Pictures

A couple days ago I asked where this picture was taken:

Kabinti was closest. It is a sugar plantation but not at Sony.

This picture is part of the sugarcane that forms the Nucleus Estate (NE) acreage for the Mumias Sugar Company. Mumias is in Western Kenya between the town of Kakamega and the Ugandan border (roughly). In the sugar industry, Nucleus Estate refers to the sugarcane that is owned by the production company, in this case Mumias Sugar. The NE at Mumias is approximately 4,000 ha (approx 10,000 acres).

The vast majority of sugarcane processed at Mumias comes from independent contracted farmers who are referred to as Out Growers (OG). Out Growers, such as yours truly, farm another 42,000 ha (approx 104,000 acres) of sugarcane which is processed at Mumias. These 42,000 ha, however, are owned by approximately 42,000 individual farmers so the vast majority are small scale farmers. It would be interesting to see if there is any other large scale industry in Kenya/Africa in which the local community have such wide scale individual stakes. 42,000 ha, 42,000 individual farmers.

You can see all the pictures from Mumias and other parts of Kenya on the Mentalacrobatics flickr page under the tag “Beautiful Kenya”.

Thanks for all the comments and guesses!

Click the image for a bigger picture.

Inspired by Afromusing, JKE and Steve

The new picture in the masthead of this blog shows the scenic view of the endless green tea fields rolling over gentle hill slopes in Kericho, Kenya. I took it this past December. It is actually made up of four photos taken in sequence and then merged together. You can see the four photos separately in all their glory in my “Beautiful Kenya” Flickr photo set. I’ll be adding more pictures to the set as I sort through them.

Kenya is very beautiful and its beauty is very diverse. My father once told me that when he was in secondary school a popular and frequent question in geography exams asked the pupils to describe what they would see on a journey from Mombasa to Kakamega focusing on the change in terrain, climate, industry etc. You could write a whole thesis on that!

I know I am showing bias here because it is a journey I take many many times but if you really want to appreciate the beauty of Kenya and the different terrains you should head west from Nairobi. The dry plains around Longonot, the dip into the rift valley, the climb up towards the rolling tea fields of Kericho, the humidity and lake community of Kisumu, the sugar plantations of Kakamega/Mumias, the rolling maize of Kitale etc etc (simply too many places to point out!!). I know many people automatically think east and head towards the coast as Bankelele points out, I always feel sad when I meet other Kenyans who have only been as far west as Nakuru or some only up to Naivasha. Come west, explore Kenya!

Here are some stills taken during the raid from internal CCTV cameras. The raid were carried out by a rapid response unit code-named the Kanga Squad, detectives from Nairobi provincial CID headquarters and officers from the General Service Unit. They are wearing bright orange reflective vests with “QRU” for Quick Rescue Unit/Quick Response Unit which indicates their day job of fight hardcore criminals like carjackers, bank robbers and murder hit squads.

These pictures are very disturbing. In some of them they have an employee spread eagled on the floor with a gun pressed against his/her head and a boot in his/her face. Remember these are NOT criminals being man handled like this. These are Kenyan men and women who went to work only to be pistol whipped and roughed up by an elite police squad.