

Once each pupil gets a set of textbooks, the task of creating a culture of reading should not go off the radar. Many of our parent readers will know that to get their kids interested in reading, learning, and developing the right skills needed for the Zimbabwe of tomorrow, having a home library is an obvious thing to arrange for. But what can you do when you are born in a rural home, where a seven-dollar book can only be dreamt of? This is where we at Hello Harare! decided to step in and do our part.

Magazines to donate to schoolchildren in rural Zimbabwe (photo courtesy of Zimbabwe Reads Trust)

We occasionally have extra copies in our warehouse, and so it seemed only natural to donate those Lira- and Sean Kingston-faced back issues to the Zimbabwe Reads Trust, an organization that makes sure school children of Zimbabwe have something to read besides textbooks.

Zimbabwe Reads Trust is working to encourage the culture of reading among the youth of the Southern African nation. The major focus of the trust is promotion of literature in the indigenous languages of Zimbabwe like Shona, Ndebele and Kalanga

We did a pilot project with several schools in the Domboshawa area back in May, and in November we shipped hundreds of Hello Harare!‘s to the Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Harare, as well as donated several packages of your favorite issues to the Doris Lessing-inspired Africa Book Development Organization, active in Chegutu, Gokwe, Tsholotsho and several other locations in the western part of the country.

To learn more about promoting a culture of reading in Zimbabwe visit ZimbabweReads.org


You can write to Andy Kozlov on andreakozlov@gmail.com

Popular narratives of Gaborone in Africa’s Switzerland and beyond

The Guardian‘s Sam Wollaston once ‘failed miserably’ to like The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series by Scotland-based Alexander McCall Smith. So did a reviewer for The Times. But the Rhodesia-born author’s Newsweek essay on Gaborone (or Gabs) in Botswana (or Bots), a setting of the series,  is a not-to-miss homage to African City. Below Steppes in Sync reprints it in full for you to enjoy.

“African cities can be discouraging. Many are surrounded by skirts of shantytowns—or informal suburbs, as they are charitably described. A visitor to Cape Town in South Africa, for example, must drive through miles of lean-to dwellings before reaching Table Mountain’s lower slopes. Farther north, things get worse. Some African cities can be downright intimidating, with their impossible traffic, frightening crime, and unplanned sprawl. Some African cities carry a health warning: do not visit unless you really have to.

And then there is Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. It is the one country in sub-Saharan Africa that seems to have avoided the post-independence slide into corruption and collapse that has afflicted the much-exploited and abused continent. Gaborone, like the country itself, is well run, neat, and, for most of its inhabitants, a remarkably pleasant place to be.

Gaborone buildings speak to a new and confident Botswana—prosperous, aware of where it’s going (courtesy of mmegi.bw)

The city is a new one. While many southern African cities have a good hundred years under their belt, Gaborone as a city really only dates back to the mid-’60s. Prior to independence, the country was administered as a protectorate, initially from Mafeking (now Mafikeng), which lies over the border in South Africa. In Botswana itself, there were in those days only a handful of towns, and Gaborone was very tiny. In 1966, when the newly independent state of Botswana came into existence, there was a small cluster of government buildings, a central mall, neatly ordered rows of government-issue houses, an airstrip, and not much else.

Then came the discovery of diamonds, and the economy of Botswana, carefully nurtured by stable and cautious government, prospered. The city began to grow.

Over the last 20 years, this growth has been considerable. Not only have extensive residential suburbs been added, but sparkling new commercial and light-industrial centers have sprung up at every turn. In the center of the city, around the government complex, a number of imposing glass towers have been erected, the headquarters of the various government ministries. These buildings speak to a new and confident Botswana—prosperous, aware of where it’s going. In the vicinity of these buildings, neat car parks house lines of well-kept vehicles under awnings. Everything is safe and well ordered: this is the polar opposite of ramshackle Africa. After all, there is usually a reason for a nickname, and Botswana, we might remind ourselves, is sometimes called the Switzerland of Africa.

Gaborone may not be as lively a town as Nairobi or Johannesburg, but it is a place where one can stand and look up at a sky so wide and empty that it makes the heart soar (courtesy of mmegi.bw)

But what of its character? There is more to a city than its water system and its public buildings. Modern towns can be soulless: bland international architecture imposed on a place says nothing of what that place has been, where it came from, and what it represents. Concrete, as W. H. Auden so acutely observed, desexes the space it occupies. There is plenty of concrete in a new city, but it need not have the effect of numbing the senses, and this has not happened in Gaborone.

The reason is that by some wonderful chance the architects who created modern Gaborone seem to have understood where they were. How they did this is a mystery. Most of the architects involved were expatriates, but I suspect that they were expatriates who actually liked the country they found themselves in and therefore had some feeling for the vernacular style. And that style really does exist. It involves a preference for curves, for feminine forms, and for shade—all worked into buildings that draw you from the heat and glare outside into a cool interior. As a result, there seems to be a direct connection between many of the new buildings of Gaborone and the lovely human effect of traditional Botswana village architecture. That architecture has a profound understanding of human scale and of domestic enclosure; consequently there is a sense in Gaborone of being somewhere profoundly comfortable.

And that is the prevailing note. This may not be as lively a town as Nairobi or Johannesburg, but it is a place where one can stand and look up at a sky so wide and empty that it makes the heart soar. This is a fine city, the center of a culture that is gentle and courteous, a good place.”

A preference for curves, for feminine forms, and for shade—all worked into buildings that draw you from the heat and glare outside into a cool interior. As a result, there seems to be a direct connection between many of the new buildings of Gaborone and the lovely human effect of traditional Botswana village architecture.

Themes and topics of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series (1998-2011)

Women in traditional vs nontraditional occupations
Rural way of life in Southern Africa
Social relations in traditional African society
Christianity and traditional belief systems in contemporary Africa
Clinical depression
AIDS and AIDS orphans in Sub-Saharan Africa

The BBC and American television network HBO filmed a series based on the books. It was shot on location in Botswana and was seen as one of the first major film or television productions to be undertaken in Botswana. (The Gods Must Be Crazy, a 1980 film set in Botswana was filmed mainly in South Africa).  The government provided five million dollars of funding for this television project.

Whilst she continues to delight millions of readers worldwide and thousands of visitors to Gaborone, Mma Ramotswe (the series’ detective heroine) has become an unofficial ambassador for Botswana, according to an African Business Special Report on the Southern African nation. From the same publication:

Says President Festus Mogae’s press secretary Jeff Ramsay: “Her name comes up all the time, and usually first! In India recently the president was asked how he felt being her president – only after he and his hosts had talked about Mma Ramotswe did the delegation get down to business.”

Visitors to Gaborone can ‘walk the beat’ of Botswana’s famous detective.

On 2 African innovation challenges – in news and architecture

You almost need a crisis where there’s real pain in a marketplace, for people to go out and invent something to solve it. Justin Arenstein of Anic

African Innovation Challenge in News

It’s called the African News Innovation Challenge (Anic), and it has $1-million to award in start-up grants by the end of this year. Anic, which was announced in October 2011, and had its soft launch last December, will formally launch this month.

Anic’s project manager Justin Arenstein says about encouraging journalists to innovate, “One of the ways that’s worked internationally is to dangle a very big carrot in front of them. It actually only took us two-and-a-half months to raise a million dollars.”

Initially the Omidyar Network (ON) put up $500,000 for the project. Established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, this organization invests in and helps scale innovative organizations to catalyze economic and social change.  One of ON’s beneficiaries is Kenya’s Ushahidi.

Anic will work like this: at the formal launch this month, Anic’s advisory council and judging panel will be announced. Arenstein says these two bodies already include people from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the International Centre for Journalists (ICFJ), and Google.

In February, a call for entries will go out. “We envision a two- to three-month window period, during which people will post their idea on a public forum, and we’ll casually invite the rest of the industry to help refine that idea,” says Arenstein.

Winners will be announced in the third quarter of 2012, and then the hard work really begins. “We’ve tried to learn from what people have done in the US and Europe and elsewhere,” says Arenstein. “We’ve looked at the innovation funds that seem to have had an impact, like the Knight News Challenge. They’ve learnt from what works best, and what doesn’t work best.”

Money given to Anic awardees will be released in tranches, with each project receiving between $12,500 to $100,000 depending on its scope. With the backing of the African Media Initiative, the Omidyar Network, the International Centre for Journalists, Google, the Knight Foundation, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, the US Department of State, and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers – all of whom are contributing either funding or expertise – the African News Innovation Challenge has already garnered high-level support. Now it’s up to the journalists and media workers of Africa to meet the challenge.

Justin Arenstein

And they have a good example to follow, the one set by the Anic’s project manager himself. Justin Arenstein is a multi-award winning investigative journalist based in South Africa but also working in Malawi, Mozambique and Swaziland. He is currently holding a position of consultant on Google’s media engagement and content development in Africa, including strategies for journalistic toolkits and digital journalism experiments, data journalism projects, and digital migration. He is also a Vice President for the Jo’burg-based Association of Independent Publishers, Southern Africa’s largest umbrella association for independent grassroots newspapers, magazines, and ‘alternative’ print media.

