Nyirogongo erupts

 

What an awful sight; a wall of lava rushing towards your house .... 

Residents in the Democratic Republic of Congo have returned to destroyed houses after a large volcano erupted, with many searching for missing loved ones.

Mount Nyiragongo turned the sky red and spewed out a river of lava on Saturday, but stopped short of Goma, a city of two million just south of the volcano.

At least 15 deaths have been confirmed, but the number is likely to rise as officials reach the hardest-hit areas.

Nine of the victims died in a traffic accident as people fled.

Four others were killed as they tried to escape a prison while two were burned to death, government spokesman Patrick Muyaya said on Sunday.

More than 170 children are feared to be missing and 150 others had been separated from their families, according to Unicef, which said centres would be set up to help unaccompanied minors.

The lava halted near Buhene district, on the outskirts of Goma, burying hundreds of houses and even large buildings. Reconstruction efforts are likely to take months.

"All the houses in Buhene neighbourhood were burned," Innocent Bahala Shamavu told the Associated Press news agency.

Elsewhere, lava crossed one highway connecting Goma to the city of Beni, severing a key aid and supply route. However, the city's airport was untouched, despite earlier reports that it had been affected.

But seismic tremors had been felt in the aftermath, Mr Muyaya said. "People are advised to remain vigilant, avoid non-essential travel, and follow directions," he tweeted.

The volcano, located 10km (six miles) from Goma, last erupted in 2002, killing 250 people and making 120,000 homeless.

Residents started leaving their houses even before the government announced an evacuation plan. At night, crowds were seen fleeing on foot with mattresses and other belongings.

Rwandan authorities said more than 3,000 people had officially crossed from Goma. Some started to return on Sunday. Others went to higher ground to the west of the city.

One Goma resident, Richard Bahati, said he was in his house when he heard screaming and became extremely worried as he saw the sky reddening outside.

"I lived through the problem with this volcano in 2002. The volcano devastated all our homes and possessions," he said.

A local trader, Kambere Ombeni, was among those who returned to the scene as the rubble still smouldered. "We watched the whole neighbourhood in the Nyiragongo territory go up in smoke. The fire came right down to here. Even now we can still see lava," he said.

Another resident, Irene Bauma, said people would need help from the government to rebuild their lives.

"There's land, people, a population that has lost everything, maybe there are also deaths, who knows? We are asking the government to come and help the survivors of this eruption."

Tom Peyre-Costa, from the Norwegian Refugee Council in Goma, told the BBC what had happened.

"The lava was pretty slow, like, 1km/h, but it didn't stop.... It started burning the houses," he said, adding that humanitarian organisations were already trying to address people's needs.

Mount Nyiragongo is one of the world's more active volcanoes but there were concerns that its activity had not been properly observed by the Goma Volcano Observatory, since the World Bank cut funding amid allegations of corruption.

Professor Mike Burton, a volcanologist at the University of Manchester in England, told the BBC that the lava in Mount Nyiragongo is particularly fluid and has the potential to move fast.

In a report on 10 May, the observatory warned that seismic activity at Nyiragongo had increased.

Last year, the observatory's director, Katcho Karume, told the BBC World Service's Science in Action that the volcano's lava lake had been filling up quickly, increasing the chances of an eruption in the next few years. But he also warned that an earthquake could trigger a disaster earlier.

The volcano's deadliest eruption happened in 1977, when more than 600 people died.

(from BBC Africa news)

(An aerial photo from Reuters of the lava flow on the edge of the city of Goma)

Covid in western Kenya, May 2021 ...

(An old photo of the centre of Kisumu, from DW)

Kenya’s lake region has recorded a spike in COVID-19 infections as the area becomes the new epicenter of the disease in the east African nation, according to the Ministry of Health.

The counties in the region bordering Lake Victoria, namely Kisumu, Kakamega, Siaya, Bungoma, Nyamira, Busia, Migori, Homa Bay and Kisii, are accounting for up to 50 percent of daily infections, overtaking the capital Nairobi and the coastal city of Mombasa, which have been hotspots since the outbreak of the disease in March 2020.   On Saturday, Kisumu had the highest infections countrywide, recording 103 cases ahead of Nairobi, which had 61 out of the total 573 cases from a sample size of 5,798 tested in the last 24 hours, Mutahi Kagwe, the cabinet secretary, Ministry of Health said in a statement.  Similarly, Kisii recorded 28 cases, Busia 24, Kakamega 22, Bungoma 12, and Nyamira 9 as the disease spreads in the region.

