Funkin' at the Hill Top Disco

 Snoop Dogg on the wall with Sierra Leone popstars Vida, the late Amara Kabba, and Daddy Saj.

The art of the painted sign is alive and well in Sierra Leone. I've long been a fan of African hand-made advertisements, and have bought more than one right off the facade of a business, to cart across the Atlantic and install on the living room wall. If that sounds to you like a colonialist, exploitative relationship to art-making then you have put your finger on the discomfort sometimes felt when admiring the humble, naive masterpieces that Africans from Mali to Mozambique hang in front of their shops. In my defense I can only describe the smiles of surprise and astonishment on the face of the shopkeeper when offered actual cash money for an ancient and often tattered rectangle of painted plywood.

 Snoop, detail, at the Hilltop Nightclub and Guesthouse, Calabatown, Sierra Leone

The tradition, born out of necessity on a continent where creativity is more abundant than capital, is in some countries under threat. On my last trip to Rwanda digitally printed vinyl signs were everywhere. So far, these suffer from Photoshopitis, and tend to feature sandstorms, flames, lightning bolts, sunsets and masses of billowing clouds, all downloaded at low resolution from google images. The results are pale and tawdry, homogenous in their lack of personality. At home, underemployed, the former sign-painter sits on his hands and stares at the dirt, his paints crusting in the can.

The making of a sign for a tiny roadside business is an economic calculus. The beginnings of a haircutting business, called in Kenya a "saloon" and in Sierra Leone a "barbing shop," might be as modest as a single pair of scissors and a plastic stool set up under a shade-tree. The advertising budget is limited. If the vinyl sign is rising in popularity this is only because it is winning a price-war with the sign-painter.

 The Hilltop is a legendary name in the history of rap music. This was the name of a Bronx after-hours club of the 1970s where some of the first raps were said to have been rapped, and some of the first deejay battles battled. I suspect the Hilltop of Calabatown, Sierra Leone owes nothing to this legacy. This fine establishment is simply at the top of a hill, on a red dirt road, in a semi-rural setting. But they are clearly ready to turn the party out. Just to step inside the place is to understand that it would be inconvenient to live next door.

Donflan would like to go on record as offering our services to return and do a gig here. The club is a series of well-protected cinder-block walled enclosures (African nightlife is primarily enjoyed out-of-doors), much of their many surfaces covered with spectacular murals illustrating the fantasies of disco-going: abundant, curvaceous women, tropical diversion, musical superstardom. No partying colonialist with a fat wallet will carry these off; they are painted directly onto the block walls. We were there during the day, to shoot an interview. The place made me want to put on my dancing shoes, and go back at night.

"What happens at the Hilltop, stays on the hilltop."

Somaliland Safari

More on this later, but the people of Somaliland would like you to know that they represent a politically distinct entity unaffiliated with the terrorists, warlords and pirates of Somalia. That this autonomous enclave on the northern side of the Horn of Africa remains unrecognized by any other government annoys them. Security, hospitality, and chai are all comparatively abundant. Travel, even independent travel, is possible here.

At the end of a recent film shoot in and around Hargeisa, I squeezed in an all-too-brief safari with wildlife guide extraordinaire Abdi Jama. Emerging from the Somali bush this morning, we drove directly to the airport, and I'm writing to you now from the wifi convenience of the very comfortable Ole Sereni Hotel in Nairobi. Here's a slideshow:

Saïd, packing the truck in front of the Ambassador Hotel, Hargeisa

Passing the Airport on the way out of the city. Camels occasionally wander onto the runway at inopportune moments.

Random obligatory shot of cute rural toddlers.

Obligatory shot of self in desert.

Big sky country.

Abdi Jama enjoys a Somali chai.

Minuscule mosque in teensy windswept village on the Tuuyo plains.

The end of the day on the Tuuyo plains.

Improvised rain cover.

Camp One.

Termites can be a problem.

But they make beautiful houses. No two alike.

Abdi Jama, stalking the Somali Lark on the Tuuyo plains.

The crew. Chief cook and bottle-washer Saïd, birder and bushman extraordinaire Abdi, and my personal security force, Mustafa.