One of his previous activities was rapid response consultant on digital strategies, media sustainability, mobile media and investigative journalism for ICFJ teams deployed into Sub-Saharan Africa.

Arenstein also worked as the publisher of HomeGrown Magazines, a pioneering South African publishing house that produces a network of lifestyle, business and tourism titles in some of the nation’s most rural provinces.

Specialising in government corruption, Arenstein heads the region’s only investigative pan-African news agency, African Eye News Service (AENS). The service currently reaches an estimated 1,5 million readers per day through its Audited Bureau of Circulation (ABC) accredited clients in South African, as well as extensive international Internet readership, and smaller readerships in Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland and Tanzania.

Arenstein is also the Africa member for a loose consortium of international investigative reporters, and spearheaded its most successful trans-national investigation yet tracking a suspected chemical weapon dealer and fraudster from Israel, to Switzerland, South Africa, New York and finally to his Las Vegas hideout, where US Marshals arrested him based on press reports. The dealer, Moshe Regev/ Regenstreich, has been extradiated to Switzerland where he has been sentenced to 11yrs jail.

Arenstein’s earlier work sent a South African senator to jail on child rape charges, got five provincial cabinet members axed for corruption, Mpumalanga’s legislature speaker and deputy speaker jailed on fraud charges, a provincial wildlife parastatal CEO and senior political party officials arrested on corruption charges, blew the lid on a national fraudulent vehicle licence syndicate, uncovered a fraudulent government consultancy scam and resulted in criminal charges against a range of senior government and political party officials.

Arenstein’s reports also prevented three separate illegal deals that sought to secretly alienate public assets worth US$9,2 billion.

African Innovation Challenge in Architecture

Further north of Southern Africa, there is currently only one higher-level architecture school  in the whole of Francophone Africa. Located in Togo – Ecole africaine des métiers de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (Eamau) in Lomé – is a small African school with thousands of African problems.

In 2004, the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme began restoring the Great Mosque in Mopti, Mali. The restoration expanded to include sanitation, street paving, healthcare and other measures in the neighbouring Komoguel district. Since 2006, the Programme has extended its work to Timbuktu, where it has restored the Djingarey Ber mosque (See SinS article The Festival in the Desert by Intagrist El Ansari to learn more about Timbuktu). But this is a grain of sand in the vast desert of rapid African urbanization facing local architects.

Francis Kéré, an African architecture guru, is convinced that sustainable architecture is the future for Africa. Born in a remote village outside Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso, Kéré has come a long way. He founded an architectural practice in Berlin, has become a sought-after international lecturer and has won a series of awards. Kéré is a holder of the 2004 Aga Khan Award for Architecture and the Regional Holcim Award 2011 Africa Middle East (an international competition for projects in sustainable construction). And for some Africans he has become a hero of sorts, not merely “making it” in Europe, but actually choosing to invest in African people. 

Opera in the African savannah

He is currently developing an opera village in Laongo, about an hour away from Ouagadougou, known as Operndorf Afrika or the “Remdoogo”, designed by the late German film and theater director and artist Christoph Schlingensief.

“This is an absurd but also highly interesting work, because it is a “plastic” social creation,” explains the architect. Never meant to be an opera in the European sense, the creative space in Burkina Faso is envisaged to provide stage for African performance and embrace various forms of creative expression including a film school, a theatre school and a recording studio.

Are there currently in the country the kind of professionals who will cater for the needs and requirements of such a space? According to Kéré, ”Burkina Faso is a major center for African film production. Think for example of FESPACO, the biannual Pan-African Film & Television festival which is No.1 in Africa or the theatrical production of Ouagadougou. In recent years a major music festival has been developed as well. So I believe that the required specialists are indeed available.”

Chinese trends in African architecture

In the past Europe used to be the prototype for development in Africa, today it is China. Africans travel to China to buy cheap building material and they observe how the Chinese construct their buildings. Europeans invest much more time and thought in determining whether Africans need this kind of relationship. But in this they forget how impatient Africans are. Africans want speed and efficiency, they want to see results fast. This “gap” has come to be filled by the Chinese. (See SinS video We understand pictures. A Chinese in Zimbabwe)

Sustainable architecture

Francis Kéré's Regional Holcim award-winning project - Secondary school with passive ventilation system, Gando, Burkina Faso.

Preoccupations against sustainable architecture are still strong. Many people regard building with clay as non-innovative. Soil or clay is still regarded as the “poor people’s” material.

In my own work I use clay in a way that produces a solid and long-lasting result but governments are still hard to convince. People have to recognize the upsides themselves and pressure officials for an expansion of such projects. But at the same time one can’t just wait for governments to be “forced” into sustainability either. This is where private institutions come into play, institutions that will support and promote this kind of work. Unfortunately, though, I haven’t seen any of them yet! I wonder where those major foundations with their recognizable names are, Bill Gates foundations etc.

Donor challenge

The inauguration of the school in the OPERNDORF AFRIKA. Like the secondary school in Gando, it has a double roof with a vaulted ceiling and airy windows, which brings down the external temperature of up to 40 degrees Celsius in the shade to about 25 degrees inside the school in a natural way – and this without the aid of electricity. The school aims to take on 50 local children each year, offering classes in film, art and music.

The impression this situation leaves you with is that nobody is interested in trusting Africans with their own development. The inclination is for dependency to be perpetuated. Perhaps this is related to the fact that organizations which “make a living” out of development projects in Africa, fear that once Africa grows stronger they themselves will grow redundant.  They claim to wanting to help, but how can they ever help when they repeatedly avoid teaching people to help themselves?

In my ten years on all my projects combined I have not spent more than 200, 000 euros. Yet every single one of them has proven award-winning and has been praised internationally. Were you to visit any of them, you would be impressed by their functionality. And still, no big organization has ever approached me to work with me. I have no idea what they’re waiting for.

Global Tourism Prospects and Trends

Tourism is an important force to reduce poverty and foster global solidarity (photo courtesy of Bikyamasr.com).

According to a new forecast put out by the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO),

The World Tourism Organization Building in Madrid

international tourism is set to reach a staggering 1.8 billion by 2030 – growing at a more moderate yet sustained pace than past decades with the number of international tourist arrivals increasing globally by around 3.3% each year.

UNWTO encourages the implementation ‎of the Global Code of Ethics for Tourism, with a view to ensuring that member ‎countries, tourist destinations and businesses maximize the positive economic, ‎social and cultural effects of tourism and fully reap its benefits, while minimizing its ‎negative social and environmental impacts.

By the numbers, this will add an over 40 million tourists (and their dollars) to the tourism economy every single year. In absolute terms, the emerging economies of Asia, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, Eastern Mediterranean Europe, the Middle East, and Africa will gain an average 30 million arrivals a year, compared to 14 million in the traditional destinations of the advanced economies of North America, Europe and Asia, and the Pacific.

By 2015, emerging economies will receive more international tourist arrivals than advanced economies, and by 2030 their share is expected to reach 58%.

According to the UN Steering Committee on Tourism for Development (UNSCTD), tourism spending contributed $10 billion to the world’s least developed countries in 2010 alone; while nearly 17 million travelers sought out new and unique international destinations. These numbers are a drastic shift from a decade prior, where the numbers came in at $3 billion and and 6 million travelers, respectively.

One innovative world tourism project was featured by Terracurve in 2010. Back then, Ontheglobe.com, an organization specializing in tourism promotion and cultural awareness projects for developing and post-conflict nations, started conducting tourism promotion projects with the support of US tourism agencies and ministries from around the world.

Explains Andrew Princz, Ontheglobe.com cultural navigator, “With the support of international governments, we have brought the stories of disparate cultures of the world.” “Given the global economic models of today, we are confident that corporations will acknowledge the need to more deeply understand the cultures in the countries in which they are all doing business.”

For ten years, Ontheglobe.com has spearheaded the concept of cultural navigation, whereby authors are encouraged to partner with and participate more closely and take an active interest in the realities faced by the peoples and cultures that they visit.

The site has conducted cross-cultural missions involving tourism promotion and cultural awareness campaigns taking its members to over two dozen nations including Angola, Kazakhstan, India, Peru, Cuba and Samoa. The site combines a bit of National Geographic with a bit of UNESCO and throws in a touch of Hollywood for good measure.

The fundraising campaign looks to benevolent financial sponsorship for specific projects. Corporations and individuals are offered multi-tiered levels of support targeted at the implementation of website improvements, content production, the launch of branded products, the development of a charity arm, and a web-based TV series.

Contributor levels range from the Backpacker supporter for those contributing less than US$100, to the Royal Sponsor for backers of over US$25,000.

The project most likely was halted when Andrew Princz passed away in June 2011.  Ontheglobe.com is kept online in his memory.

David Scowsill, President & CEO of World Travel & Tourism Council comes up with another set of stunning figures, “Travel and Tourism accounts for 258 million jobs globally. At US$6 trillion (9.1% of GDP) the sector is a key driver for investment and economic growth and at a global level. It is larger than the automotive industry at 8% GDP, and just smaller than banking at 11%.”

According to Wikipedia, the following countries are Non-members of the World Tourism

Egypt uses the Arab Spring events to attract more tourists and lure the ones that were scared of by the same events, at the 2011 ITB Berlin, the world’s leading travel trade show (photo courtesy of Invisiblepr.com).

