Transporting an item from A to B remains tougher in Africa than anywhere else. Expensive flights, bureaucratic borders and lack of postal systems in remote locations are just some of the headaches.
But the growth of a super-rich elite on the world's poorest continent means that for some, money is no object when trying to make a time-sensitive delivery such as, say, a birthday cake. The international courier firm DHL has made public some of the most odd and extravagant orders it receives in Africa – though it declined to name names.
Among them is a client in Nigeria who paid the airfare for an onboard courier to travel with a birthday cake from Abuja to Lagos, even though the plane ticket cost about three times the value of the cake. "The client put a significant premium on the need to have the cake delivered at a particular period of the day and was prepared to pay for it," DHL explained.
Last year a fully prepared five-course dinner for eight people was transported to a function in Zimbabwe, apparently due to shortages of certain foods in the country.
Life-saving medicines are also among the precious cargo of the African courier. Sumesh Rahavendra, head of marketing for DHL Express sub-Saharan Africa, said: "Increasingly, we see the need for cross-border and continental transportation of items like rare tissue samples, urgent medical equipment or organs.
"We have dedicated people who manage these types of shipments – whether it's ensuring a heart is transported from Europe to Kenya for an urgent transplant, a part for an important medical scanner is rushed across the world to fix that machine or, as I personally saw recently, some tissue samples were carried from South Africa to the USA for an operation to save a little boy named Juan with a rare degenerative disease."
Last year the company also moved three black rhinos from the UK to the Kilimanjaro national park in Tanzania. The 10-hour journey on a specially adapted Boeing 757 included two rhino keepers, two aircraft engineers and a specialist vet.
Some items are off-limits, however, due to customs restrictions. These include jewellery, precious metals, firearms and parts of ammunition.
DHL still rates sub-Saharan Africa as the globe's "least-connected continent" but says that in terms of "connectedness" – a ranking of 125 countries according to the depth and breadth of their integration into the world economy – it averaged the biggest increase from 2010 to 2011 and boasted the top five "gainers": Mozambique, Togo, Ghana, Guinea and Zambia.