On Safari

An Archetypal Acacia

I don’t know how my fellow sound recordists feel about it, but for me our chosen profession is exciting not in and of itself, but because it leads to innumerable fabulous adventures. No sooner had we disembarked from two weeks on a factory ship in the Indian Ocean, than cameraman and bunkmate Axel Baumann and I found ourselves driving north across the bush. We went from Mombasa to Nairobi, and then beyond, towards the Ethiopian border, to Samburu, a Kenyan national reserve. Here we were to film in the days ahead. For now, blissful time off: the vagaries of scheduling the boat journey had left us with a full forty-eight hours to do nothing but wait for our producer, look at wildlife, and eat from the abundant buffet at our lodge.

The baboons shall inherit the earth

Samburu is a deservedly famous safari destination, and was my first taste of what spotting game is like in a touristed spot. Several upscale lodges and tented camps are dotted along the winding river at its heart. After dawn coffee and biscuits the mini-buses and pop-top land cruisers depart at 6:30 AM sharp in order to have two and half hours of drive time and make it back for breakfast. Dirt tracks wind through riverine forest, acacia scrub and savannah. Nobody is without a camera, and the drivers keep in frequent contact with one another. providing alerts as to sighting opportunities of the so-called “big five,” the largest and most desirable animals. The lesser creatures which interest me just as much, like the tiny Pygmy Falcon or a gaggle of the exquisite Vulturine Guineafowl (2887) don’t make it on the radio, let alone the drabber songbirds like Donaldson-Smith’s Sparrow Weaver, which looks like a tidy overgrown House Sparrow but is rather a local specialty. A healthy group of giraffe or a family of elephant, however, can quickly find itself surrounded by its own gaggle of minivans. In the open bush country the vehicles are visible for miles, and the gathering of cars attract more of their own kind, including private drivers out of the radio loop who drive hastily up, fearful that they might be missing something. There are moments when the whole exercise becomes a rather amusing demonstration that the herd instinct is alive and well in the human species.

The very odd and beautiful Vulturine Guineafowl

But the skies and spaces are huge, and I’m not complaining. The experience remains utterly sublime, filled with breath-taking episodes. Furthermore, without the significant dollars spent by wildlife spotters to justify conservation efforts, this majestic place would likely disappear.

The drab yet exciting Donaldson-Smith's Sparrow Weaver, preparing to weave

I will now describe the most sublime of our many sublime Samburu moments, and don’t read this if you are the sort who likes their travel narratives free of gloating. If you only enjoy stories that offer schadenfreude, recounting the author’s myriad struggles and moments of comic suffering, you had best stop reading right now (and perhaps buy my book instead). The tale I am about to tell is not for those easily made jealous.

Je suis le Giraffe

After a spectacular day of being driven about in the African bush with our heads thrust out the top of a minivan, we headed back toward the lodge across the flat, acacia-dotted floodplain. From luxurious proximity we had watched Elephants, Buffalo, countless Giraffe, hordes of baboons, Grevy’s Zebra and Grant’s Gazelle. Ornithologically, too, it had been a splendid day, filled with such avian delights as Tawny Eagle, White-headed Mousebird, Rufous Chatterer (2893), and Buff-crested Bustard. We were close to the lodge, and to celebrating the day over a cold bottle of Tusker.

The stripes of the Grevy's Zebra are the most elegant of all

The setting sun dappled the stands of acacias with leopard-spot shadows as the weaver-birds flew back to their clusters of intricate hanging nests. Scanning for the last birds of the day in the passing treetops, I spied an elongated pale stretched shape, an anomalous blob near the top of one of those archetypal slope-roofed acacias, the stuff of setting sun picture postcards of the African landscape. “St-st-stuh-stop….” I whispered urgently for perhaps the fiftieth time that day. But I added one new and important word: Leopard! Our driver squeezed down on the brakes. Little following turrets of dust wafted past the side mirrors. “Shhhhh,” I said. “Right there, very close. Very, very close. In the nearest tree. Shhhhh. Back up, about twenty-five feet.” He did, and there it was, perhaps twenty yards away, stretched out along the horizontal upper portion of an acacia trunk, one of two adjoining trees, with nothing behind but low, dense, marshy bush. Creamy white, daubed with its own personal camouflage and dappled with the orange and shadows of the setting sun, the muscular beast turned its languid lemony eye on us, yawned, and relaxed back onto its branch. It was difficult to breathe, faced with such stunning views of this most difficult of large wild cats. “You guys are so very lucky,” whispered John Chavanga, our fixer, from the front seat. “Oh, my.” In the binoculars I could appreciate every spot, every rippling muscle. I soaked in the abundant length of the cat’s whiskers. Beside me, I knew, Axel was doing the same through a 300mm lens.