Organization: Suriname, Guyana, United States, Belize, Trinidad and Tobago, Dominica, Grenada, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Liberia, Somalia, Comoros, Ireland, Iceland, United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Estonia, United Arab Emirates, Myanmar, Singapore, New Zealand, Palau, Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Cook Islands, Tuvalu, Nauru, Niue, Kiribati, Solomon Islands, Samoa, Tonga and the rest of states with limited recognition.

The most significant change among the top ten destinations by international arrivals in 2010 was the rise of China to third position, according to the 2011 UNWTO Tourism Highlights Edition, released last June. China ousted Spain for third place, and has overtaken both the United Kingdom and Italy during the past few years. In terms of receipts, China (+15%) also moved up the ranking to fourth position, overtaking Italy (+1%).

 

China travel boom helps global tourism income generated by inbound visits near US$3 billion a day mark (photo courtesy of Chinatraveltrends.com).

China also moved into third place in the top ten ranking by international tourism spenders, with an expenditure of US$ 55 billion, overtaking the United Kingdom (US$ 49 billion). China has shown by far the fastest growth with regard to expenditure on international tourism in the last decade, multiplying expenditure four times since 2000, the UNWTO report says. Ranking as the seventh biggest source market in 2005, it has since overtaken Italy, Japan, France and the United Kingdom.

Other key global tourism trends in 2010:

• International tourist arrivals reached 940 million and tourism receipts generated US$ 919 billion
• Travel for leisure, recreation and holidays accounted for just over half of all international tourist arrivals
• Slightly over half of all travellers arrived at their destination by air
• France maintained its position as the world’s number one tourism destination.

As an internationally traded service, inbound tourism has become one of the world’s major trade categories. The overall export income generated by inbound tourism, including passenger transport, exceeded US$ 1 trillion in 2010, or close to US$ 3 billion a day. Tourism exports account for as much as 30% of the world’s exports of commercial services and 6% of overall exports of goods and services. Globally, as an export category, tourism ranks fourth after fuels, chemicals and automotive products.

The large majority of international travel takes place within the traveller’s own region, with about four out of five worldwide arrivals originating from the same region.

The total tourist arrivals by region shows that, by 2020, the top three receiving regions will be Europe (717 million tourists), East Asia (397 million) and the Americas (282 million), followed by Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

Every year on September 27, we celebrate the World Tourism Day. This serves to raise awareness among the international community of the importance of tourism and the contributions it can make in the economic, political and social sectors, and how it can help towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Keep an eye on UNWTO World Tourism Barometer

Download ITB World Travel Trends Report 2011-2012

Adasia: untapping media markets in Central Asia

Adasia, a Russian-language web portal about Central Asian ad and media agencies, is less then a year old. However, during the last six months it has been supplying Central Asian creativity buffs with local surveys, trends and figures such as the fact that 75% of Azerbaijani ad agencies have their websites in reconstruction.

According to Adasia’s end-of-the-year survey, the Kazakh and Azerbaijani agencies are the main players in the region. Kyrgyz creatives are good at design and less so at the advertising side of it. Tajikistan manages to make do with less than three agencies, whereas Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are still to discover their potential.

Juan Pablo Valencia (photo courtesy of Brandnews.kz)

The site is a collective effort of several local agencies from across the region:  IMedia (Kyrgyzstan), URA Marketing (Uzbekistan), Good-Day (Kazakhstan), Mak.az and some creatives from Design.kg and Brandnews.kz. A Tashkent-based Brandbox Branding & Creative worked on the design of the web portal.

The most-awarded creative director in Central Asia Juan Pablo Valencia of TBWA Central Asia & Caucasus is a constant inspiration to the Adasia team.

Some facts about Central Asian advertising market from Adasia

Central Asia does not have any regional ad festival yet. Crystal Butterfly is the name of a festival in Azerbaijan.

The biggest number of video promos in 2011 was produced for cellphone companies.

In Tajikistan it is illegal to advertise cell phone services.

The largest number of ad agencies and design studios in Central Asia call Kazakhstan their home.

Uzbekistan imposed a ban on the use of red and black in outdoor advertisements.

Uzbekistan’s capital Tashkent hosts the biggest number of billboards in Central Asia.

Procter & Gamble operates the biggest media budget among FMCG (Fast-moving consumer goods) brands in Central Asia.

Kazakhstan-based Das Marketing/Mindshare is the largest media agency in the region.

URA Marketing from Uzbekistan is the oldest full-cycle ad agency in Central Asia.

Shokay: a Socially Conscious Business in China

reprinted from The Globe and Mail

During a trip to China’s Yunnan province, Carol Chyau and her business partner, Marie So, had a small epiphany: “80 % of the world’s yak population is in Western China and its wool is comparable to cashmere,” Chyau says. “If it’s comparable to cashmere, why isn’t it in retail stores?”

When Chyau and So (from Taiwan and Hong Kong, respectively) met at Harvard, they challenged themselves to form a socially conscious business in China—a country where the economy rarely slows to consider things like the environment or people’s livelihoods. The pair founded Shokay, with a plan to make high-fashion goods from rural yaks’ wool in megalopolitan Shanghai.

Armed with almost US $100,000 in grants and business-plan competition winnings, they visited local farmers and artisans to see whether it was even feasible. Factories in Shanghai hadn’t handled yak wool since the 1990s. “We had to put together a supply chain that didn’t really exist,” says the 30-year-old Chyau. Last year, the company sourced 20 tons of yak down and exported finished goods to 10 countries. Moreover, Shokay claims to have raised its yak farmers’ annual incomes by 20% to 30%.

In hyper-commercial Shanghai, awash in luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, Shokay’s retail store offers a radically different brand message to its well-heeled denizens. “It’s that personal connection,” Chyau says, pointing out that many items carry the name of the woman who hand-knit the product.

The Perks of Traveling by Rail in Zimbabwe (if any)

by Andy Kozlov

A Pathfinder bus parked at the Golden Mile Hotel in Kadoma (photo by Andy Kozlov)

A vintage ticket for a train from Bulawayo to Mbalabala that I got as a present from the museum guide

A vintage ticket to the Railway Museum in Bulawayo that I got as a present from the museum guide

AIr Zimbabwe hangar at the Harare international airport (photo by Andy Kozlov)

Bernard, the Railway Museum guide

Figtree

Mooka steam train in Japan

Newspaper ad of the Bulawayo-Figtree tour

NRZ headquarters – the tallest building in Bulawayo (photo by Andy Kozlov)

NRZ rep posing for me in front of a vintage carriage

One of the carriages that we traveled in on the steam train tour to Figtree

Railway map of Zimbabwe in a book on steam trains

Railway Museum in Bulawayo 1 (photo by Andy Kozlov)

Railway Museum in Bulawayo 2 (photo by Andy Kozlov)

Railway Museum in Bulawayo 3 (photo by Andy Kozlov)

Railway Museum in Bulawayo 4 (photo by Andy Kozlov)

Railway Museum in Bulawayo 5 (photo by Andy Kozlov)

Railway Museum in Bulawayo 6 (photo by Andy Kozlov)

Railway Museum in Bulawayo 7 (photo by Andy Kozlov)

The steam train that I took on the Father’s day tour from Bulawayo to Figtree

The Bulawayo-bound Pathfinder bus that I was going to take on Christmas eve was cancelled. So I was stranded in Harare and again got to consider satisfying a long-held curiosity of a long-distance train travel in Zimbabwe. But then I remembered how persuasive my friend, a Zimbabwean taxi driver, was when I mentioned the idea to him on various occasions – trains in Zimbabwe are not reliable at all: you take one from Harare thinking that you reach Bulawayo in 12 hours and end up in the middle of nowhere for no-one knows how long.

His word versus a National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) chap’s whom I talked to a number of months back when I went for a Rail Leisure Father’s Day Steam Safari Train ride (Bulawayo-Figtree). National Railways people were so friendly to me both then and when I visited the Bulawayo

AIr Zimbabwe hangar at the Harare international airport (photo by Andy Kozlov)

Railway Museum at the beginning of the year. I enjoyed their nicely-implemented PR campaign again at this year’s tourism expo in Harare.

The Zimbabwe railway system was largely constructed during the time of British colonial rule, and part of it represents a segment of the Cape-Cairo railway. Until 1980 it was called Rhodesia Railways (RR).

NRZ started steam train trips using the refurbished stock from the museum in September
2005, when a special train was run from Bulawayo to Victoria Falls to celebrate the Centenary of the Victoria Falls Bridge.

It’s no news that NRZ has been in shackles this past decade. Goods transport has declined, from 18 million tonnes in 1998 to 2 million tonnes in 2010. Their trains have been through several accidents, and many observers draw gruesome comparison between NRZ and the once-state-of-the-art Zimbabwean transportation company Air Zimbabwe.

But NRZ’s struggles are not unique to Zimbabwe. Last year, South Africa’s Rovos Rail train derailed near Pretoria. Three crew members were killed and several passengers were injured. Like the NRZ Steam programme, the Rovos Rail trains use vintage rolling stock that has been gutted to transform the coaches into luxury accommodation. And they are very expensive to travel on.

