You could be forgiven for not recognizing ‘Ms Isis’, the woman who “wants to be known as that female producer who made beats” – she changes her hairdo almost every week. But the roots that she doesn’t change, are the ones embedded in her sound.
Ms Isis, not to be confused with the terrorist organization, but rather with the Egyptian goddess of fertility and motherhood, grew up in the windy city of Port Elizabeth in South Africa.
She moved to the Gauteng province after school and it was while at university in Tshwane that she found her passion for composing hip-hop beats.
“I bumped into people who knew how to make beats and they taught me, so I’m basically self-taught,” she says.
Trying to etch out a place in the competitive and male-dominated industry is not easy for anybody, let alone a woman.
“It’s harder… there’s a lot of expectations for females,” says Ms Isis on the challenges she faces.
Another is staying relevant and standing out from the crowd. This is perhaps why her hair is transformed almost every other week. The music industry is hard for women and Ms Isis is acutely aware of this.
“I’m a girl but I’m not necessarily the girl that everybody wants to see,” she says, referring to the unrealistic expectations forced on women. She refuses to sexualize her music and is unwavering in her stance against surrendering her musical integrity.
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‘Ms Isis’, Terrorist, Organization, Egyptian, Goddess, December 2016
As a woman, Ms Isis has to juggle music, motherhood and marriage. Her husband is Lengolo Moletsane, also known as Madkind, a graphic designer by day, and multi-instrumentalist and producer in her band by night.
“He can tell you more about South African music, I can tell you more about Coolio,” says Ms Isis jokingly.
They are strong-willed and determined to find the right balance between music and parenting.
“It’s very difficult… I see why people are always discouraging, but it can be done. I want to do it and I’m going to do it.”
There is a distinct air of defiance in her voice, as if she’s out to prove the doubters wrong.
With two successful radio singles in 2016, she seems to be getting it right. Her single, Only, a house groove which she collaborated on with Sculptured Music, enjoyed regular airplay and received stellar reviews, most notably from house legend, DJ Christos. She recently wrapped up the video for her second single Mamatime, a jazzy hip-hop inspired melody. Ms Isis has picked up some traction with these singles and hopes that the coming year will bring with it more bookings and the release of her first studio album, which she is currently working on.
“I’ve been an artist that always performs with beats and now I have formed a band, I’m very excited about it,” says Ms Isis, who hopes to one day grace stages like the Standard Bank Joy of Jazz Festival, a venue she has great fondness for. Mamatime ends with Ms Isis singing the isiXhosa words Ixesha, Ixesha, lihamba naba hambayo, meaning “time only moves with those who move with it”. It looks like Ms Isis’ time has come, and it’s moving forward with her beats.

Miss-Isis-094

The Goddess Of Groove

Seminal is an odd word. It is a late Middle English word, from the old French, seminal or Latin seminalis, from semen, ‘seed’. Modern English has it meaning ‘a work, event, moment or figure strongly influencing later developments.’
Robert Kennedy’s visit to South Africa was seminal to my life, strongly influencing my later development.
Back in 1966 I was virulently anti-apartheid, a position difficult to explain to modern youth as it seems so obvious, ho hum, of course you were. But in those days most of South Africa’s whites thought you were a terrorist, communist or even a landsverraier (traitor) if you suggested blacks should get the vote. Especially in the Free State where I was born, grew up, went to school, matriculated in 1965.
When Bobby came to South Africa, I was fresh out of school, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, desperate to hear an American opinion of our politics. So I went to the airport to meet him, then listened intently when he spoke on campus. Please understand, I felt alone in a sea of white people who thought only whites should vote, run the government, have privileged jobs, use the beaches, walk on the pavements, travel first or second class on the railways. And never, ever, should white people mix with other races. Seems strange that so many people could live contentedly with such absurd beliefs, but trust me, they did.
And really, what could I, a nerdy-looking boykie from the Free State, in my first year at university, do to change it?
Robert Kennedy, after his rapturous welcome from students, started off:
“I came here because of my deep interest and affection for a land, settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage.
“I refer, of course, to the United States of America.”
Sustained laughter. Great start. But not seminal. Towards the end of his speech, in which he said South Africa could lead the world, he said the words now carved in stone over his grave at Arlington:
“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
It changed my life.
Suddenly I thought perhaps my small contribution could make a difference. I didn’t have to change the whole world, did not have to eat the whole elephant myself, just do my bit, piece by piece, and each time I’d make a difference.
Helen Suzman’s famous report-back meetings to her Houghton constituency after South Africa’s parliamentary session were also seminal, making me believe there were others who believed as I did. I was not alone.
Time and time again I would go to the Kennedy speech when first I became a political journalist, and then in the turbulent 1990s when I edited The Star. I suspect had I not gone to that speech, not been inspired, I may have been a lesser editor of what was then Johannesburg’s biggest paper. The words guided me when times were dark and no light could be glimmered at the end of the tunnel. Every act counted, I told myself and, eventually, told my reporters, every single act that could bring down the awful edifice of apartheid.
