When the British were done colonising Africa, they left more behind than just a few pale-skinned humans and their tea-drinking habits.
They also left behind their bicycles.
The thing is, those British bicycles were actually built and designed solely for pink-cheeked English lads and lasses to joy-ride over smoothly paved lanes through quaint British villages on Sunday afternoons. It was never intended for long-haul transportation over the pot-holed or dirt roads (or no roads) of darkest Africa.
When Craig Calfee visited Africa some 20-odd years ago, he noticed how inadequate the imported bicycles were for the rural, rugged terrain. Ever the observant chap, he also saw how abundant bamboo grew in the area. That, along with the fact that there were no local bicycle building industry, planted the seed for the current Bamboo Bike Project.
The ability to build bicycles locally, is a great achievement; the same
shipping container holding the necessary parts for about 2 000 bamboo
bicycles would only hold about 500 complete bicycles. As explained on
their website, bamboo is grown locally in Africa, and therefore the
manufacturing of bamboo bicycle frames does not require extensive
infrastructure (or even electricity, as Calfee has demonstrated that a
frame could be made using only a Swiss Army Knife). [Via]
Apart from being cheap and homegrown, bamboo has apparently also proven to be far more light-weight and shock-absorbent than many high performance frames. So is it just a matter of time before we see a bamboo bicycle winning the Tour de France?