Last November I came across Taurai Chinyamakobvu‘s article about how NRZ should be revamped.

This Zimbabwean scholar is a Japan-based innovation and technology analyst who (if you google his name), drawing on his experience of the Far East, once argued why Air Zimbabwe must be liquidated and in his other article presents a case for making Zimbabwe an airline hub. His NRZ piece is thrilling in its attempt to compare NRZ to the Japanese JR.

Mooka steam train in Japan

Here is an NRZ anecdote from Taurai:

The last time I used a passenger train in Zimbabwe was in 2004. The journey had more drama than I had bargained for.

I boarded a Bulawayo-bound train on a Friday evening. It departed Harare between 8 pm and 10 pm, and was supposed to get to Bulawayo between 8 and 9 am. Users of NRZ trains will appreciate that the train hardly leaves at a specific time! I intended to get to Bulawayo and conduct my business between 9 am and 1 pm on the following day.

So quite early in the morning, as the train approached Shangani, the train driver, much to our shock, disbelief and dismay, stopped the train mid-track, jumped off and  without explanation disappeared towards Bulawayo road.

No one from NRZ explained anything. No one knew what was happening! Soon after that, many people got off the cars and started milling around the train, tracks and Shangani plains, without any knowledge of what was going on. We all waited around the train wondering what was happening. Soon word started spreading that the NRZ had stopped paying its drivers overtime, so the train driver’s time was up before he got to Bulawayo, so he had to leave the train there and someone would have to come later to pick up from where he left it.

After what seemed like ages, we eventually saw a cream Mazda 323 appear from a dirty, dusty road amongst the thorn bushes that litter the Matabeleland plains. A passenger from that car, who turned out to be a train driver, jumped into the locomotive and started the train. No one really told people to reboard the train, but common sense dictated so, and before long, our journey resumed. Needless to mention that instead of getting to Bulawayo at 8am, I arrived in Bulawayo between 12 noon and 1pm.

A Pathfinder bus parked at the Golden Mile Hotel in Kadoma (photo by Andy Kozlov)

Who knows, maybe next time when my bus gets cancelled I will take a chance and a train to Bulawayo. If we get stuck on the way and the train driver decides to disappear for a couple hours, it might give me some quality time to reflect and get down to writing that film script about Cardinal Eugene Tisserant and the Eastern Catholic Churches that I’ve kept putting aside for a number of months.

Meanwhile, NRZ’s Rail Leisure Steam train tours are growing in number. According to the provisional calender that I got at their stand during the tourism expo, there will be over 20 tours to Figtree, Plumtree and Victoria Falls, priced from 50 to 300 USD.

For details contact Mr Munya on 0712616497 or 0772678324, landline 09 363675/362291 or email them on steamsafari@nrz.co.zw and passengerservices@nrz.co.zw

You can write to Andy Kozlov on andreakozlov@gmail.com

If you want to learn more on transportation trends in the developing world see such SinS articles as

Post-Soviet nations gradually embrace high-speed overland transportation

How India reconnects with its North-East

Youssou N’Dour, a Creative in Politics

He is the son of a car mechanic who began by hustling pirated CDs in car parks of Senegal and went on to become one of the most influential recording artists in the world.

Youssou N'Dour (Photo by Diena/Brengola/WireImage)

Now Youssou N’Dour, the Senegalese musician once described by Rolling Stone magazine as the most famous living African singer, is putting his music career on hold so he can enter politics ahead of presidential elections in his native Senegal next February.

Best known globally for his songs drawing on Senegal’s traditional mbalax music, N’Dour is also feted at home as an entrepreneur. His announcement came on the back of the launch of Fekke Maci Boolé – which means “I Am Involved” in the local Wolof dialect – a social consciousness movement he says will “disturb” the country’s entrenched political elites. It is not clear if N’Dour plans to challenge Abdoulaye Wade, the 85-year-old president who has been in power since 2000, but his declaration has stung politicians.

N’Dour has repeatedly said Wade – whose age is sometimes disputed – should not stand for re-election after winning two free and fair polls. This will reignite old tensions with Wade, who has tried to shut down N’dour’s television channel TFM (Television Futurs Medias) and newspaper L’Observateur in the past.

N’Dour is widely respected in Senegal for having stayed in his country, despite winning international acclaim and wealth thanks to hits such as “Seven Seconds” with Neneh Cherry.

The Senegalese singer has strongly criticised the profligate spending of the Wade leadership in a country where formal employment is rare and average income per head is $3 a day. One example of such spending is Africa’s long-overdue answer to the Eiffel tower or Statue of Liberty – a £17m  Monument of the African Renaissance, a 49- metre bronze statue on a hilltop overlooking the Atlantic in Dakar.

The statue shows a muscular man in a heroic posture, outstretched arms wrapped around his wife and child. Nearly 50 North Korean workers (see our post A Bittersweet Taste of Soft Power: North Korea’s flirting with tourism to learn about other North Korean creative projects in Africa) were brought in to build it, because of their expertise with bronze art, and some Senegalese have complained of its communist-era design. It has also drawn criticism from Muslims, who make up 94% of Senegal’s population, because of Islamic prohibitions on representations of the human form.

Alassane Cisse, a Senegalese delegate at the world summit on arts and culture in Johannesburg, South Africa, said, “All cities need signatures, but in Dakar we have had only monuments which existed during colonisation. Africa needs its own great monuments like the Eiffel tower and the Statue of Liberty. This symbol of African renaissance will motivate people to rehabilitate and work with Africa.”

He added that the site has exhibition, multimedia and conference rooms, as well as a top-floor viewing platform giving a bird’s eye view of Dakar. “It will be a cultural place. Around the monument there will be a theatre and shops. Many tourists will visit there, so the economic effects will benefit the population.”

But the president has sparked anger by maintaining that he is entitled to 35% of any tourist revenues it generates, because he owns the “intellectual rights”.

Youssou N’Dour is not the first person to use celebrity status as a catalyst for political popularity. George Weah, the ex-World Footballer of the Year, ran as vice-president on a ticket with Winston Tubman for the Congress of Democratic Change Party in Liberia. Despite being unsuccessful against Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in the last two presidential elections, Weah remains popular with the Liberian people and his fame alone draws support to his party.

One of the 40 most powerful celebrities on the continent together with N’Dour, Chelsea and Ivory Coast footballer Didier Drogba was one of 11 members appointed to the Ivorian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, created to investigate the deaths of 3,000 and the displacement of 500,000 Ivorians in the wake of the November 2010 elections.

Further afield, the boxer Manny Pacquaio recently won office as a congressman for the Sarangani Province in the Philippines. He aims to run for governor of the province in 2013, then senator in 2016, and president in 2022.

Perhaps the most famous US singer to achieve success in politics was Sonny Bono, former partner of Cher, who left a career as a singer and record producer to become Mayor of Palm Springs and then a Congressman in California’s 44th District from 1994-98.

Notably, celebrity success does not necessarily translate to being top of the pops in the electoral stakes. In Weah’s case some of the electorate mistrusted his ability to perform as a politician, citing his inexperience as justification for why they would not vote for him. In another example, singer-songwriter Wyclef Jean was disqualified from running in 2010 Haitian presidential elections, having not lived in Haiti for 5 years prior to his electoral campaign.

Women walk past rubbish heaps and unfinished homes in a neighborhood at the base of the nearly-completed 50-meter-high (328-foot-high) bronze statue dubbed the Monument of the African Renaissance in Dakar, Senegal (Photo by Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press)

According to Think Africa Press, while N’dour has not expressly endorsed any political party/candidate, nor suggested under which side of the political spectrum he will fall, his music suggests he is an individual who champions freedom, Pan-Africanism and modernisation.

The haunting tones of N’Dour in “Seven seconds” repeats the word “changer” (“to change”), echoing his political diatribes about stagnant Senegalese politics . Following a recent visit to the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, N’dour argued that the current focus on Libya by Western powers detracted from the necessities of “the real Africa”. His 2002 album Nothing’s In Vain is a non-traditional mix of themes echoing freedom and Pan-Africanism.

N’dour has now been a UNICEF goodwill ambassador and a talisman for humanitarian and human rights issues for more than 20 years. He headlined the Amnesty International “Human Rights Now!” Tour in 1988.

On the winding roads of African film distribution

reprinted with additions from Cinetoile.eu

by Prof. Martin Mhando

One of the greatest ironies of the film industry in Africa is in the area of distribution: African film producers often target the international commercial market but receive meagre or non-existent earnings from it. In the process, they become totally dependent on the festival circuit for the distribution of their product. Other methods for distributing African films continue to be tried in many different parts of the continent: Ghana and Nigeria, for example, have individually developed appropriate means for distributing their films commensurate with their economic and social histories.

Experiences of commercial distribution of films in Africa have failed miserably. The strength of the commercial distribution system only suited the products for which it was created. The environment of film distribution in the continent is typically that of the West. One might as well have been in London or New York as regards cinema in any African capital before the 1980s. The African product was on alien grounds, even in Africa, especially where cinema technology influencing the take-up and eventual control of the cinema business.

The ‘theory’ that one immediately recognizes when studying the continued state of affairs in film distribution in Africa is that of dependency – the local cinemas’ continuing dependence on the dominant cinema for its global construction and maintenance.