They interviewed me for the movie A Ripple of Hope and asked me to read the relevant bits from the speech. I tried, but each time choked up, although it was four decades after I had first heard it.
At the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr, Bobby said: “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”
He would have made a great president, Bobby. Humour, intelligence, compassion, a way with words and that special Kennedy magic.

A Ripple Of Hope At A Time Of Despair

There’s a certain attention that a lone Kalashnikov rifle commands. Even more so when it is carried by a woman wearing a keffieh (the chequered scarf once used as the symbol of the Palestine resistance movement). This is exactly how the world learned to know of Leila Khaled.
What made the Palestine-born activist a terrorist was not the rifle but the first time she played a part in hijacking a plane in 1969, while still in her 20s.
It was after this hijacking that the now-iconic photo (see next page) of Khaled holding the Kalashnikov was taken by American photographer Eddie Adams. Khaled since underwent six facial surgeries to change her appearance, which also allowed her to participate in the second plane hijacking in 1970.
Her cause? That of the Palestinians, and their right to return to their homeland as a free people.
Today, at 70, she’s a mother of two sons and has a granddaughter she dotes on. The Palestinian Right to Return, as she explains during her visit to Johannesburg in February, is just as close to her heart.
“It’s very important to put the Palestinian question on the international agenda. After the first intifada [Arabic word for resistance] in 1987, it was a widespread awareness about the Palestinians because we did not, up to now, achieve our goals, in return for the refugees [to go back] to their homeland, to their cities, villages, properties,” says this member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
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“The Right of Return is still a dream. We cannot practice our self-determination without being in our land, and to establish an independence.”
Khaled’s visit to Johannesburg was however not without controversy. Her visit was organized by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions South Africa (BDS South Africa), which is part of the global campaign aimed at pressurizing Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian land.
The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), alongside a number of other parties, were quick to condemn the visit before Khaled had arrived, and continued to do so. The SAJBD issued a statement against Khaled’s visit and BDS South Africa’s role in bringing her to the country, adding to the recent tension between South Africa’s Jewish and pro-Palestine groups.
Despite the tense backdrop to her visit, Khaled is nevertheless vocal about the Israel and Palestine conflict, and her crucial duty to fight for her people.
“Israel is still having [exclusions] against our people, in the West Bank and in the Gaza strip, and lately they have [committed] a holocaust for the Palestinians in Gaza. Now Israel denies all rights of Palestinians,” she says.
The Israeli-Palestine conflict has now become a focus of the International Criminal Court, and the Hague-based power could prosecute both parties for war crimes. At the center of any conflict, however, are women and children, and especially at a time where civilians have now become the target. Rape and systematic sexual assault is also a weapon of war, and according to Khaled, a societal ill that has taken too long to remedy.
“[These challenges] should be supported by civil society. It’s not just by one person. It needs time, it needs education, and the steps for the betterment of the people. It doesn’t mean that everything is okay. There are many big challenges facing not only the government, but society as well,” she says.
While there are societies in which some women have succeeded alongside men, statistics point to the gaping gender pay gap.
“[There is still a need] to have consciousness about the woman as a human being, not as a sex. Women’s rights are part of human rights, so if any country doesn’t apply this to its rules and laws, it means that they are violating human rights,” says Khaled.
Her active role extends beyond her iconic photograph, which has also become a part of popular culture, the same way Che Guevara’s image is emblazoned on T-shirts. The keffieh, which has been used as a symbol of Palestinian resistance and support, is now a fashion accessory. The message these symbols carry, according to Khaled, is however not lost.
“When I look at Che Guevara as a symbol, and also Nelson Mandela as a symbol of the struggle against injustice, whether it’s under [the] apartheid regime or [not], it’s not the whole thing that I see. I see behind it,” she explains.
“It means that this image should be in [popular] culture. We should learn from history, from other people. It’s not only our people who are struggling, there were many other people in the world who struggle.”
Young Khaled’s image is almost timeless as it speaks for the many women on the frontline, taking on an equal role alongside men in conflicts around the world.

CTX1557

The Grandmother who Hijacked Planes

Aliko Dangote lives as you might expect, given he’s the richest person in Africa and resides in the same country being bullied by the insidious Boko Haram terrorist group, which finds something noble in kidnapping village girls. Located on Victoria Island, a wealthy Lagos enclave that has a moat in the form of a lagoon and the far eastern shores of the Atlantic Ocean, his mansion comes with all the trimmings: massive black gate, bulletproof windows, Big Brother video surveillance, guards and a secret entryway.