Minutes went by. “It’s amazing it is still there, putting on a show for you,” said Frances, our guide and driver. “Showing you everything. I have rarely seen one stay for so long. Soon he will go.” And indeed, the cat began to stir, cricking its neck and gently placing a paw further down the trunk, as if testing its exit. Without haste or urgency it walked and jumped its way down to the ground, then walked directly into the enveloping bush behind. We were quivering with excitement, exulting, and hi-fiving over this splendid sighting. The show was over, what a finale to a perfect day!

"Alright, if you nuisances insist on parking there, I'm out of here!"

I’m not sure whether Frances started the car again immediately, or if we sat there luxuriating in silence for a few more moments, or even whether I more heard or saw what happened next, but from behind the two trees there came a violent thrashing of the brush, a rippling movement. I’m now certain I heard it, as well, a rowdy crashing through the bushes. The leopard came streaking back out of the bush and bolted up the neighboring tree in perhaps a fiftieth of the time it had taken to make its languid descent a few moments earlier. Only just behind it followed a charging lioness. She cruised into the clearing, stopping short at the foot of the tree. The leopard looked down in panic. The lion looked up, evaluated. The trunk was narrow, the new cat much heavier than the fugitive. She paced, below, the leopard never letting her out of sight as he turned on his branch. Axel switched lenses. The lioness gave it up as a bad job and strolled back into the bush. Nonetheless the leopard continued to twitch with paranoia; it was no longer worried about us, mere humans in a land cruiser. Frances radioed. Everyone had already gone in, except for one microbus from the Serena Lodge. Eventually, it drove up. We had spent so long enjoying the two-act spectacle that by the time two very grateful ladies arrived and we exchanged whispered greetings, we had had our fill, and we left them alone to enjoy for themselves the leopard, still sitting nervous in his roost.

Simba! (looking resentfully up at the toothsome snack she just missed out on)

All photographs by the illustrious Axel Baumann

Port of Dar es Salaam; Two Views

I would look good on one of these in Brooklyn (updated)

Room for improvement: Eucalyptus suicide scooter, Rwanda

The always excellent Afrigadget is a blog devoted to African ingenuity and invention that has posted about many spectacular creations made from abandoned parts and scrap most northern-hemisphere dwellers would doubtless chuck in the trash. They have a post up now combining two of my passions, bicycling, and bamboo, with a link to this project, which pairs the sustainable (and in many places in Africa, free) plant resource with cutting edge bicycle design.

In Rwanda bicycles are used for transporting almost anything that can conceivably be loaded onto them, and being able to manufacture one out of the weeds growing in the gully would be most helpful



These gents doubtless dropped off a load of cargo in Kigali and are headed back up the mountain the easy way


UPDATE:
I've been hanging around over at Atlas HQ most of the week, repairing the world's most beautiful pasta machine, about which more later. (What this really means is that I have been watching Joseph lathe, mill, weld, buff, sand and polish a part I needed to replace on the world's most beautiful pasta machine, but if you come over to dinner and are subjected to my long, explanatory lecture about the pasta machine, its glories, and the long struggle to restore its functionality, I will most likely by then have convinced myself that I did all the work and therefore take all the credit.) Today when I turned up Joseph had a book to show me that his ex-employee Matthew had rescued from the dumpster at Cooper-Hewitt, Matthew's new employer. He had then thoughtfully brought it by as a gift. Turning at random the pages of what looks to be a most interesting and informative look at bicycles and their physics, I stumbled on this page, concerned with alternative bicycle frame materials. It seemed too grand a coincidence to ignore. (Click the image to load it in a readable size)

Scan courtesy of Atlas; permission neither requested of nor granted by the publisher. Please do contact us if you feel the use of this reproduction here is not in your best interest.