However, local filmmakers have always expressed divergent needs as regards distribution through their texts and local structures of production and exhibition. A good example is that of the late Sembène Ousmane when he decided in 1974 that he would only film in Wolof, because he wanted to reach what he regarded as ‘his audience’ (Ashbury 1998: 82). The challenge of reaching African audiences remains the key to the growth of African cinemas. In the reception of its product, African cinema also presents its diversity and strength.

The re-birth of African film distribution was dependent on the renaissance of marketing strategies of times gone by, such as those of the African travelling salespersons, or the market woman. If African cinema were to challenge this ‘normalcy’ of global cinema, it would require an avant-gardist approach to producing and distributing their texts. If African filmmakers were to take up this challenge it would imply the following:

1. The new cinema would not be concerned with communicating using shocking means, skewed moral intents or diverse aesthetic values;
2. The new cinema would be unlike the oppositional cinema of the 1970s, which was for personal expression, and the directors knew that they would not be suitable for mainstream theatrical release;
3. The new cinema could aim at commercial gain and use conventional and non-conventional forms and methods in its effort at communicating with an audience outside the laid-out (and now dying) distribution channels.

These conditions would lead to applying the socialization technologies such as happened in Nigeria and Ghana. These unfolding socialization processes are unfortunately often denigrated, and their locally based approach undermined by contemporary production and distribution structures. The mainstream cinema distribution pattern is a symptom of the sick state of affairs in film distribution as well as production in Africa.

Challenging the globalized medium

One might ironically say that a certain renaissance of African cinema was to emerge thanks to the Structural Adjustment Programmes meted out by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1980s. After state subsidies and controls from cinema were removed in Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Mozambique in the 1980s, corrupt businesses characteristically exploited commercial and legal opportunities. Video distribution shops were opened in every available commercial street corner, as well as homes, and traders broke copyright regulations with impunity. Young lovers who could not afford cinema tickets and the bus/taxi fares to city centre cinemas could now enjoy a night out close to their homes watching videos!

Things changed since the 1990s. Filmmakers and grassroots distributors have taken up the challenge of film and video distribution in Africa with very little prompting. While the commercially-run sector still thrives on blockbusters from Hollywood, it is the cheap local film and video that now commands the attention of the urban and rural spectator.

Jeremy Nathan, who has been involved in the South African film and television industries for nearly 20 years, has worked all over Africa, and has key relationships with producers in  Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola, Nigeria, Tunisia and Senegal. He created Dv8, a South African initiative that develops, finances, produces and distributes this nation’s films.

According to Nathan, Nigerian filmmakers have found a way to circumvent the usual industry distribution channels, regularly making both new movies and a living. Relying on neither government funding nor television coin, the Nigerian film industry has forged a viable digital video revolution – a business model that all of Africa and indeed many other parts of the world could emulate. (Nathan 2002)

One way that would invariably ensure the video medium’s sustenance, and even its viability, is to understand the nature of distribution. To do this, producers may need quite novel ways of communicating visual materials to larger audiences while integrating technology and its socialization capabilities.

Theorizing distribution in Africa

Conditions of reception in Africa contain specific parameters for cinema consumption, suggesting that audience responses need to be accounted for outside of Western theories. Under the current social conditions in the linguistic regions of Africa (anglophone, francophone, lusophone and swahiliphone), it is only appropriate to base a theory of distribution within theories of social appropriation.

I use the term ‘appropriation’ while aware of the implication of its discourse. From the discussion on the Nigerian and Ghanaian distribution experiences, appropriation can also be understood as the process through which dominated cultures re-inscribe their hegemony over and above the hegemony of the imperial powers (Ashcroft et al. 1998: 34). Through appropriation, the dominating culture’s form is reconstituted to express and interpolate experience in order to reach a wider audience. It is also used to express some deeper knowledge of narratives.

Po di Sangui (Tree of Blood) poster in the Production Services of Zimbabwe building in Harare. One the most elaborate, high-tech films of the African film genre, Po di Sangui is a joint collaboration between several European and African countries (photo by Andy Kozlov)

Just as language can be used to ‘bear the burden of another experience’ (a quotation often ascribed to both Chinua Achebe and James Baldwin), so too can cinema technology be used to bear the burden of another techno-cultural experience. By appropriating modern technologies of culture, communities in Africa are able to intervene directly in the dominant cinema’s discourse. This is how the communities insert their own cultural realities.

When mainstream Western films and videos are shown in the villages, devoid of their publicity and marketing machinery, they tend to lose their ‘hegemonic’ patronage and attain an inferior position to that of traditional community media. Audiences react to the showings, as would an adult to a child’s game – aware of the implications of participation. In that way, the cultural and social impact of the supposedly dominant order is minimized.

Says an Indian literary critic, theorist and an University Professor at Columbia University Gayatri Spivak:

The emergence of a vital and prolific popular cinema in Nigeria could be regarded as an important African response to the encroachment of Western pop culture in this age of global information flows. Rather than aping foreign models … it is a window into a particular contemporary African society, offering fascinating insights into how people see themselves, their aspirations and fears, including the desire for material well-being and status, and the value attached to pleasure and entertainment in an uncertain post-colonial world. (Spivak 1991: 66)

A study of the cinema of this continent should help us theorize about cinema language and culture as we make sense and come to terms with contemporary global society. To do that, one needs to approach the study of each area with regard to historical references, to social action and interaction between the production and interpretation of texts. That way each new and developing cinema would determine its own subject matter, authorial status and direction.

This new cinema culture subverts conventional expectations and offers a populist critique of African cinema of the past 40 years. It explores the popular even and proposes ‘alternative’ African cinemas.

What these new entrepreneurs are doing is to re-interpret the commercial aesthetic outside the conventional market through establishing relatively inexpensive modes of production and distribution. At the same moment they undercut the dominance of Western distribution channels, which have been failing African audiences for many decades. The capability to produce simply presented to these filmmakers a discursive practice that comments on both the limiting and limited influences of the globalized cinema.

On Branding: products and.. places

Joe Duffy, one of the most respected and sought-after creative directors and thought leaders on branding and design, writes in a recent piece for FastcoDesign that naming is about much more than words; it goes beyond linguistics and phonetics.

Consider these names–alone. Apple. Amazon. Target. What do any of these words say about the products they sell? The services offered? The groups that started them, or more important, the companies that they have become?

Not much.

Then stop for a moment and think about the way the world communicates today. Paraphrasing. Colloquialisms. Jargon. Even when you have a brand name that defines your raison d’être, it often gets abbreviated. That’s what happened to Federal Express and America online.

And then…they embraced it.

These are but a few examples of truly relevant brands. Their true meaning comes from getting to know them, watching them evolve, seeing them for more than the letters that make up the words in their names.

Making a decision on a name, without the benefit of seeing it in its visual form, puts a person at a significant disadvantage. Done well, the power of the graphic presentation adds significant meaning. The interplay of positive and negative space (the arrow in FedEx); unique logotype (Saks Fifth Ave., Diet Coke); a symbol (I love NY); and color (Tiffany). These are some of the many elements that can work in concert with words to deliver greater meaning to a name. These are the cues that transform a meaningful name from being a mere product descriptor to a brand with differentiation, relevance, and personality.

 

 

As our world becomes more integrated, with the ability to see many cultures and readily buy and sell goods from multiple nations, as businesses cross borders more consistently, as our interaction with technology and the visual communication of graphic user-interface design increases, and as we are constantly pushed to process more and more information, we’re beginning to see some brands evolve to a place of “wordlessness.” Apple, Levi’s, Starbucks, and Nike are a few of the noteworthy brands that are leading this branding evolution. Perhaps this is because we’ve come to a point where we see new opportunity that can come with transcending the differences and struggles that verbal communication presents.

The product branding principles may still apply, but in the case of nation branding we are certainly dealing with a lot more complex ‘products.’

Anthony Ryman explains:

According to Simon Anholt, author of Brand America: The Mother of All Brands, a select group of countries have national images so powerful and so positive that they amount to megabrands. Other countries have successfully turned around, or repositioned, their national brand in recent years. Still others are actively working to polish their brand identity.

Megabrands

Countries effortlessly synonymous with a number of valuable attributes:

• FRANCE: chic and quality of living?
• ITALY: style and sexiness?
• GERMANY: quality engineering?
• SWITZERLAND: purity, wealth, integrity?
• JAPAN: technology, entertainment, design

Turnaround Brands

Spain under Joan Miro's sun

• SPAIN: Once thought of as a European backwater, Spain capitalised on the 1992 Barcelona Olympics to successfully re-brand itself as a hip Mediterranean playground (think of the Joan Miro sun symbol). The resulting rise in inward investment, property development and tourism has lifted Spain to an economic powerhouse within Europe.
• IRELAND and SOUTH AFRICA re-branded themselves as countries on the move, based on their economic and political turnarounds, respectively. And the resulting increase in GDP, especially noticeable in Ireland, coupled with the rise in inward investment and standard of living has lifted Ireland to the top levels of healthy economies in the European Community.