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After I enter, a butler motions to a sitting room overlooking a patio and a blue-tiled pool. The three-story fortress is shielded from the 90-degree heat by powerful air-conditioners (themselves presumably shielded from Nigeria’s notoriously unreliable electric grid by diesel generators). Dangote, round-faced with a trimmed graying moustache, appears from upstairs dressed in khakis and a casual blue button-down. The 57-year-old can seem miscast in the role of industrial titan, often speaking so softly that he mumbles.
As breakfast arrives by the platterful, including plantains, smoked chicken in red sauce, diced sweet potatoes, whitefish and sausage, he sticks to coy conversation. Whether about his country’s fraught presidential election (“It’s going to be tough for both parties”) or his cement company’s long-delayed overseas listing (“Maybe next year”), he has little to say. On one subject, though, he is always articulate. “Nigeria is one of the best kept secrets,” Dangote says. “A lot of foreigners are not investing because they’re waiting for the right time. There is no right time.”
Nigeria does provide fertile opportunity for vast wealth. As evidence, look no further than Dangote’s No. 67 rank on the World’s Billionaires List and his $14.7 billion fortune – mostly from three majority stakes in publicly traded cement, sugar and four companies. And he doesn’t arrive here alone. In another dramatic sign of his country’s emergence, Nigeria has overtaken South Africa on FORBES’ 50 Richest in Africa ranking. Thirteen Nigerians earned spots in 2014, including a trio of new billionaires.
Dangote and these other Nigerians power Africa’s largest economy. The drop in crude prices prompted the oil rich country’s stock index to plunge 40% last year, taking Dangote’s net worth down in lockstep – no surprise, since his companies account for almost a third of the nation’s benchmark index (his $10.3 billion drop in net worth was the world’s largest last year). But the underlying fundamentals are strong. From 2010 to 2013, Nigerian GDP expanded by an average of 5% a year. (It now totals some $500 billion, or a third larger than South Africa.) Even with the oil glut, forecasters believe this year’s growth will top 5%. In fact, according to a widely cited Citigroup report, economists expect Nigeria to have among the fastest average annual GDP growth in the world between 2010 and 2050.
There are other reasons for international interest as well. In the shadow of rising Islamic militancy, which has destabilized the Middle East and now threatens to do the same to parts of Africa, President Obama recently issued an executive order tasking US business executives with strengthening trade ties to sub-Saharan Africa (the council includes heavy hitters from Wal-Mart, G.E. and McKinsey).
Prior to that, in May 2014, he dispatched Penny Pritzker to Nigeria, the first visit by a Commerce Secretary in two decades. America’s foreign direct investment in Nigeria reached a continent-leading $8.2 billion in 2012, the last year for which statistics are available. Overall US-Nigerian trade was $9.8 billion last year. Nigeria sells far less oil to America these days – it exported $2 billion of the black stuff last year as the US’ tenth-largest supplier – so most of that trade comes through other goods and services.
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Keeping Nigeria successful is critical. The country is already Africa’s most populous, with more than 170 million people, and that figure will swell to 210 million by 2020. By 2050, Nigeria is forecast to overtake the United States (440 million to 400 million). Yet a majority of the people subsist on less than $1.25 a day. About half are illiterate; most are very young (the country’s median age is 18.3). And 50% of rural Nigeria lacks access to clean drinking water. It’s hard to imagine the government coming to grips with it all, even if oil prices recover. Nigeria consistently ranks in the bottom quarter of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International, and is proving a feckless pursuer of the Boko Haram thugs terrorizing the northeast.
All of which makes Dangote – well connected, wildly wealthy and ready to do business – an increasingly important player on the world stage. “Anyone doing business in Africa,” says David Rubenstein, the cofounder of the Carlyle Group and a fellow billionaire, “knows Dangote.”
The roots of Dangote’s rise lie 150 miles south of the Sahara in his hometown of Kano, Nigeria’s second largest city. A dusty metropolis, Kano has been a trade center and commercial hub since its establishment in the 10th century, thanks to its strategic location on the edge of the vast desert. Egyptian perfumes, incense, inks and mirrors dominated at first, then leather goods. The camel caravans became lucrative enough to fight over; wars broke out with neighboring kingdoms. When the British arrived in the late 1800s, Kano was West Africa’s most important business center.
Under British rule, Sanusi Dantata, Dangote’s grandfather, grew rich trading commodities like grain oats and rice, and ranked as one of Kano’s wealthiest citizens. Dantata insisted on personally raising his grandson – not an unusual arrangement in northern Nigerian culture – and instilled a businessman’s mind-set in Dangote at a young age. At the age of eight, he turned allowance into startup capital. “I would use it to buy sweets, and I would give them to some people to sell, and they would bring me the profit,” Dangote says. “When you are raised by an entrepreneurial parent or grandparent you pick that aspiration. It makes you be much more aggressive – to think anything is possible.”
The country was growing up, too. Post-colonial instability, including countless coups and a civil war in the 1960s, was eclipsed by an oil boom in the 1970s. During that decade, the economy grew 18% annually, with many of the spoils going to well-connected elites. Despite the explosion of revenue, the World Bank still considered Nigeria – along with countries such as Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Chad and Mali – as “low income,” a candidate for international aid.
