The doors to the casino at the Intercontinental Hotel in Nairobi are guarded by an acacia tree of a man who cradles an AK-47 as if it were his child. Amir Zada, 28 — dark hair closely trimmed, face slightly tense — wears a pair of black Persols and walks past him without regard. The inside is dark and shadowy even at midday and doesn't need the gunman at the door to achieve its feeling of menace. Zada rolls up his shirtsleeves, sits down at the roulette table, and sipping from a bottle of Tusker beer, places a bet for 3,000 Kenyan shillings on red.
Together with his partners at Exotix Ltd. — a boutique investment bank with offices from New York to Jakarta — Zada has perfected the business of helping investors from the first world navigate the murkier waters of the third. This week he has brought more than a dozen clients and several hundred million dollars of investment capital to Nairobi for four days of meetings with Kenya's most promising companies, from banks to breweries. It's money intent on pursuing an ancient strategy that has become newly chic: riding Africa's vast natural riches — and political volatility — to personal fortune. More than $36 billion in foreign capital was invested across Africa in 2006, a record figure and game-changing sum for the world's poorest continent. The emerging markets boom even has a new name, frontier investing, which conveys the romance of colonialism without evoking any of its savagery.
Zada flew in from London the night before with his boss, Peter Bartlett, 44, who founded Exotix almost a decade ago. Over the past few years, they have put their clients in everything from the debt of Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority (bought for pennies on the dollar in the early days of the insurgency) to North Korean bonds (which trade up or down depending on the tenor of the day's nuclear rhetoric). Zada and Exotix make a fee on any investments placed, and — with a small pool of discretionary capital at their disposal — sometimes take equity positions in these markets themselves. While the continuing subprime crisis has pushed investors away from the U.S., a different sort of disaster has, on this day, lured them to Nairobi in the shared, unspoken hope that the killings, rapes, and burnings that followed Kenya's disputed elections in December might have depressed prices to the point of opportunity. This is Africa, and where there is fire, there is gold.
Earlier that morning, Zada and a dozen of his clients had piled into a Mitsubishi bus that might have once been a Peugeot — a vehicle refitted and painted to the point of deracination. There's an unassuming Indian man from the U.K.'s $30 billion Wellcome Trust; a silent Senegalese 20-something; an as-yet-unaccounted-for guy from Morgan Stanley; and a sandy-haired, blazered Dutchman who looks like he has just been elected commodore of a yacht club. (His Africa fund, Mango Capital — which invests in African and Middle Eastern stocks and returned 58 percent last year — seems to be named for the level of statehood just above banana republic.) There is also a man nicknamed Tweeders and a young American hedge fund analyst who looks like a hungover Keanu Reeves and who keeps going on about Pangaea — the master continent, not the London club.
