The Sundarban
Textual utter material byNeha Wadekar
Photographs byKhadija M. Farah
Nairobi’s Panari Hotel sits alongside a highway between the city center and Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. On the 2nd floor, all over from a Chinese restaurant and subsequent to a movie theater, is a diminutive skating rink that serves as the residence noxious for the Kenya Ice Lions, the finest ice hockey crew in equatorial Africa.
On a most up-to-date Wednesday, the field echoed with the thud of hockey sticks and bodies colliding with the boards. From the bench, gamers shouted at their teammates in Swahili as they faced off in a 5-a-facet scrimmage on a rink factual a quarter of the scale of a law Nationwide Hockey League rink.
A worthy divide exists in Kenya between the rich and dejected, but here in Nairobi ice hockey is helping to bridge the gap. The crew is made up of “of us from very humble backgrounds, and of us from the worldlier facet of lifestyles,” says 30-year-broken-down Ice Lions captain, Benjamin Mburu, who works as an architect and construction supervisor. Most of the crew individuals are amassed students; some are unemployed. The sport has also been a lifeline for gamers tackle 21-year-broken-down Chumbana Likiza Muhusini, who grew up in one in all the city’s cruelest slums. None of that issues on the ice. “No person cares about who got here from the effect,” Mburu says.
Closing year Kenya changed into the fifth African nation and factual the 2nd sub-Saharan nation to join the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), the global legitimate physique for the sport. It took almost a decade for the Ice Lions to invent that recognition.
Sincere out of excessive college, Hamisi Mwachofu is one in all the Ice Lions’ youngest individuals.
The crew began informally in 2016, when about a young Kenyans working on the rink as skating instructors grew uninterested in factual watching Western expats play hockey and determined to give it a ride themselves. Soon they were recruiting gamers from Nairobi’s rollerblading neighborhood, sourcing jerseys and other apparel from the city’s secondhand markets, and donning a patchwork of donated equipment. “It used to be giant frigid, and I couldn’t regulate my skates,” Mburu says. “As an African, the closest I ever got here to ice hockey used to be principally Christmas motion photographs on TV.”
It wasn’t long ahead of the feel-correct narrative of hockey on the Equator began to unfold. In 2018, an executive on the Chinese multinational firm Alibaba realized in regards to the crew thru Fb and flew about a of the gamers to South Africa to movie a television advert featuring the tagline “Ice hockey in Kenya? No dream is too giant.”
Worthy of the crew’s equipment comes from donations.
The crew has received diverse club tournaments and friendlies against a neighborhood community of expats.
The TV space raised the crew’s profile, however the Ice Lions amassed had no one to play against—except, later that identical year, Canadian restaurant chain Tim Hortons flew the squad to Canada for training and filmed a documentary in which the gamers obtained full sets of substances and Kenyan jerseys, met hockey legends Sidney Crosby and Nathan MacKinnon, and competed against a Canadian crew. For about a of the Kenyans, it used to be their first time leaving Africa.
The gamers got here residence determined to regain Kenya’s hockey ecosystem. This day, retired Canadian legitimate Saroya Tinker is helping the Ice Lions originate a ladies folks’s league. And the crew has begun a Saturday early life clinic to produce a pipeline of skill for future generations. Currently, as many as 70 children existing up for weekend practices.
Carol Kagendo is a trailblazer of ladies folks’s hockey in Kenya. She’s conducted for the Ice Lions for five years and no longer too long in the past began coaching in their early life program.
In the previous year, crew captain Benjamin Mburu has led the squad to three wins at international tournaments.
The squad is coached by Canadian Tim Colby, who spent 10 years on the helm of minor league hockey teams in Ottawa ahead of he moved to Kenya. Unsurprisingly, Colby says the community’s ideally suited hurdle comes all the model down to the price of ice time in Nairobi: At $100 an hour, it’s too dear. And the rink is too diminutive. On top of that, the Ice Lions—both gamers and crew—are all volunteers, and it’s complex to sprint a full-time, legitimate sports crew on a volunteer basis, Colby says.
Despite these challenges, the Ice Lions hope to take phase in the first ever African International locations Cup, tentatively scheduled for subsequent June in Cape Town, South Africa. And so that they thought to work their intention up thru the heaps of-tiered IIHF World Championship divisions, with the intention of in the end qualifying for the Olympics. “Nothing is impossible,” says Mburu.
Coach Tim Colby spent a decade leading minor leaguers in his native Canada.
As with plenty of the Ice Lions, Mike Otieno’s hockey occupation began on in-line skates as a baby. Now he works as a skating instructor on the Panari ice rink when he’s no longer training.
A model of this narrative appears in the October 2025 issue of Nationwide Geographic magazine.
Neha Wadekar divides her time between London and Nairobi, the effect she reported this narrative. She’s also written for the Original Yorker, the Original York Instances, and the Economist, and her reporting on jihadi insurgency in Mozambique earned the Pulitzer Middle’s Leap forward Journalism Award.
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