Dangote, a Muslim, attended Al-Azhar University in Cairo and studied business. After graduation, he asked his grandfather for permission to move to Lagos. A $500,000 loan from his uncle set up 21-year-old Dangote as a trader of rice, sugar and cement. He was well capitalized and a naturally talented trader. He imported sugar from Brazil and rice from Thailand and sold them locally at a huge mark-up. At his height, he says, he was pocketing $10,000 in profit a day. “Things were quite good,” he says. “It allowed us to create an awful lot of cash.”
He also worked the politicians. According to a State Department cable unearthed by WikiLeaks, Dangote “held exclusive import rights in sugar, cement, and rice, using such advantages to do volume business and undercut competitors.” Dangote flatly denies this.
Dangote’s success landed him firmly on America’s radar. A 1994 diplomatic cable singled him out as a businessman to know in Nigeria and drew attention to his clan’s homes in Kano, Lagos, London and Atlanta. The State Department report also highlighted the annual family vacation to the States.
A 1995 trip to Brazil convinced him to shift from trading to manufacturing. Why continue to play middleman when he could make the stuff in Nigeria instead and pocket even more profit? His resolve was strengthened in 1999, when Nigeria held its first democratic presidential election in six years, choosing a bespectacled former military ruler and chicken farmer named Olusegun Obasanjo, whom Dangote had known since 1981. As a key part of his platform, Obasanjo had pledged to protect and promote domestic industry.
That’s all Dangote needed to hear. Dangote Sugar started in 2000 and quickly expanded the annual production capacity of its refinery at Lagos’ Apapa Port to 1.44 million tons, enough to satisfy 90% of national demand. By the time Dangote Sugar debuted on the Nigerian Stock Exchange in 2007, sales had quadrupled to $450 million. The four firms, which began in 1999 and also produces pasta and noodles, followed a similar trajectory. It began with a single mill, tripled revenue to $270 million, increased capacity eightfold to 1.5 million tons – then joined Dangote Sugar on the NSE in 2008, the same year Dangote became the first Nigerian on FORBES’  World’s Billionaires list, at No. 334. In 2005, Dangote secured a $480 million loan led by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation – Nigerian banks didn’t have the ability, or the stomach, to put up the cash alone – and agreed to plunk down $320 million of his own money to build a cement factory. Dangote Cement listed on the NSE in 2010 as a $1.3 billion-in-sales company. The three companies today do a combined $3 billion in revenue; while Dangote Flour operates at a loss and Dangote Sugar’s net margin falls in line with Brazilian peer Cosan, the cement company is wildly profitable, with a margin of 52% – about double that of close competitor LaFarge Africa.
Obasanjo, re-elected in 2003, worked overtime to ensure that any Dangote challenger who entered the market did so with a significant handicap. At the time Dangote’s sugar and four companies went public, raw sugar was taxed 12 times less than refined sugar, wheat six times less than flour. Dangote Cement prospered from restrictive licenses. The companies retain a vice-like grip on their industries today, controlling at least half of the cement and sugar markets and about 25% of four.
“When Obasanjo took over, he took guys with him,” says a Nigerian belonging to the country’s overlapping circle of business and political elites. “He gave them a leg up.”
Last August, as the Islamic State overran northern Iraq and Boko Haram was declaring its own caliphate in Nigeria, the White House held a US-Africa trade summit in Washington, DC. A highlight was the announcement of a $5 billion fund backed by Wall Street billionaire Steve Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group – and Dangote. They plan to invest in infrastructure companies throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
“We can do well as investors, and the countries will do well,” Schwarzman says. “We’re aware that operating in Africa isn’t as easy as many other places. You have to have a very strong local partner, and we were lucky enough to find Aliko. He’s done a remarkable job.”
Rubenstein, of the Carlyle Group, sought out Dangote as well when raising money for his firm’s first sub-Sahara-focused fund in 2012. Dangote ultimately invested in the $700 million fund.
“His name carries a great deal of weight,” Rubenstein says. “If you say he’s an investor with you that carries a lot of weight. He’s helped us.”
The Carlyle fund has so far invested in five companies, including a $147 million deal last November for Nigeria-based Diamond Bank, a retail lender.
It’s all part of Dangote’s fast-rising international profile. He’s a Davos regular, and appeared with Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s current president, on a panel about investment potential in Africa at the 2014 World Economic Forum. Even four years ago, he was there making a familiar pitch: “Don’t give any more aid to Africa,” he said. Invest with local partners instead. “You will make money, and we’ll make money, and it’s better for everyone.”
But it is not in Dangote’s nature to rely on others to prosper. Mostly, he relies on himself.
He trusts few others with real power at his companies, often making decisions with little more than gut feeling, says a former top executive.