The trend in the lake region has been recorded for over a week, with the area contributing 261 out of the 659 cases recorded on Friday out of a sample size of 6,972.   On Thursday, the lake region similarly recorded about 200 cases of the disease out of the 376 reported from a sample of 4,153.  The spike in COVID-19 cases in the region has been blamed on the Indian variant, which was first detected in Kisumu, with at least 20 cases confirmed.

Kenya’s confirmed positive cases stood at 168,108 on Saturday as cumulative tests conducted hit 1.8 million, said Mutahi. The country has vaccinated 952,967 persons as of Saturday.

(News item from Xinhua News Agency  Macao)

Kenya starts its first national wildlife census ... report from Reuters

Kenya began its first national wildlife census on Friday, aiming to aid conservation and identify threats to its vast but threatened wildlife populations.

The census will run until July, with rangers, researchers and community members counting animals on land and from helicopters.

It will focus on counting rare species such as the pangolin, which has been identified as a potential intermediary species for COVID-19, and the Sable antelope, of which fewer than 100 remain in Kenya.

Expanding human settlements, a changing climate that makes resources scarcer, and poaching have contributed to declines in wildlife populations. Giraffe populations in Kenya have fallen about 40% over the last three decades, according to the Africa Wildlife Foundation.

The 250 million shilling ($2.3 million) project was launched by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and the tourism ministry at the Shimba Hills National Reserve, the coastal home of Kenya's last population of Sable antelopes.

Some of Kenya's most vulnerable animals, including rhinos and elephants, are counted periodically. But it will be the first time animals are counted systematically in all areas of the country.

"We know there are major gaps. We probably don't know much about what is going on in northern Kenya," said Winnie Kiiru, acting chairperson of the Kenya Wildlife Research Training Institute.

Detailed information about wildlife in northern Kenya's less populated and less visited parks is limited.

The aim is to better understand population sizes and their distribution, to identify threats to animals and suggest conservation strategies.

Tourism accounted for 8.2% of Kenya's GDP in 2019, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council, much of it from visits to nature parks, but has fallen drastically during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The plunge in international travel has also had some benefits. Last year was the first since 1999 in which no rhinos were poached, the KWS said.

Northern White Rhino .... is it possible to bring them back ?

 More embryos developed to save white rhinos

Embryos to be used on surrogate female southern white rhinos to create herd of nearly extinct nothern white rhinos.

The Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya on Thursday announced that four new embryos of the nearly extinct northern white rhinos had been developed, promising the endangered animal a new lease on life.

Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, died in 2018 in Kenya leaving behind only two infertile females.

Scientists, who had stored Sudan’s sperm, have been working hard to develop embryos which they plan to use on surrogate female southern white rhinos multiple times to create a herd of pure northern white rhinos which will be reintegrated into the wild.

The Ol Pejeta Conservancy on Thursday said: “The international consortium of scientists and conservationists working towards preventing the extinction of the northern white rhino through advanced assisted reproduction technologies is pleased to announce that in March and April 2021, four additional northern white rhino embryos were produced.”

Next phase to save rhinos

Kenya’s Tourism and Wildlife Minister Najib Balala said in a statement that with nine embryos successfully developed, it was time that scientists moved on to the next phase to use surrogate rhinos to develop a herd of northern white rhinos.

“We are excited with the laboratory outcome of the last ovum pick-up in March. With nine pure northern white rhino embryos now developed, the partners in the project should embark on the next phase of the project – embryo transfer to the surrogate southern white females at Ol Pejeta Conservancy. We are eager to get the progeny from the project that will guarantee survival of the species.”

The conservancy said this is the most successful series of procedures – from oocyte collection in Kenya to in vitro fertilization and cryopreservation in Italy.

The team working to save the nearly extinct rhinos includes Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW), Safari Park Dvůr Králové, Kenya Wildlife Service, Ol Pejeta Conservancy and Avantea.

There were hundreds of thousands of northern white rhinos roaming in East and Central Africa, but civil war and years of poaching brought its populations to near extinction.

(from Anadolu Agency)

~     ~     ~  

Not quite understanding the biology of genetics, I wonder how the progeny can be 'pure' whites .... they collected sperm from Sudan, but where did the eggs come from, if there are no more living female whites ?   I need to investigate further !