Brands to Watch

• BRITAIN, having already positioned London as a cosmopolitan, investment-savvy style capital, it now wants to extend the image to the rest of the country (Cool Britannia), coordinating efforts across government agencies.
• SLOVENIA’s brand strategy has focused on transforming its image from that of a post-communist state to the new crossroads of Europe, building highways, lowering trade barriers, promoting foreign investment, and selling itself as an alternative tourist destination for those tired of Italy and France.
• NEW ZEALAND: On the back of the successful worldwide smash hit Lord of the Rings trilogy, New Zealand launched a successful tourist campaign which has made the country the in place to visit and immigration and inward investment has soared as a result.

The Spontaneous Brand

According to Wally Olins, one of the foremost branding gurus, some nations develop a national brand in a kind of controlled or formalised way, but with others it happens almost spontaneously.

If you look at what is happening in India today, and the perceptions around India, none of these are controlled. India has emerged in the last five years in terms of perceptions in a quite different way from the way it was perceived ten or fifteen years ago. (See our post on India’s creative economy).

It was spirituality and poverty, and now it’s software; it’s highly educated people. And in some countries, Indian clothing: textiles and fabrics, are fashionable…. None of this is managed. It’s all spontaneous.

However India has recently launched a very powerful and dramatic tourist promotion, which really encapsulates the essence, spirit and beauty of Incredible India. Surely a sign of its increasing sophistication and power.

The Bittersweet Taste of Soft Power: North Korea’s flirting with tourism

The unexpected death of Kim Jong-ilcreates foreseeable tensions on the Korean peninsula. But it

Koryo Tours, this British-led, Beijing-based tour operator has an unprecedented access to destinations in North Korean

could also be a ripe time for North Korea to exercise its soft power moves. We all know it – the country is in desperate need of rebranding, as well as many more urgent improvements.

Winning over the hearts and minds around the world has never been easy. Earlier this year, there was a rather lame effort to flirt with Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland region by sending a statue of Joshua Nkomo after having trained back in the 1980s local troops to kill ca. 20,000 people there. In 2010, the North Korean soccer team was protested against and did not camp in Zimbabwe on its way to South Africa. Supporting Zimbabwe National Parks makes sense, but who knows what this exactly implies with such underreported transactions.

It may come as a surprise to most our readers but some steps to put North Korea in a more positive light and lure tourists are already being done. And it’s not just individuals like Joshua Spodek or Rita Colaço, Macao-born author of an interesting blog about DPRK in Portuguese who visit the country. There are actually companies that offer tours to the North. Yes, yes!

Two men to watch. Simon Cockerell is the General Manager at Koryo Tours, a British-run, Beijing-based company that has been leading tours to the DPRK since 1993 , that has also helped produce several award-winning documentaries on the country.  Walter Keats is President of Asia Pacific Travel, a U.S. company that has been conducting tours to N.E. Asia since the 1970s, and visits specifically to North Korea since 1995 (click to listen to an interview with both).

Koryo Tours is  is one of a handful of non-Chinese foreign firms to successfully do business in North Korea, an economy in which glacial change is under way — several Western consultants and entrepreneurs are now active in Pyongyang. There is even a pair of Italian-invested pizza restaurants.

North Korea joined the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) in September Juche 76 (1987) and the Pacific-Asia Tourism Association (PATA) in April 1996. Hong In Chol, a department director of the State General Bureau of Tourism, says that they have travel offices in China, Malaysia and Germany.

According to Cockerell, approximately 2,000 tourists visit North Korea each year. “We take about 50% of these 2,000 people – 10-15% of them are US citizens, and we take about 80-85% of the Americans.  It’s expensive to visit.  However, once you get over that, the visa process is quite easy – they don’t generally arbitrarily deny visas, but it is harder for journalists and South Korean citizens to get in,” he explains.

“Certainly there are some restrictions – tourists aren’t allowed to wander off anywhere they want, and generally they are asked to stick to an all-inclusive itinerary that doesn’t involve wandering around town – but they are generally not in danger.  They just have to be aware of some limitations,” he further explains.

“Every year, there’s an event called the Mass Games – this is what most people go to see. It’s enormous, and takes place over a 10-week period in October. 60-70% of the market goes at this time. Over 100,000 performers take part in a 90-minute show over this period every single day,” explains Cockerell. People often visit during leaders’ birthdays and other holidays too.

Brand new Air Koryo Tu-204-100B pictured in 2010

Some attractions offered by Koryo Tours include: a bicycle tour of the DPRK, Pyongyang International Film Festival, Chollima Steelworks, Tae’an Heavy Machine Tool Complex, Tae’an Glass Factory, Nampo Taekwondo School and Nampo Park.

Why visit North Korea? According to Joshua Spodek,

if you travel to explore new places, North Korea is one of the few frontiers left that tourists haven’t overrun. You see people living in a world different than yours. The more different a society, the more you can see yours from a new perspective.

Although this traveler reminds us that

They have imprisoned foreigners for life for things that we wouldn’t consider illegal.., and you have no right to due process.

How to get to North Korea? What a better way for a Steppes-trotters there is than to fly in on the North Korean flag carrier Air Koryo. According to an informative online publication North Korean Economy Watch, under the EU ban, Pyong­yang’s Air Koryo can only fly two new airliners it purchased from Russia last year to the EU member states.

Says Koryo Tours co-founder Nick Bonner, ”Tourism requires legal channels for doing business. You

Bonner with Hong Yong-hui, the star of the film "Flower Girl," at the Pyongyang International Film Festival 2008. (Courtesy of Nick Bonner)

don’t have it in war zones, so it requires North Koreans to set up a structure to deal with the outside world and I think that is very positive. People will disagree, but it would be difficult to further isolate the country and I think engagement is a better policy; non-engagement has not worked.”

Given his positive experiences in Pyongyang, Bonner was shocked to discover early this year that his website had been firewalled by Seoul. He flew there, but after speaking to the Broadcasting Standards Commission, discovered there was nothing that could be done. ”We seemed to be classed rather seriously. I don’t think we are undermining the South Korean government. We do not take South Korean tourists in, but what does hurt is we have been making films to show people a glimpse into a closed society.”

Still, the meeting seems to have had a delayed effect. In November, once again, without communication or explanation, the firewall on Koryo Tours was removed.

That has proven to be a relief. Bonner’s latest project film is not a documentary, but a (currently untitled) North Korea-based romantic comedy about a coal miner who dreams of being a circus performer, filmed in Pyongyang and the surrounding region. It’s now in post-production. South Korea will be a key market.

Though Koryo has expanded to Central Asia and Russia’s Far East, for Bonner himself, North Korea remains the focus.

How are the Christians doing in North Korea, by the way?

Kim Jong-il the Creative (film fan)

The “Dear Leader” is gone, and the internet these days is filled with speculations about what he left behind him. Steppes in Sync would like to take a more unconventional look and reflect on the creative legacy Kim Jong-il left for his compatriots in North Korea and the DPRK buffs around the world.

Kim Jong-il wanted to have his own Godzilla film made in North Korea

Before he took over leading the country from his father, Kim Jong-il, an avid film fan, was supervising the country’s movie industry during the 1970s. One of his achievements in this area was the kidnapping of well-regarded South Korean filmmaker Shin Sang Ok and his ex-wife Choi Eun Hee. Kim forced them to make movies for North Korea for 8 years. Before kidnapping Shin, he had forced 11 Japanese “cultural consultants” into work on North Korea’s movies, only to have some of them commit suicide rather than continue on.

Shin and Choi lived in more luxurious circumstances, making a series of films including the North Korean take on godzilla flicks - Pulgasari.

Their “Dear Leader” was building them a mansion and a Hollywood-worthy movie set when the couple went to Vienna to negotiate film distribution rights in 1986. There Shin and Choi eluded their bodyguards, fled to the American embassy, and pled for asylum. Discussions they’d secretly taped with their executive producer were used as proof that they had not gone to North Korea for fame and fortune (as they’d been forced to claim at press conferences).

Kim Jong-il, as portrayed in "Team America: World Police" / Courtesy imdb / © 2004 Paramount Pictures

Per Kim’s instructions, the nation’s cinematic output consisted of films illuminating themes such as North Korea’s fantastic military strength and what horrible people the Japanese are.

According to Korean film expert Johannes Schonherr, even the country’s capital Pyongyang has been developed with films in mind. ”It looks like a movie set. It’s not a capital built for living, it’s a capital which is built to show off – something that you can film and transmit to the rest of the country via movies and television.”

“Of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important,” the Soviet Union leader Vladimir Lenin famously told his culture commissar in 1919. Kim literally wrote the book on communist filmmaking in 1973 On the Art of the Cinema and is claimed to be such an inspiration for the film and performing arts students in DPRK today. More about this you can read in our previous post  My North Korean film classes in humanity and creativity.

Kim himself was less likely to watch films made by the Soviet masters Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin than those starring his favorite actors, Elizabeth Taylor and Sean Connery. His collection of VHS cassettes and DVDs, said to contain between 15,000 and 30,000 films, supposedly contained all of Taylor’s pictures and all the James Bonds. He also admired Friday the 13th, Rambo, classics by Japanese masters, Hong Kong action films, Westerns, even Britain’s Ealing comedies with their accent on proletarian cooperation.