“Ultimately all the decisions sit with the boss, Dangote, rather than the senior management,” the executive says.
Self-reliance and a supremely healthy ego blend seamlessly into a cult of personality at Dangote’s firms. Portraits of him hang on the walls. The average Dangote employee seems to virtually worship him.
“I’m going to be a big man, I’m going to be the next Dangote,” a lab technician at the one of the cement plants says over and over again until his sentiment is recorded on paper. A lieutenant warns that Dangote will walk out of a meeting if it starts even a minute late.
But Dangote is hardly the hermetic workaholic (“I don’t think I’ll ever retire”) he puts on. “He attends more parties than anyone I know,” says Jim Ovia, a banker and close friend. One Sunday last month found Dangote on his yacht – christened Mariya after his mother – and then flying to Geneva on Monday to see his grandchildren. Later that week, he met first with the French general counsel and then with Davido, Nigeria’s biggest pop star.
Another recent social call: breakfast with former president Obasanjo, then onto Abuja to meet the current president. Dangote has good reason to keep up with Jonathan, whose government still enforces Obasanjo-era high tariffs on imports that compete with Dangote’s key products. Indeed, the State Department has come to see Dangote as completely inseparable from the Nigerian government.
“But without him a lot of people wouldn’t have jobs,” says a former US diplomat in Africa. “And Nigeria would be weaker.”
Jonathan’s reign may soon end: He faces a surprisingly strong challenger in this March’s presidential election, and Boko Haram’s unchecked bloodshed is at least partly to blame. The insurgents have killed an estimated 20,000 people, displaced more than a million and now control some 20,000 square miles within Nigeria. Jonathan’s opponent – a retired army general – is seen by his supporters as the best man to finally defeat the terrorists. For Dangote, the upheaval has meant lower demand for his cement (“There are places in the north where no one is thinking of building a home,” one Dangote executive says), and he cut cement prices twice last year, most recently by 14% in November. But whether it’s Jonathan or someone else ruling Nigeria, observers find it difficult to believe that anyone would shut him out of the presidential palace. He’s simply too important to the economy.
Oil represents another big play. He is busy building a refinery some 40 minutes by car outside central Lagos. He explains with uncharacteristic glee that the recent drop in prices will actually make construction easier. His suppliers will be desperate… and easy pickings. “We will be the only ones around,” he says. “We will carry a big knife and cut them on prices.”
The refinery, Dangote says, can be profitable even at $50 to $70 a barrel. Raw crude for the refinery will come from multiple suppliers. If all goes according to plan, it’ll produce 650,000 barrels a day – a variety of gas, diesel and jet fuel. Dangote would basically walk away with a monopoly on refined oil in the country: The four Nigerian National Petroleum refineries are viewed as corrupt to the point of non-functioning.
To make it happen, Dangote plans to invest some $10 billion to $11 billion in the project and an adjacent petrochemical plant, with at least $6.75 billion in debt financing. Dangote threw a big celebration the day he signed the loan terms at the Hilton in Abuja. Guests included state governors, bank executives and, naturally, the president.
Terraforming is almost complete on the refinery’s 10-square-mile site – a jungle swamp now turned into a sandy expanse. A drive-through reveals a few stick huts, the last remnants of native villages that were there before Dangote arrived. Dangote executives promise the government has compensated the displaced natives well. As a stream of black Dangote trucks pass – one with a full bed of armed guards – a woman scurries inside a hut and shoots back a dark look.
The convoy pulls to a halt on a palm-tree-lined beach, a tropical paradise more suited to multimillion-dollar condos than refining petrochemicals. It’s a goner, though, the future home of another Dangote empire.
“The refinery will start in 2018 if we finish on time,” Dangote says, optimistic as always. “By that time all the dead bodies will have been removed from the street. All the trouble will be gone.”

The Gatekeeper  To Growth

“Roho Mzungu,” shrieks a group of barefoot children in prayer caps as they run past a mildewed wanted poster, crudely plastered onto an ancient narrow lane on Mombasa Island. Translated from Swahili, the youngsters’ cries simply mean: White Ghost. It has become the latest moniker for perhaps the most unlikely international terrorist of our generation.
I am back in Mombasa after an absence of two years and there is still only one name on the lips of local people. Today, in the schools and playgrounds of coastal Kenya, a region that once welcomed a million tourists every year, a flame-haired British housewife plagues the nightmares of local children. To the local media she is also known as the White Widow and her name is whispered in fear in churches and teeming coastal markets.
