Foreign Correspondent Margot Kiser
Letters to Annie from Kaftanistan
Mar 21, 2012 3:44 PM EDT Margot Kiser reports from Nairobi on the successful ransom of British citizen Judith Tebbutt. On Tuesday afternoon, in the small inland Somali town of Adado, law enforcement officials gazed skyward as a single-engine aircraft circled close overhead. The plane—a U.K.-owned KingAir 200 operated by the British company Phoenix […]
Best wishes to all for a Happy and Prosperous 2012. Kenya Department of Defence press brief Saturday, Dec, 31st, 2011. Meeting began nearly an hour late @ 11 am. Colonel Cyrus Oguna (a dead ringer for Eddie Murphy) from Kenya’s Dept of Defence delivered in dead pan fashion a speech that included description and # […]
Somalis arrested in Lamu Nov 25, 2011 (photo; Abdullah Bargash) November 25, 2011 (LAMU, KENYA) Lamu police announced Friday that they had arrested five unarmed Somalis on Manda island. The Somalis are now being held in Lamu jail. Police and CID told a crowd of reporters at the police station that the men, mostly in […]
Ten heavily armed gunman reportedly stormed the beach near Lamu island in Kenya early this morning, firing shots, and abducting an handicapped Frenchwoman from her sea front grass hut. According to Lamu police, the gunmen and their hostage “went out into the open sea”. Around 2 AM, residents of Shella, a small European enclave near […]
Construction for the first three of twenty-one berths of the Lamu Port is slated to begin in November. This may not seem like ground-breaking news, but for a project that’s been in the pipeline since the 1970’s, it’d be one small step for Kenya, one giant leap for Africa. Yesterday I attended the portion of […]
Artists at work outside in the elements are often – correctly – labeled “street artists”, and pass their time sketching kitsch for tourists in big cities. But nothing could be farther from how Herbert Menzer, a wild and wacky German visionary/ real estate developer/accidental politician/friend to all, envisioned the first annual Lamu Painters Festival. Menzer’s […]
Seems only fitting that an ancient Muslim tradition was celebrated today with a race between ancient Arab fishing dhows. This part of Eid is less about fasting (Ramadan, a word that reminds me of Papadam) than it is about the journey to Mecca in November. Who goes to Mecca anyway? A successful, middle-aged acquaintance, Hamid, […]
The “burial-at-sea” took place at 5 pm. About two dozen close friends, acquaintances, Italian compatriots, neighbors, and a few curious souls arrived around 4:45 in a motorcade of small taxi boats. The sun was still high and everyone wore sun-glasses in defense against the striking Equatorial sun. Some wore black, some white, as if in […]
My Lamu hippo piece ran in the East African last week. Read it online here.