~     ~     ~ 

see:-     http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-end-of-sudan.html

Death of Mama Sarah Obama

 

NAIROBI, Kenya -- Sarah Obama, the matriarch of former U.S. President Barack Obama's Kenyan family has died, relatives and officials confirmed Monday. She was at least 99 years old.

Mama Sarah, as the step-grandmother of the former U.S. president was fondly called, promoted education for girls and orphans in her rural Kogelo village. She passed away around 4 a.m. local time while being treated at the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral hospital in Kisumu, Kenya's third-largest city in the country's west, according to her daughter Marsat Onyango.

“She died this morning. We are devastated,” Onyango told The Associated Press on a phone call.  "Mama was sick with normal diseases; she did not die of COVID-19,” a family spokesman said, adding that she had tested negative for the disease. He said she had been ill for a week before being taken to the hospital.

President Barack Obama had been informed of the death and has sent his condolences.

She will be buried Tuesday before midday and the funeral will be held under Islamic rites.  “The passing away of Mama Sarah is a big blow to our nation. We’ve lost a strong, virtuous woman, a matriarch who held together the Obama family and was an icon of family values,” President Uhuru Kenyatta said.

She will be remembered for her work to promote education to empower orphans, Kisumu Governor Anyang Nyong’o said while offering his condolences to the people of Kogelo village for losing a matriarch.  “She was a philanthropist who mobilized funds to pay school fees for the orphans,” he said.  Sarah Obama, was the second wife of President Obama’s grandfather and helped raise his father, Barack Obama, Sr. The family is part of Kenya's Luo ethnic group.

President Obama often showed affection toward her and referred to her as “Granny” in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father.” He described meeting her during his 1988 trip to his father’s homeland and their initial awkwardness as they struggled to communicate, which developed into a warm bond. She attended his first inauguration as president in 2009. Later, Obama spoke about his grandmother again in his September 2014 speech to the U.N. General Assembly.

For decades, Sarah Obama has helped orphans, raising some in her home. The Mama Sara Obama Foundation helped provide food and education to children who lost their parents — providing school supplies, uniforms, basic medical needs, and school fees.  In a 2014 interview with Associated Press, she said that even as an adult, letters would arrive but she couldn’t read them. She said she didn’t want her children to be illiterate, so she saw that all her family’s children went to school.

She recalled pedaling the president’s father six miles (nine kilometers) to school on the back of her bicycle every day from the family’s home village of Kogelo to the bigger town of Ngiya **   to make sure he got the education that she never had.      **( Ng'iya, is where we lived when we first arrived in Kenya, and was the home of Joseph Adhiambo, photo on the right)

“I love education,” Sarah Obama said, "because children learn they can be self-sufficient, especially girls who too often had no opportunity to go to school.  If a woman gets an education she will not only educate her family but educate the entire village,” she said.

In recognition of her work to support education, she was honoured by the United Nations in 2014, receiving the inaugural Women’s Entrepreneurship Day Education Pioneer Award.  

(Report from abc News)

Palm Sunday

Continuing from yesterdays thoughts about palm fronds on the track into Eliye Springs, this photo is from todays Mill Hill newsletter, and shows just what I was thinking about yesterday !  People carrying palm branches, walking down from the Mount of Olives and across the Kidron Valley into Jerusalem.    I have twice walked this very steep path, but never at Easter .... 

Lake 'Rudolf' part 2

El-Molo Island & Nyiru Range beyond, from Porr

Having written a little about the Omo River dam and what its effect will be on the people of the Turkana area, I found myself thinking a lot about our expeditions to that area. 

I found the above photo from one of our trips, and by the late 1970's El Molo island was scarcely populated; the El Molo were a dying tribe, being absorbed into other tribes of the area.   Wikipaedia says "historians have noted that there are few "pure" El Molo left. Most group members are today admixed with adjacent Nilotic populations, primarily Samburu, with only a handful of unmixed El Molo believed to exist. Many El Molo speakers have also adopted cultural customs from these communities. In 1994, there were reportedly only eight unmixed El Molo remaining."   I had noted a few days ago that El Molo was one of the Kenyan languages now thought to be extinct.  