<div id="attachment_3029" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3029" class="size-medium wp-image-3029" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/NM_00001208-1-300x201.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="201" />NAIROBI, KENYA &#8211; SEPTEMBER 23: Heavy smoke is seen from the site of the terrorist attack, Westgate Mall, on September 23, 2013 in Nairobi, Kenya. The attack occurred on Saturday, 10-15 gunmen from the extremist group Al-Shabab entered the mall and opened fire at random on shoppers; 68 deaths have been confirmed. (Photo by Gallo Images / Nation Media / Salaton Njau)</div>
Thirty-one-year-old Samantha Lewthwaite, a white Muslim convert and the fanatical widow of Jermaine Lindsay, the 7/7 bomber who killed 26 people when he blew up a Piccadilly Line Tube train near London’s King’s Cross in 2005, remains at large in East Africa today, known to be in possession of significant quantities of explosives, cash, ammunition and a zeal so deeply entrenched her name is whispered in Al-Shabaab training camps with some reverence.
Kenya has been a primary target for Al-Shabab fighters ever since Nairobi sent thousands of troops to fight in Somalia. The Africa Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) has used troops from various African countries to fight the militants since 2007, but Kenya’s ramped-up involvement since October 2011, has been instrumental in pushing Al-Shabaab out of its most important strongholds, including Mogadishu and the port town of Kismayo.
The enduring role of a British housewife at the core of East Africa’s terror shows how complex the task of combatting the growth of attacks is. As we approach the anniversary of the Westgate Mall attack, global terrorist related deaths have leaped by almost one third as the world enters a deadly new phase in the cycle of violence.
Data compiled by Maplecroft, a British risk consultancy, found that over the last 12 months, global deaths have risen 30% compared to the previous five-year average. Africa, as a continent, has been among the hardest hit. With terrorism incidents in Libya doubling in the last year, violence is having a toxic impact on its economy, especially its oil sector, while attacks in Egypt have hit its tourism industry and of course Kenya, which has been hit by increasing attacks.
For Kenya in particular, there is arguably more to lose from adverse publicity. According to Maplecroft, June represented Kenya’s bloodiest month since the Westgate shopping mall attack, with 69 deaths and at least seven wounded, with a single Al-Shabaab attack on a Mpeketoni village in Lamu County responsible for 48 of the deaths.
In Mombasa, the impact of terrorism on the local economy was stark. Occupancy in most of the major resorts strung out along the coast was as low as 10%. Kenya’s tourism, which has provided 15% of GDP in recent years, is in tatters. Warnings last month by the British and other foreign governments prompted flustered tour companies to evacuate clients from Kenya’s coastal tourist hub, Mombasa. Today, the luxurious resorts on Lamu Island stand empty. Operators admit it could take years to restore confidence.
The reason? Mombasa is a fertile recruiting ground for Al-Shabaab, working through radical mosques and clerics. These leaders portray the conflict across the border as jihad, which has an energizing appeal to many youth. The myth of Lewthwaite has curiously become part of that dynamic.
Lewthwaite’s list of alleged cohorts is as deadly as it is long. United States (US) intelligence sources believe that networks linked to Dawood Ibrahim, one of the world’s most wanted men, are bankrolling the deadly Al Qaeda cell Lewthwaite is part of. Dawood, the head of Indian crime network D-Company, is currently the most wanted man in Asia and the ruthless driving force of 5,000 foot soldiers involved in everything from drugs trafficking to contract killing. Currently on the Interpol wanted list, his association with Al Qaeda in Africa has dramatically grown in the last two years.
What is undeniable is Lewthwaite has funding from somewhere and she is backing it up with action. Lewthwaite was recently identified as the brains behind a bold operation to free her terrorist lover, Jermaine Grant, who was arrested in Mombasa in December 2011 in a raid. Kenyan police believe the audacious attempt to rescue Grant, as he was taken from prison to a Mombasa court to face trial, was coordinated by Lewthwaite after two suspected terrorists were stopped crossing into Kenya from Tanzania with bullet-proof vests and face masks. Both men claimed they were acting under the direction of Lewthwaite.
A source from the Kenyan Anti-Terrorism Police Unit told me that she could still be in Mombasa.
“We believe that for some time she was in fact hiding in plain sight here in Mombasa, working her identities between a now blonde western tourist and burka-clad Muslim. Mombasa is Kenya’s second largest city and she knows the city well. The problem for us is, although not quite a master of disguise, she is afforded the right to wear a hijab or a burka and this simplest of methods allows her to travel. To catch her we must lift the veils of 100,000 women and she knows this is her biggest weapon.”
Lewthwaite’s incredible life on the run is a remarkable twist to an enduring story that is made for Hollywood. Over three years ago, Lewthwaite was forced to flee a terrorist safe-house in Mombasa after Kenyan Police received a tip-off that an Al Qaeda-linked terror cell she was part of was planning to blow up hotels and shopping centers in the city over Christmas.
Instead of the suspects they expected, the police discovered an empty shell. A hastily abandoned bomb-making factory containing batteries, hydrogen peroxide and wires. Crucially they also found a false passport left behind in panic by one of the alleged terrorists, a white woman, later identified as Lewthwaite.
