Kite Ship

The world's first kite-powered cargo ship set sail on Tuesday, Jan. 22, from Germany to Venezuela. Its makers hope to prove that using earth-friendly energy can also mean saving a fortune.

Sailboats are anything but modern -- unless we're talking about the MS Beluga Skysails, which is now chugging across the Atlantic Ocean with the help of a 160-square-meter computer-controlled kite.

The contraption's inventor, 35-year-old Stephen Wrage, said supplementing the ship's diesel engine with wind power should cut its daily fuel bill by 20 percent -- at a time when oil has exceeded $ 100 a barrel. Turning to alternative energy sources like wind power, an ancient tool in ocean travel, also reduces the ship's CO2 output.

"During the next few months, we will finally be able to prove that our technology works in practice and significantly reduces fuel consumption and emissions," said Wrage, founder and president of the Hamburg-based company SkySails.

The kite, shaped like a para-glider, flies up to 300 meters high to be able to pull the 10,000-ton vessel and is shaped like an aircraft wing, to enable it to take advantage of different wind directions. 

It cost about $ 700,000 to make, not counting the five years of research Wrage and his colleagues put into it. It operates at 100-300m above surface level - much higher than a normal sailing craft - where winds are stronger and more stable. The kite can be used in winds of 12-74km/h and not just when the wind is blowing directly from behind the ship. Larger kites could cut fuel usage by 30 to 50 percent, Wrage said. The company hopes to double the size of the kites to 320 square meters and then expand them again to 600 square meters by 2009. They intend to fit 1,500 ships with the sails by 2015.

Though freight ships are the world's most important commercial transport method, carrying 90 percent of all traded goods, they were excluded from the UN's climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol. Experts have advocated that the industry -- which produced 5 percent of the world's total carbon emissions -- be included in the successor treaty, to take effect after Kyoto expires in 2012.

But as long as oil prices remain high, ship companies already have a hefty incentive to reduce their fuel consumption. Many have already made effective efforts to save fuel by mandating slower speeds in their fleets.

Hamburg-based logistics company Hapag-Lloyd, for example, reduced the standard speed of its ships from 23.5 to 20 knots in the second half of last year and reported "significant savings."

"Before, ships would speed up to 25 knots from the standard 23.5 to make up if time was lost in crowded ports," said company spokesman Klaus Heims. "We calculated that five knots slower saves up to 50 percent in fuel and it had the added effect of cutting carbon dioxide emissions immediately."

Wrage and his SkySails company, however, expect many shipping firms to choose kite power, should the maiden voyage turn out to be a success.

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Searching the Heart of Africa
continued from previous page

But it is no laughing matter when the entire US President declares that “All men are created equal” only to contradict himself by announcing that “It would be impossible for a black person to understand the mathematical formula.” This was Thomas Jefferson, who has gone in memory as a man with “lifelong passion to liberate the human mind from tyranny, whether imposed … [of] our own ignorance.”

Yes, ignorance! How was Thomas Jefferson to know that there was a university in

University of Timbuktu

Timbuktu that with 25, 000 students by the 14th Century? This was before the West colonised us. And this is a lost story our school history books do not tell with any patriotic zest. Indeed, what is called “World History” in secondary school is nothing but European history. Colonialism robed us of our history.

But there are some who know better. Only recently, a delegation of European church leaders visited Africa and knelt down before former president of Mozambique and said, “We repent for robbing Africans of their history and identity.”

When President Bingu wa Mutharika one day after a trip to Kigali emphasised that we must be the first to tell our story, it is the restoration of our dignity and identity that he speaks of. No African country can meaningfully develop without deepening its sense of identity, history, dignity and destiny.

European history is full of lies. Europe was not the first to discover that the earth goes round the sun. African mathematicians in the 15th Century knew about “the rotation of the planets, knew about details of the eclipse” almost 200 years before the European Galileo and Corpernicus were to arrive at the same mathematical calculations. Probably, Europeans had not started of thinking of it as a possibility at all. Well, Galileo was almost hanged for his “sins” of discovery by the Catholic Church, then.

When Achebe sets out to tell the story of Africa in Things Fall Apart, he is doing exactly what Mutharika is asking Malawians to do. That novel is our true cultural representation that opposes the story of Europe about us. The culture of Things Fall Apart has its serious weaknesses and questions without easy answers.

Yet, those people in that novel value the sanctity of human life so that even a kinsman who commits suicide as Okonkwo does becomes a thing most loathed. They do fight what they call “the war of blame”, fighting for the sake of it – contrary to the thought that Africans were blood-thirst warmongers before colonialism. They love and value peace for they can dedicate an entire Week of Peace for this reason. When Okonkwo breaks this value and beats his own wife, he is punished for it.