Kim naturally took grave exception to Western films that depicted North Korea in a less than flattering light. He objected, for instance, to Bond’s torture by North Korean soldiers in Die Another Day (2002), describing it as “insulting to the Korean nation.” He was unimpressed, too, by Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police (2004), in which he is portrayed as a marionette who supplies weapons of mass destruction to terrorists and turns into a cockroach. He never spoke publicly about the film but, via the Korean embassy in Prague, tried to have it banned by the Czech Republic, which refused to cooperate.

Benetton UNHATE, Kim Jong Il and Lee Myung Bak of South Korea

A North Korean epic film about a North Korean ship that sank in 1945 was “totally modelled” on Titanic. ”The love story is like the love story with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and the director had to watch the real Titanic movie more than 100 times so he could get the Titanic feel into the North Korean version,” says Schonherr.

One of the last times in his lifetime that Kim surfaced in the pop culture outside North Korea was when he was featured in the recent UNHATE campaign by Fabrica, the creative department of the Italian-owned apparel brand the United Colors of Benetton widely (or rather wildly) known for their kiss ads.

From Zimbabwe to Australia: Stephen Chigorimbo on the International Public Television event

Steppes in Sync got a chance to talk to Stephen Chigorimbo at the beginning of December and learned a lot about his spanning-several-decades behind-the scenes experience with INPUT, an international pubic broadcaster event that we briefly mentioned previously on this blog.

Here’s what’ve learned about the history of the event on the African continent:

I have been in touch with Input since 1987 when I was at the Ouagadougou FESPACO film and television festival in Burkina Faso. That’s when I came across Sergio Borelli, one of the founders of INPUT. Then in 1991 we did Mini INPUT here in Harare alongside the Southern Africa Film Festival (of which I was the Vice Chair). It was the first time that INPUT came to Africa. Next thing they did was to organize a full-fledged INPUT event in Sithengi in Cape Town (2001). In 2008 in Sandton, Johannesburg, with a vast involvement on the part of SABC.

 

The INPUT program is a very important one for Africa because INPUT is about getting the public television like ZTV and SABC to collect programs from their producers that have been broadcast to go to that conference where producers from across the planet can give a critical opinion of them.

In 2008 during the INPUT in Johannesburg I met the coordinators like Timo-Erkki Heino from Finland and then they asked me to be the coordinator for Zimbabwe. In 2009 I was invited to be a on the selection committee. – This is when I went to Berlin. Since then I attended INPUT events in Poland and this year in South Korea.

We are now asking producers in Zimbabwe and in Southern Africa who have made interesting stories to submit them for the INPUT discussion next year.

The deadline is end of December. Your information can be sent via http://www.inputsydney.com/register/ or one can send the DVD containing their production to the Goethe Institut in Milton Park, Harare, the Mini-INPUT hub for Zimbabwe.

INPUT 2012, the International Conference for Television in the Public Interest will be taking place in Sydney, Australia, 7-11 May 2012.

INPUT 2012 in Sydney will present screening and discussion sessions with approx. 80 programmes from about 30 countries around the world.

The Festival in the Desert by Intagrist El Ansari

La trompette et le méhari (photo by Intagrist El Ansari)

by Intagrist El Ansari

Established in 2001, the Festival in the Desert has seen its success grow each year, exceeding all expectations for attendance, international recognition and its socio-economic impact on the Sahara desert region, including the region of Timbuktu  in Mali, where it takes place every January. The success of this event is driven by Manny Ansar, the Director of the Festival in the Desert and an originator of the project. He says happily, “This festival has transformed my life.” This is a story of a gathering both diverse and singular  -  the largest the desert has ever known.

Genesis

I must have been approximately six years old when one day we had pitched our tents in the desert

Le site du festival, à Essakane, au crépuscule de la première soirée (photo by Intagrist El Ansari)

near the village of Gargando, west of the city of Timbuktu, heading towards Mauritania. As I stood outside our nomadic encampment on a high spot, I was puzzled as I watched something move through the camp. The image I saw was of a group of men arriving on the backs of proud-faced camels, walking in caravans or galloping. The men of our camp welcomed the guests and led them to the reception tents a few metres away from the houses. The women got busy – some organizing things inside the tents, others striking their tambourines to announce the event being prepared and to send a call to the neighboring camps.

The sky was blue and orange, crossing in an arc, forming a gradient of an infinity of colours only the desert lets one see. The solar spectrum shot out through the empty air of the desert plain. The shepherds and their animals returned to the camp under the gaze of the travelers who rested in front of the tents that had been oriented towards the sunset. Migratory birds in the sky sang in their choked voices the music of great spaces, a melody announcing prophecies. Listening to their concert of grief, I came down from my dune and made a wish to fly away with them one day.

Performance surréaliste en off du groupe inuit (photo by Intagrist El Ansari)

Arriving at the camp, I asked my mother, “What are all these people doing here? Is it the feast of Ramadan once again? My mother smiled, “No! These travellers stop by all the camps. They are going to Temakanit for a festival that celebrates the reunion of all the nomads. She spoke a lot about this event, its importance and its interest for the desert and its inhabitants. These people were not making the trip alone. The people from my camp would also join them in a long caravan, whose pattern evokes the Yemeni Kingdom of Sheba, homeland of the majority of the Tuareg tribes. Thus, camp upon camp, the camel riders would lead everyone to their final destination, a central point known to all in advance. There they will meet other nomads who came from the four corners of the desert to celebrate the great feast of the Temakanit.

Internationalization: Dynamics of Evolution and of Opening

The Festival in the Desert, in its current form is an international musical gathering and was established in 2001. But it has existed since time immemorial. Somehow, this event has always existed, under different guises according to the times (but in harmony with those times) while remaining faithful to its traditional roots.

Un spot dans le désert (photo by Intagrist El Ansari)

The January 2010 edition marked ten years of existence of what is today one of the largest gatherings of diversity in the world. That gigantic unprecedented meeting took place in Timbuktu, gateway to Sahara. The festival extended over three days with the rhythms of the camel parades, the music and songs of the Tuareg’s traditional repertoire, and also with concerts of international and national artists in front of a crowd of 10,000 people.

Nomads and sedentary people, foreigners coming from the four corners of the world, officials, journalists, the festival-goers – the diversity reflected accurately the heterogeneity of today’s world.

What does one discover coming here? The desert’s immensity, of course. But in particular the singularity of a culture and civilization in harmony with this aridity for whom the desert has served as a “bulwark” for centuries. In the words of a French writer, farmer and environmentalist Pierre Rabhi, the standardization of lifestyles that leads to a single model is contrary to the spirit of openness.

The meaning of the message sent out to the world

The largest desert of the world is known to be an open and welcoming place through the magic of the tradition of hospitality of its inhabitants. Through this image, the Festival in the Desert warmly invites people of all cultures to come and share their traditions, to discover and recognize each other in a musical encounter on a grand scale. But the Festival also poses this question: “What do the Saharan cultures and civilizations have to bring to the world today.” Men of the Sahara have developed a life in harmony with the environment, and have adapted to the most inhospitable space in the world.

The intercultural exchange that the Festival in the Desert promotes is authentic and reinforced by the conducive and poetic framework of the desert.

Saharan civilization contains some remnants and vestiges of cultures ancient and lost. Seclusion, the search for solitude and contemplation has led men to populate the desert spaces. Their isolation resulted in the conservation of ancient cultural traits.

Observation of international geopolitics permits us to easily understand the pessimism that feeds the reports about the Sahara region by the mainstream media. For a long time, the largest desert in the world was only valued for its sand dunes and sensual, huge and majestic infinite landscapes! The wind of international interests, of geostrategic desires for natural resources – water, oil, gas, uranium and solar energy – blows across the Sahara region today.

In this atmosphere, however, the security of foreigners who came to the festival has never been disturbed. Here one can meet ministers, ambassadors, Princess Caroline of Monaco, a millionaire co-founder of the MTV, a shepherd who supports his eight children with 15 goats, or a craftsman who offers his creation of the day. All so different and yet so similar take their place on the same large white dune of fine and pristine sand. And every night on this common grandstand groups spontaneously form around campfires. The simplicity of the meeting. In front of them, a large open stage able to sound defiance to the deserts’ silence with its power. The spotlights illuminate the desert without competing with the stars.

Jean-Marc Phillips Varjabédian, a violinist trained at the Conservatoire Supérieur de Paris, interprets Johann Sebastian Bach’s Chaconne. A gradual and feverish tension overtakes the crowd. Music spreads across the dryness of the air and space. At this precise moment, I feel the push like grains of sand in my body! The trance is broken. I regain awareness, a return from my distant baroque escape. The public regains its spirits and breaks into applause, while the group, Tartit, an emblematic ensemble of Tuareg women, arrive for their turn on the stage.

Really, this evening is dedicated to the XVIII century, between Bach or the culmination of European Baroque and the epic tales that evoke the Sahara victories of the Tuareg. In effect, this evening Tartit interprets “Abacabok”, which traces the history of Hawalen Ag Hammada al-Ansari “The Pius”, the mystical Saharan of the XVIII century.

In this inner adventure, I remember that day where as a child I arrived at the camp on the long caravan and discovered the Temakanit.

NEXT EDITION:  Festival au Désert –  January 12- 14, 2012

To come to Timbuktu, you will have to travel through the capital of Mali Bamako. The festival  hosts a flight from there.