Since then, it has been shadow chasing for the authorities. Relentlessly hunted by the Kenyan Anti-Terrorism Police Unit, and partially supported towards the end of last year by Scotland Yard’s elite SO15 anti-terror squad, the White Widow has remarkably eluded capture.
Frustrated at Lewthwaite’s sophisticated field skills, Kenyan investigators increasingly believe that the Aylesbury mother of three might have played a small, but influential, part in the 2005 London bombings and is now so mired in jihad she has abandoned her three young children to enable her to stay on the run.
The information surrounding Lewthwaite’s current whereabouts is believed to have been sourced under interrogation from known associates of the Briton, including Marianna Issa Mohammed, a female terrorist who was arrested in Kisamayo, Somalia.
Claims that she had boasted of prior knowledge of the London bombings within the terrorist community are particularly remarkable considering that in the wake of the tragedy, Lewthwaite went public on her horror at her dead husband’s act of terror and she was even placed into protective custody by Scotland Yard.
Suspiciously, it wasn’t until a week after the 2005 bombing, that Lewthwaite contacted her local police to register her husband missing. At the time, she claimed they were having relationship troubles. Lewthwaite then later refused to accept Scotland Yard’s insistence that her husband had been the bomber, until investigators produced evidence and she was apparently dragged screaming from her home claiming her husband’s mind was poisoned by radicals.
The White Widow’s journey from suburban Britain to Somalia is all the more astonishing because her father was in fact a British soldier who served in Northern Ireland. Her parents separated when she was 11, which friends claim badly affected her, leading to her being comforted by Muslim neighbors in the town.
After starting A-levels in religious studies, the teenage Samantha decided to convert to Islam, aged 15 and began wearing a hijab and swapped her jeans and T-shirt for a salwar kameez, a traditional Asian tunic and trousers. At 17, she went one step further, changing her name to Asmantara.
As her radicalization continued, Lewthwaite, described by her teachers as precocious and intelligent, enrolled for a degree in religion and politics at the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Around this time, she met Jamaican-born Islamic convert Jermaine Lindsay on an internet chatroom for Muslims and they later met face to face at an anti-war rally in London. The couple married in an Islamic ceremony in the front room of a terraced house in Aylesbury in October 2002 before just four witnesses. None of Lewthwaite’s family attended.
“My father Andy didn’t approve and stayed away and my mum just couldn’t make it. I was his youngest daughter. He found it hard enough when I converted to Islam, without marrying a Muslim I had hardly met,” she later recalled.
In 2004, the couple’s first son was born, which is when Lewthwaite claims her husband started to spend time at radical mosques. She has said he was a peaceful man before these visits. Lewthwaite was seven months pregnant with their second child when Lindsay launched his 7/7 attacks. Police believed that she was also a victim of the terrible events and placed her in protective custody after her house was torched in an arson attack.
But her precise movements since the bombings are harder to follow. Within two years of the London attacks, the widow met a new lover, identified by her family only as a Moroccan Muslim from Birmingham, and she later gave birth to her third child in August 2009. It was shortly after this point that Lewthwaite went off the grid.
In late 2010, Lewthwaite is believed to have traveled to South Africa on her own passport but later left with a new identity: that of Natalie Faye Webb, a 26-year-old South African-born nurse based in Essex, England, who was later confirmed as a victim of identity theft. At this point, it is believed Lewthwaite spent time at a training camp in Somalia.
By August 25, 2011, the Briton entered Kenya from Tanzania with her three children, also on false passports, where she is believed to have met with her current lover, Habib Saleh Gani, an Al-Shabaab sleeper, in Mombasa. Lewthwaite is also thought to have made contact with a third British terrorist, Jermaine Grant, 29, from Newham, East London.
By linking herself to Al-Shabaab, Lewthwaite had chosen one of the most ruthless terrorist organizations on the planet. The group, which has imposed a strict version of Sharia law in areas under its control, including the stoning to death of women accused of adultery and amputating the hands of thieves, was responsible for a double suicide bombing in Kampala, which killed 76 people watching the 2010 World Cup final at a local rugby club.
Chillingly, a cache of intelligence, found on the body of Al Qaeda’s African leader and inside the bullet-ridden truck he tried to ram through a Somali government checkpoint, provides a chilling look at the global aspirations of Al-Shabaab. The meticulously prepared documents that detail plots for a kidnapping and attacks on London’s prestigious Eton College, Jewish neighborhoods and the posh Ritz and Dorchester hotels, were uncovered last year when senior Al Qaeda leader Fazul Abdullah Mohammed was shot dead by Somali forces.
According to anti-terrorist police, Lewthwaite seemed the perfect operative. Able to seamlessly mix with tourists on surveillance trips but also able to revert back into strict Muslim society in a burka, her logistical skills proved to be invaluable.