Above all, Africans have been a people of every measure of human dignity, says Achebe in Things Fall Apart. These people did not hear of a civilised culture with the coming of the White man, they were not mindless – adds Achebe elsewhere but they had “flourishing industries – civilised to the marrow” as Robin Walker writes in his When We Ruled. As late as 1400, the people of Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique and Malawi were trading with Far East, and as far as China. We could brave and sail the high and far seas.

Indeed, “Without the help an anonymous East African sailor,” reports Stephen Williams, “it is doubtful that Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, would have succeeded in ‘discovering’ India.” We knew India before the earliest of their explorers claimed to have discovered it. Even when the Portuguese Francisco Alvarez came to Ethiopia to convert them to Christianity in the 1520s, he found only found the Ethiopian city of Lalibela which already had 11 underground Christian churches. There was nobody to convert to Roman Catholicism, and wondering whether the doubting Thomas of Portugal would believe it, this missionary wrote: “I swear by God, in whose power I am, that all that is written is the truth.”

Our cultures are not primitive or backward as we have been made to believe by the West. They only have their own internal weaknesses. But that is like any other culture. Even Western culture is confronted with serious moral questions. How can you call human beings who love to watch two bullies tearing each others flesh and bleeding in the name of Boxing a game of the civilised? While they come to teach my old mother about human rights and gendered rights, the woman is the most commodified and undignified humanity in the capitalist society of the West. Women are for advertising, even if it means undressing them for money! The list is endless.

Perhaps not much changed then. Instead of seeing darkness, they still see the bush first before they see human beings. They see the safari, the game. When I asked an American and a British history professors in England only this last September, “What do the British and American travellers desire to see first in Africa?” – these colleagues frankly and concurrently said, “the safari”. The animals first!

The way we advertise tourism both within Africa and Euro-America only promotes this image. We must invent construct our own Seven Wonders of Malawi which they must come to see – not just game. The image of game or safari still portrays us as the people of the bush where modern civilisation is remote from imagination.
Why should the Western tourist be invited to see the monkey more than the civilised wonders of our hands?

In order to “discover Africa…up and personal”, one tourist advert says, we must see the monkey captured in the heart of darkness. The designer had to ensure that the Chimpanzee symbolising Africa in the advert must be surrounded by an impervious thick black image – an image of darkness those who said Africa has no history talked about. Disturbing memories of the Western story that the African is close to the ape in his evolution, when you remember Charles Darwin’s impotent theory that Man evolved from the monkey, becomes inevitable in this advertisement of Africa. When some think of an African to be seen, then it is the nomadic Masai and some such tribes.

But now the story is changing. If they will not come to see the safari and the nomadic Masai whose culture is fine while they see him as part of game, they come to see poverty. They come to see The Wretched of the Earth! Yet, Africans can afford to share a beautiful smile in their material poverty, even to people we do not know.

The story of the richness of Africa remains untold. Noone tells us that the only mineral rock to have existed on the soils of Britain is a little coal – malasha. Much of the rest came from Africa. But nobody tells us the story of the poverty of England.

Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim is the founder of Celtel but he was born in Sudan. He is not Western, not White but very successful. When he says, “We have shown that Africa is continent where you can conduct business successfully,” we are tried and found wanting – convicted because we often of investors as people who must come out of Africa. We want developed and big companies that come to Africa on a silver platter rather growing ours from a scratch. Look at Celtel today, with over 17 million subscribers in 15 countries! The riches are here, we are only trying to be mentally poor.

One of the richest men who ever lived on record but in the 14th Century was an African, generous, pious, dressed in Persian silk and his name was Mansa Musa of Mali. He once travelled with 60, 000 men on a pilgrimage to Mecca, including 12, 000 slaves – 500 of whom directly preceding him with “a staff of gold” each while he stately rode on a horseback.

King Mansa-Mussa

Mansa Musa spent so much money in gold while in Egypt that the national economy collapsed after he left. “For years after Mansa Mussa’s visit,” writes Professor DeGraft Johnson, “ordinary people in the streets of Cairo, Mecca, and Baghdad talked about this wonderful pilgrimage – a pilgrimage which led to the devaluation of gold in the Middle East for several years.”

Africa has walked her wonderful pilgrimage to prosperity before the West invaded and destroyed our memory. These are wonderful memories we must tell – wondering: what type of history do we teach our children?

Malawi has a wonderful story to tell the world too. Yet, some choose to post the darker side of our wonderfully beautiful face while our little children to ask you and me: who robbed us of our beautiful history, identity, pride and sense of self-worth? What shall we say to the generation of our children, then?

A story is a trail of the blaze that tears apart darkness into blazing hope. The path to destiny is not possible without hope. But the story of hunting will always favour the hunter until the lion invents his own story-teller. Africa, tell me a story of hope.