"The El Molo are believed to have originally migrated down into the Turkana Basin around 1000 BC from Ethiopia in the more northerly Horn region. Owing to the arid environment in which they entered, they are held to have then abandoned agricultural activities in favour of lakeside fishing"  (Wikipaedia)

We saw a few El Molo people with scrawny cows and couldn't think what the animals could possibly find to eat among all the lava boulders and gravel that covered the area for miles and miles inland from the lake shore .... until we realised that the cows were driven into the shallow lake to eat the water weeds near the shore ... aquatic cows !

It is Palm Sunday tomorrow, and if we could go to church, (covid lock-down still applies to some churches) we would be given palm crosses, to remember the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem .... when people were waving and strewing palm branches, traditionally used as a celebration of victory.   This came to mind when I was remembering our trip to the west side of Rudolf, to Ferguson's Gulf.   The 'road' up the west side of the lake was then just a rough and sandy track, and the sand had been covered (presumably where the sand was deep and hard to drive over) with palm leaves to give grip to vehicles tyres.  Memories !  

~     ~     ~     ~     ~

(Added later:-)

See what I wrote in 2018 .... http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2018/06/lake-turkana-formerly-lake-rudolf.html

... and  http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2018/08/ancient-kenyan-burial-site.html

... and  http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2018/08/more-on-lothagam-burial-site.html

Lake Rudolf .... sorry, Turkana !

 

So much is changing in Africa, and a lot of it not for the better.   What we knew as Lake Rudolf and visited two or three times, was a place for nomadic tribes with their camels and donkeys and goats, living a simple but very hard life.  As I see it, 'development' is rarely for the benefit of the people who live where the development is taking place, and so it would seem in the northern deserts of Kenya/the southern areas of Ethiopia.    There are dams being built across the Omo River in southern Ethiopia, which is the main source of freshwater flowing into Lake Turkana.

"Encompassing swathes of Ethiopia, South Sudan and Kenya, the Omo-Turkana Basin is one of the oldest landscapes in the world that is known to have been inhabited by Homo sapiens and is now one of the world’s most extraordinary examples of ethnic diversity. In the lower Omo Valley alone, a varied history of cross-cultural encounters has played out to produce eight distinct ethnic groups, speaking many languages from Afro-Asiatic to Nilo-Saharan.

In a cattle camp on the bank of the ancient Omo River a Mursi elder implored me to “tell our story so that others might know us before we are all dead in the desert”. Where the river ends in Lake Turkana, this sentiment was echoed by local fishermen: “You will find our bones in the desert.” The story of the Omo-Turkana Basin is now that of the Ethiopian state exploiting its periphery in the name of “development”, trampling on the human rights of its citizens in the process.

Over the past decade, the Ethiopian government has pushed ahead with a huge hydro-electric dam on the Omo, known as Gibe III. Without any meaningful consultation with the communities affected, the state has also appropriated grazing lands and freshwater, threatening their vital resources and local heritage.

All of this has happened despite the area gaining the status of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980. As Richard Leakey, the Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist and politician put it, “these happenings are profoundly disturbing”.

The completion of Gibe III, Africa’s tallest dam to date, has eliminated the annual flood and radically reduced the Omo’s flow, which produces 90% of Lake Turkana’s freshwater input. In doing so, it has reduced sediments and nutrients critical for traditional agriculture, riverside pastures and fish habitat.

Over 30% of the lake inflow will be diverted for commercial irrigation projects. The result could be a fall in lake level comparable to that of Central Asia’s Aral Sea, which has shrunk by over two thirds since the 1960s because of irrigation abstractions and which has been called “the world’s worst environmental disaster”. To make way for the commercial plantations planned for the Omo Valley, tens of thousands of hectares of land will be expropriated and thousands of local people displaced.

The need to see “development” as more than a simple matter of an increase in GDP is well established. In his seminal work, Development as Freedom, the Nobel Prize winning economist, Amartya Sen, demonstrated that sustainable development must be based on universal access to social and economic necessities as well as political and civil rights. The many communities in the Omo-Turkana Basin have suffered a systematic curtailment of their most basic and essential rights.

International agreements which the Ethiopian government signed up to, such as the 1993 International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights require it to protect and promote the rights of minority cultures and ensure the “right of everyone to take part in cultural life”.

Since 1948, Ethiopia has also been signed up to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article II provides against the destruction of “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide”, famously defined the specific need to protect against the “disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups”.