On arrival, it seems Lewthwaite blended quickly into the tourist capital of Mombasa where she operated three safe houses in high-end estates in the north of the city. In the Kisauni area, she lived in a house belonging to a wife of Musa Hussein Abdi, a British-born terrorist who lived in Africa for a long time and who was killed in Somalia last year alongside Fazul Mohammed. The latter was the mastermind of the bombings on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
Lewthwaite then moved to Shanzu, a magnet for British tourists, where she lived in a five-bedroom villa paying four month’s rent upfront. She used her western appearance to mingle with holidaymakers and carry out reconnaissance on security in major hotels. But on December 19, 2011, anti-terrorism police raided the house. How Lewthwaite escaped before the raid is a mystery.
Police recovered 60 bullets, two magazines for AK-47 rifles and bomb-making material including acetone, hydrogen peroxide, ammonium nitrate, sulphur, lead nitrate chemicals, AA-sized batteries, an electric switch and a piece of conductive wire.
Ahmed Hassan, a resident of the Kisauni apartment block, says Lewthwaite would leave the house in both western clothes and in her burka.
“Wearing a burka will not get you into an international hotel but wearing a bikini will and a sarong will. It is obvious now that she was the terrorist’s main spy,” he says.
Following the raid, Lewthwaite fled with a laptop, cash and bomb-making material to another safe house barely 20 kilometers away from where anti-terrorism officers believe she dished out equipment and money to field terrorists under the noses of unsuspecting neighbors and police.
But as the net tightened Lewthwaite’s London associate, Jermaine Grant, was arrested in central Mombasa. Grant’s arrest is significant. Within days the White Widow’s latest hideout was exposed again. But, when officers led a raid on the property in January, Lewthwaite had somehow left shortly before and was last seen driving towards the Tanzanian border crossing, Lunga Lunga.
Lewthwaite didn’t raise her head in Mombasa again until June 24 last year when witnesses claim they saw a white woman throw grenades into a crowded bar, killing three people, including a nine-year-old boy, and horrifically injuring 30. Since that last incident, she has been true to her nickname. A ghostly presence linked to sporadic attacks across Kenya including the Westgate Mall.
In Mombasa, Lewthwaite’s case file remains open at the regional Law Courts, where she has been charged in absentia. Court documents indicate that Lewthwaite and her lover Gani are charged with being in possession of explosive materials and conspiracy to commit a felony. The files also allege that Lewthwaite is bankrolling a Mombasa terror cell whose members include Grant.
Jacob Ondari of Kenya’s directorate of public prosecutions believes Lewthwaite is highly dangerous.
“She is not just a small cog in this terrorist machine; she has links to the top. I will be calling for the death penalty when she is finally caught. That would be our prayer,” he says.
In recent months, The Muslim Youth Centre, a radical Kenyan organization believed to have terrorist links, has used the myth of Lewthwaite as a recruitment tool, boasting of her escape from the world’s most sophisticated intelligence agencies. The group has also posted a recent video of a hooded British Al-Shabaab operative calling for holy war in Somalia in a bid to further boast their international credentials.
Perhaps most tellingly, using Lewthwaite’s image on its website and Twitter feed, the group recently referenced the Hollywood blockbuster, The Thomas Crown Affair, in which Pierce Brosnan plays an art thief who carries off a heist by dressing dozens of accomplices in identical clothing as him, allowing him to escape right under the noses of the police.
According to Phyllis Muema, director of the Kenya Community Support Center, a not-for-profit group in Mombasa that works on rehabilitating Somali fighters, Lewthwaite is a powerful recruitment tool.
“To have a white western woman on their side provides Al-Shabaab with a major weapon. For illiterate and impoverished young Muslim men it is easy to be radicalized, but to follow a white woman with access to money from abroad and with her education and intelligence is a significant allure,” she says.
For Lewthwaite’s family, the uncertainty of her children’s fate remains the hardest pill to swallow. Her grandmother in Northern Ireland, Elizabeth Allen, wears a panic alarm and has been told to contact police immediately if Lewthwaite arrives at her home in Banbridge, where she spent part of her youth. Her mother, Christine Allen, claims she hasn’t heard from her daughter in years.
My source within the Kenyan Anti-Terrorism Police Unit reveals that they have believed for several months that although Lewthwaite is still with her lover, Gani, she is no longer on the run with her children.
“We believe that she is separated from her children at the moment to enable her to remain at large. Even under a burka her footprint is compromised by the children. We have artists’ impressions of them and Lewthwaite knows they are her biggest weakness. She cannot hide them under burkas. We believe they have been smuggled over the Somali border and are being cared for in a training camp.”
The claims are backed up by postings on the widow’s closed down blog which stated: “I advise you to raise your children in the cult of jihad and martyrdom and to instil in them a love for religion and death.”
The source added: “The truth is there was no mention of children from eye witnesses in the final property she was linked to and interrogations since have identified her as operating with Habib only. It wouldn’t be the first time a jihadist has made such a sacrifice. They sacrifice everything they have for this life.”

Tag: Terrorist

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