Intagrist El Ansari used to work as a PR and communications officer for the Festival in the Desert. He is a documentary film director and reporter based in the Sahel/Sahara region.

Born to the Tuareg tribe Kel Ansar, he spent his childhood in the desert near Timbuktu and then, driven by curiosity and adventure, lived for over 10 years in France. He worked on Yann Arthus-Bertrand‘s project 6 Billion Others as a translator, assistant director, cameraman and assistant editor. Intagrist’s collaboration with Bertrand continued when he got involved in the filming of Home in Mali and the Sahara. Currently,  Intagrist is involved with SAHARA Patrimoine & Cultures.

Steppes in Sync is glad to have him join the team of our contributors.

You can reach him on inta@free.fr

Ad agencies for humanity

Advertising for Humanity, a creative agency whose clients are all social-benefit organizations, was started by social entrepreneur Dan Pallotta, author of Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential.

Among the takeaways from Pallotta’s book is that forcing nonprofits to work with a low overhead prohibits them from obtaining the exposure needed to make large-scale social impact. If we could apply business principles like advertising to the nonprofit world, however, they too could create market demand.

Instead of just questioning the system, Pallotta devised a solution with Advertising for Humanity. The agency offers top grade creative services to nonprofits including business strategy consulting, branding, digital and print tools, CSR, event design, media planning, and board and donor transformation. “We help humanitarian organizations succeed by transforming their brands. We help consumer brands succeed by transforming their social initiatives,” Advertising for Humanity says on their site. “We marry marketing and meaning.”

In less than 10 years, Pallotta’s event marketing model—“the long-distance, multi-day pilgrimage model”—has been able to raise $582 million, and raise over $1 billion by inspiring others to start their own movements. The marketing practices delivered by “Humanity’s ad agency” have already benefited organizations like the US National Breast Cancer Coalition, Kenya-originating Kourage Athletics, Gulf Coast Foundation of Community, Helmsley Charitable Trust/Glu, Breast Cancer 3-Days, AIDSRides USA, Kidney Foundation of Alberta and the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

Kourage Athletics operates in a Kenyan-owned factory located 139 kilometers north of Nairobi in the Rift Valley, the womb of many of Kenya’s best runners. The products itself combine fashion-forward design, a modern fit and performance-centric quick-dry fabrics that will pump you up at your next race or simply during your next morning jog. “Kenyan runners are world-class,” says 23-year-old Kourage Athletics fashion designer Joseph Kisuli, “we wanted to create an equally impressive garment.” “We combine the fit of your favorite t-shirt with the best performance fabric in the world.”

Kourage is a legal non-profit that strives to reduce poverty through job creation. Revenues from Kourage Athletics are reinvested back into where the brand emanates from, and where it matters most: Kenya.

Another creative agency with an ethical twist is Do Good Advertising that offers advertising and graphic design services to companies and enterprises that also have a social mission. Do Good Advertising strives to stay competitive, and offers numerous services including posters, outdoor publicity, exhibition and presentation materials, web design, television advertising, brochures, reports, branding, logos, stationary design, radio advertising and press advertising.

Founded in 2006 by graphic designer Richard Rogers and copywriter Stephen Simpson, Do Good Advertising has worked with a long list of clients including British Lung Foundation, Children in Scotland, Christian Aid, Veterinary Benevolent Fund, Waterwise, University of Glasgow, Respect Me, Glasgow Drawing Studio, and National Museums Scotland. Its main office is in the East End of Glasgow, Scotland, with a secondary office operating out of the Ethical Property Company in London, England.

Finally, there is Neo that works with a variety of organizations including social businesses, social enterprises, green businesses, public sector organizations and charities. Neo offers a range of services including fundraising, campaigns, media relations, social marketing, events, organizational development, branding, design and marketing. Despite that exhaustive list of services, everything comes back to one thing: creating positive change.

Certainly, it’s no surprise that Neo has a long list of crème de la crème clients including Greenpeace International, WWF, Wellbeing of Women, Help The Aged, ActionAid, Arts Council England, Homeless Link, Counsel and Care and Ethical Trade Initiative.

Top 10 global media giants: it’s not that easy

Frugaldad's creative blunders: coming up with updated stats is not that easy

90% of what Americans watch, read and listen to is controlled by 6 media conglomerates. Not that we were not in the loop about that. But we need to admit that any attempt to find updated statistics on the top ten global media giants constantly fails. Conspiracy of these same giants? Well..

Turning brick after brick of the online wall,  one can come up with a more or less clear picture. However, this doesn’t save the researcher from glaring errors like the one made recently by Frugal Dad and highlighted by Fastcodesign. E.g.: GE does not own Comcast.

One has little doubt that the Big Six exude influence on the rest of world. However, what about the major players from rest of the world? No surprise here. Most top-grossing media businesses still come from the developed world.

..but one should keep trying: something is better than nothing

Axel Springer AG is one of the largest newspaper publishing companies in Europe, claiming to have over 150 newspapers and magazines in over 30 countries in Europe.

Another German business Bertelsmann is one of the world’s largest media companies. It owns RTL Group, which is one of the two major private TV companies in both Germany and the Netherlands and also owning assets in Belgium, France, UK, Spain, Czech and Hungary. Bertelsmann also owns Gruner+Jahr, Germany’s biggest popular magazine publisher, including popular news magazine Stern and a 26% share in investigative news magazine Der Spiegel. Bertelsmann also owns Random House, a book publisher, #1 in the English-speaking world and #2 in Germany.

One more European giant is Vivendi that owns Canal + Group and Universal Music Group.

Fast readers of Ethiopia or Addis’ avid culture of newspaper reading

Montage of Addis Ababa sights.

What would you do if you were an Addis Ababa resident too poor to purchase local press, but as many of your compatriots, couldn’t live without catching up on latest news? You would probably rent a read.. and make sure you read fast enough not to be charged extra.

Ethiopia-based Mohammed Selman, a lecturer in journalism and freelance writer, documented this avid reading culture in a fascinating account for Mail & Guardian almost a year ago.

The nation with the second-largest population in Africa — some 80-million potential readers — registers among the fewest number of newspapers on the continent. At present only a handful of local newspapers and two handsful of local magazines circulate in Ethiopia, with a total weekly circulation that barely equals that of one day of Kenya’s Daily Nation‘s 50,000 print run. By comparison, Fortune, reportedly the leading English weekly in Ethiopia, publishes 7,000 copies a week at most.

Some corners of Addis Ababa are reserved for newspaper passions, Arat Kilo being one legendary neighbourhood. It is not only the home of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s spacious palace and the country’s Parliament building but also of flat-broke citizens with rich news-reading addictions. Berhanena Selam, the nation’s oldest and largest publishing house, where 99% of newspapers get published, has a seat in Arat Kilo too. As the hub of street newspaper reading, Arat Kilo entertains more than a thousand people a day.

Merkato in Addis Ababa (Photo by Jessica Lee).

“Paper landlords” offer “news seats” to readers who gather on the edge of a road, in a nearby alleyway, even inside a traffic circle. And for years, these “paper tenants” have happily hunkered down, reading a copy of a newspaper quickly and then returning it to watchful owners nearby. One copy of a newspaper may quickly pass through a hundred readers before, late in the day, it is finally recycled as toilet tissue or bread wrap.

Addis Ababa readers are privileged. The distribution system in Ethiopia is under-developed, so major cities elsewhere in the country receive newspapers a day or two later.

Now, as a rising number of unemployed people hunt for jobs through newspapers and a growing population of pensioners distract themselves with news, news seats are popular pastimes. And this is true despite prices for newspapers doubling as a result of the rising costs of newsprint and the country’s latest round of inflation and devaluation.

Addis' avid readers can get their news fix by renting a paper for half an hour. On Saturdays, it can be tough to find an empty 'news seat (photo by Mohammed Selman).

Few Ethiopians read newspapers, magazines or books alone in public but they do banter in groups. Only a few cafés allow their verandahs to be news seats to attract more customers. On the contrary, many street-side cafés post No Reading signs next to No Smoking signs.

Nowadays, traditional newspaper vendors and peddlers find themselves challenged by newspaper lords such as Boche. From a flat stone in Arat Kilo, Boche earns bread for his family of six by renting newspapers and magazines from sunrise to sunset.

Wearing worn overalls, he spreads the day’s newspapers around him and passes copies to paper brokers, mostly kids; his “paper constituencies” may reach 300 people a day. His attachment to this task is legendary. “I have a beautiful daughter called Kalkidan,” he says. “I named her after a magazine I lease weekly.”When papers start to wear out with over-use, Boche splices them with Scotch tape. Then he affixes his signature so everyone knows which copies belong to him.

Merkato (Courtesy ethiopianreview.com).

Merkato, one of the largest open-air markets in Africa, now has a place for newspaper addicts around the Mearab Hotel.

Other Addis neighbourhoods, like the affable commercial district Piassa, have also created newspaper circles for paper tenants. Yohannes Tekle (29) has been a regular reader of street papers for seven years. These days, especially, when a newspaper costs up to six birr (75 US cents), he rents one for 25 Ethiopian cents (which is less than one US cent).