It is difficult not to conclude that what we are seeing in the Omo is the wholesale disregard of these commitments by the Ethiopian government. Its development policies are not only transforming landscape and heritage but destroying complex systems of sustainable living that have endured for millennia. The huge injustice of all this is that the ecological costs will be borne by local communities while the profits will be enjoyed by central and international corporations.

Meanwhile, centuries of collective wisdom relating to livestock diversification, flood dependant cultivation and customary obligations and mechanisms of livestock exchange, will be made redundant.

This is not to deny, of course, that development, in the sense defined by Sen, is a laudable and necessary enterprise. But we must also recognise that large-scale infrastructure projects are likely to have far reaching consequences for the lifestyles and cultural identities of those they displace.

Projects which set out to increase economic growth without regard for social justice and individual rights are not worthy of the name “development”. Development must benefit locals and for this to happen their voices must not only be heard but also given a central and determining role in any discussions about the future of their lands and livelihoods.

Both cradle and crucible of our species, the Omo-Turkana Basin is unique and precious. Its heritage and history, as well as responsibility for its future, are shared by us all.

(from The Conversation.com)

Is there really no way of moving into the modern world for nomadic peoples without destroying their lives ?   I'm not sure that the invasion of rich tourists is quite the answer, but where lodges and game reserves have been set up by local communities, such as the Samburu, tourists with money to burn have come in droves, and the profits of such ventures benefit the local people, without destroying the ecology and history of an area.   We loved visiting the north of Kenya, and especially the area to the east of Lake Rudolf .... oops !     Turkana !   

It was arid, hot and with no 'facilities' whatsoever, but we took the children there for several days; they splashed around in the shallows of the lake (with an adult in attendance watching for crocodiles !)  They spent the hottest part of the day in shade, catching up with school lessons (I was teaching them myself); they found interesting rocks, and even some fossils !

Lost languages ?

 

(Report from  Anadolu Agency  news)

In the Kenyan capital Nairobi, rap music artist Martin Nderitu, 24, is having trouble laying down lines in his mother tongue for an album expected to drop in early March.  His album is composed in a slang called Sheng – a mix of Swahili, English, and 42 local languages, popular among the urban youth of the East African country.

In modern Kenya, the entertainment industry, politicians, schools, and even places of worship use this slang, which has now developed into a hybrid tongue.Like many other kids in his country, Nderitu grew up speaking a foreign language, a practice which has become a status symbol for many.

“My lines are very deep, they speak about society and our day-to-day life,” he said.  Unable to speak in his local language, he holds society and his parents responsible for not teaching him his mother tongue. He said that he can speak the English part of Sheng, but has trouble pronouncing his own mother tongue.   “My parents speak Swahili and Kenya’s slang called Sheng. They don’t speak their traditional languages. I blame them for the person I’ve become because it was their duty to pass the language onto me,” Nderitu said.

Similarly, Peter Waithaka, 25, said he can understand Kikuyu, his mother tongue, but is unable to use it to speak.  “I can hear the Kikuyu language but I can’t speak it. I feel like mother languages are just things of the past which in this modern era where we have computers, laptops, and the internet, these languages will disappear,” he said.

With over 40 tribes inhabiting Kenya, it is home to numerous languages and dialects, passed down from generation to generation.  The country has adopted Swahili and English, which are taught in schools, as the two national languages. The local languages which connect people to their ethnic groups are only learned at home when children grow up.

Worrisome phenomenon

According to studies by linguists, most Kenyan youths can barely speak their ethnic languages.  Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Clara Momanyi, a linguist at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, described the phenomenon as worrisome.   “The upbringing of kids these days isn’t like the way we were brought up, because parents are neglecting some of the traditional roles which we’ve had in Kenya since time immemorial,” she said. “They’re not teaching kids our culture nor our languages.”

She said that many young parents do not know their languages themselves, so they cannot teach them to their own children.  They feel it is better to teach them Swahili and English than their own mother tongue, which is why they grow up not knowing these languages.  “Sooner or later we have these languages disappearing because of a lack of teachers,” warned Momanyi. “They will disappear and of course, our culture will also disappear because languages are the vehicle in which languages are passed on from generation to generation.”

Waithaka, who is a young musician, says that in big cities, schools punish students for speaking in vernacular or ethnic languages.  “We’ve been urged to speak mostly English. You can speak Swahili twice a week,” he explained. “This has been [policy] in Kenya for a long time to improve English speaking and comprehension of students at the cost of languages like Kikuyu, Luo, and Kamba.”

