The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday October 24 2010
The article below described a Nairobi-made light aircraft that has "a 40 litre engine and weighs 800kgs". Most light aircraft weigh about 460kgs. We meant a 4 litre engine, which weighs approximately 308kgs.
Gabriel Nderitu is a 42-year-old IT specialist with no background in aviation engineering, but ever since he was a boy, he wanted to fly. Now he is close to finishing building his own twin-seater aircraft, a feat made all the more remarkable by the fact that he's done so in the backyard of his home in the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya.
So far, the project has taken 16 months of his time and cost him 450,000 Kenyan shillings (£3,500) from his savings. The plane has a 74in propeller and a 40-litre Toyota engine and weighs 800kg. The strutted wing and ailerons are skinned with aluminium sheets. To help with the welding and the assembly, Nderitu hired five mechanics.
How did he know what to do? Nderitu spent six months researching the subject online, downloading blueprints. Some parts he ordered from the US. "It's a boyhood dream," he told Kenyan TV. "I just want to get it out, whether it works or not. If it gets out of my mind then I can do something else."
Such ingenuity is far from atypical in Africa. As the blog AfriGadget points out, Nderitu is not the first African to try building his own aircraft. Physics graduate Mubarak Muhammad Abdullahi, 24, from north Nigeria, recently built a working helicopter using scrap aluminium and parts from a Honda Civic, an old Toyota and a crashed Boeing 747. This inventor had no formal training in aviation, either, but his helicopter flew, if only ever seven feet off the ground.
There have been reports, too, of three Somali men constructing a homemade chopper.
The AfriGadget site is filled with examples of similarly inspired inventions: a customised bicycle with a dynamo that can charge a mobile phone, for example, or a contraption to extract biogas from cow dung. The idea is to showcase Africans "bending the little they have to their will, using creativity to overcome life's challenges". The site's founder, Erik Hersman, grew up in Kenya and Sudan and also co-founded Ushahidi, a crowdsourcing tool that allowed Kenyans to track the violence that followed the 2008 elections and which has since been used in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Gaza.
As for Gabriel Nderitu, there is no guarantee that his aircraft will be allowed to fly, or that it is even capable of full flight. But that little matters. "If a guy says 'I want to build an aircraft' it seems like he's from the moon, or from somewhere," he told the Kenyan media. "And if it happens, if it at least lifts off, even if it is three feet, it shows that you have gone somewhere."