Kidnapping in Lamu
In the early hours of Saturday October 1st, a French lady was kidnapped from Manda island, in the Lamu archipelago, two weeks after a British lady was kidnapped and her husband shot dead, further north up the coast towards Somalia.
I got the call on that Saturday morning, and was asked to take the first flight down. This was a different type of journalism to everything else I have hitherto done.
Arriving in Lamu, nobody on the island could believe that “the Somali pirates” could be so “audacious” to come to Lamu. It was hard to believe that the Kenyan government, police and coast-guard had not stepped up security following the previous kidnapping.
Local hoteliers had themselves organised an aeroplane to fly up the coast and try to track the kidnappers as they fled towards Somali waters. The coastguard did not have a boat, it was rumoured.
The fate of Marie Dedieu is still unknown, but the impact on tourism in Lamu will be enormous. Over eighty per cent of the island relies on the tourism industry, which immediately sunk as news trickled in. Over two hundred people that Saturday cancelled their holiday to Lamu. It will take a long time to rebuild the reputation of the island; the Kenyan tourism indusyry is still recovering from the hit it took following the post-election violence several years ago.
The last time I came here, I came for two or three days. I left ten days later. It was easy to fall in love with the place. It will be harder now.
The Hurri Hills of Kenya, north of Marsabit and across the Chalbi desert, seemed to be the remotest place on Earth. I hadn’t seen tarmac for days, and small, rocky tracks stretched across the plains and wound their way through the hills.
Small communities live nestled in these hills, miles from anywhere. They draw what scarce water there is, where they can. And that water is becoming increasingly scarce with the drought affecting the Horn. They walk with their cattle across the vast plains, in search of pasture. It is rare that they see outsiders in these parts.
Borders mean little up here. An ageing man in one village I visited told me “our nearest water is the other side of those hills”, pointing towards the horizon. The other side of those hills is Ethiopia, a journey they would make daily. The nearest market, a source of produce as well as an outlet for their goats, was also in Ethiopia. No-one holds a passport.
Driving from Marsabit, crossing the Chalbi desert, we got lost at night, in the vast expanse of black. We were headed to a small town where we could spend the night, but there are few lights in this part of the world, and once we lost the track, it wasn’t easy to find. Our faith was in the driver. In the end, he turned up trumps.
The Sudd
I have never been so happy to leave somewhere. The waiting area at the airport in Malakal was a storm of flies, buzzing through the heat that hung heavy in the air. I was on the “standby” list to fly to Bentiu in a UN helicopter, and the prospect of being stuck here, missing the story I was aiming for in South Sudan’s Unity State, was not a pleasant one.
As the chopper rose into the air, the White Nile stretched out below, cutting through this fly-infested town. As we flew west, the small round porthole windows—open at our altitude of 1000 feet—gave onto a sea of green below. The vast swamplands of The Sudd, which swallow up the Nile as it moves north towards Khartoum, stretched into the hazy mist of the day’s deathly heat.
It was the swamps of The Sudd that caused so many problems for the early explorers in the 19th century, trying to trace the Nile to its source. For months they would drag themselves through, meeting unknown tribes, battling the flies, the mosquitos, and the impenetrable sodden land. And now, as South Sudan is on the verge of its independence, it is this same swampland that renders many of the routes impassable during the rainy season, cutting off towns like Malakal from Juba, except by boat.
But from the air, this ocean of green betrayed none of its dangers. Cattle herders moved their livestock across the fields as carrion birds flew over them. A man stood repairing the thatched roof of a lone tokul, the traditional Sudanese mud huts. Isolated isles dotted small, unknown lakes, and a serpentine river slithered to the horizon.
An hour later, the helicopter landed in Bentiu, and I was back amongst the realities of South Sudan, leaving behind the romanticised version from the air.