Parents to blame?

Many also worry that the government is indifferent to documenting and doing research to keep the local languages alive.  

Kimani Njogu, a university teacher of Swahili and African languages, said parents have to take most of the blame for not passing down these languages to their children. She also faults the government for its indifference.   “It’s important that we try and learn our mother tongues because they connect us with our history and our identity and give us a sense of belonging,” she said.   The government has also failed to preserve the languages, says Njogu.

Martin Njoroge, a linguist at the US International University in Nairobi, said the Sheng has evolved and is being used as a first language by some speakers. He said it is no longer slang.   “A language must have culture, history, geography, and solidification of its grammar and vocabulary, so in my view, Sheng is on the path to becoming a language,” he explained.   “I do not think that Sheng will go away, it will continue adjusting itself and very soon we will have first language speakers of Sheng.”  He said Sheng has a future now, as other communal languages are on their way to extinction.

The Yaakunte language of the Yaaku tribe, once indigenous to Ethiopia and Kenya, has been listed among six local languages (Sogoo, Lorkoti, Kinare, Kore, and Elmolo) which have gone extinct, according to Jennifer Koinante, executive director of the Yiaku Laikipiak Trust, a local advocacy group .

The Yaaku tribe, former hunter-gatherers and beekeepers who once numbered over 5,000, have been assimilated into the Maasai tribe.  The Yaaku over time gave up their language in favor of the Maa language of the Maasai.  Today, only seven people speak Yaakunte, all of them over 70 years old.

I find this very sad indeed.  About ten years ago when I was in Kisumu for a month, I met a charming African family of mother and three daughters, all very well educated .... private schools for the girls .... and together as a family they spoke English.   But the mothers 'mother' tongue was/had been Dholuo, and her greater family all spoke Luo in their homes.   Tragically, the mother felt that her children should be 'modern' and forget their 'primitive' heritage.   How sad.

However, the girls spoke fluent English and French, adequate Kiswahili .... and absolutely NO Dholuo.  I spoke more Dholuo than they did !!  This meant they couldn't speak to their own grandparents, who knew no English and so rarely saw the grandchildren .... probably even as little as 25 years ago they would have visited and spent time together, and learned from their grandparents the traditions and stories of their heritage ... and when the grandparents die, that cultural history, their heritage, will be gone.  

Locusts again

 

I briefly mentioned locusts towards the end of a previous blog entry .... 

http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2020/07/mama-pat-african-updates-and-qavs.html

.... and now the plague is back in Kenya in ever greater swarms.

The Daily Telegraph recently had a report:-  "Biblical plague or manageable threat? Swarms of the pests, driven by climate change, are wreaking havoc on the food supply of a region regularly facing acute bouts of hunger"

From the air, the mountain valleys are awash with millions of flitting white dots. A swarm about twice the size of the City of London ready to devour every bit of vegetation in its wake looks like this from the air.

    

"Last year, East Africa was hit by a once-in-a-lifetime invasion of voracious desert locusts. Billions of insects poured across the border into Kenya from the Arabian Peninsula, Somalia and Ethiopia. 

Commentators compared it to something from the Old Testament – a biblical plague of Abraham, driven on by climate change, wreaking havoc on the food supply of a region which regularly faces acute bouts of hunger.

There had been nothing like it in Kenya since the 1950s and officials were caught flatfooted, trying to battle swarms roughly the size of Luxembourg with a handful of planes and almost no proper equipment. 

Pilots tasked with spotting the swarms sent their locations back to base on WhatsApp on shoddy rural internet connections.

A single locust swarm can contain up to 80 million locusts and fly 30 to 80 miles in one day depending on the wind. By the time, spraying planes arrived at the WhatsApp coordinates the next day, it was often too late. 

The locusts had warmed up in the morning sun and moved off into the wilderness, laying millions of eggs. Every day, each locust can eat its weight in vegetation daily and multiplies twenty-fold every three months. A swarm can easily eat as much food as 35,000 people in a single day and multiple two dozen times in three months."

Pilots of small planes and helicopters more used to flying celebrities to game lodges are now tracking swarms as they settle for the night, and are ready at dawn to spray the settled swarm as they start to warm up in the dawn sun .... and spray with a U.N. approved pesticide.  

(summarised from a Daily Telegraph report)