‘Kamali’ was a nickname. It meant vervet monkey, a name he had been given by some people in the west of Kenya for his cleverness and good humor. He was knowledgeable about the north and the behavior of animals and the minutiae of conducting a safari.
Kenya had been put on the map by hunters, and by people who wrote about hunting. Hemingway’s name comes quickly to mind, and so does Karen Blixen’s; but much earlier there was the Tarzan-like figure of Colonel Patterson and his Man-Eaters of Tsavo. What all such books about Kenya have in common is an obsession with animals and a lazy sentimentality about servants and gun-bearers. No crime, no politics, no agents of virtue appear in these books. Hemingway’s Kenya might never have existed — at this distance in time it seems the private fantasy of a wealthy writer bent on proving his manhood, and the hunting safari one of the more offensive kinds of tourist one-upmanship.
‘There is no hunting anymore,’ Kamali said. ‘I’m so glad.’
I looked out the window for anything familiar. I had spent years in the late sixties going back and forth from Uganda to Kenya, but now I saw nothing that I recognized except signboards lettered with place names. It was clear to me on my way to Nairobi that the Kenya I had known was gone. I didn’t mind: perhaps the newness would make this trip all the more memorable.
Our overstuffed Peugeot was doing eighty. I said to Kamali, ‘Mind asking the driver to slow down?’
‘Pole-pole, bwana’ Kamali said, leaning forward.
Insulted by this suggestion, the man went faster and more recklessly. Because so many of the Kenyan roads were better than before, people drove faster and there were more fatal accidents. ‘MANY DEAD IN BUS PLUNGE HORROR’ is a standing headline in Kenya.
‘That was a mistake. I should have said nothing,’ Kamali said.
Police roadblocks — there were eight or ten on this road — did nothing to deter the man from speeding. He stopped. The car was in bad shape, obviously, and overcrowded. The policeman glared at us and cowed the driver but when he had detained us for a few minutes, he waved us on.
‘Look — the slums,’ Kamali said as we entered the outskirts of Nairobi. ‘They worry me the most.’
We were hardly past Thika, which had once been the countryside, written about in an amiable way as a rural idyll by Elspeth Huxley, who had grown up there. Now it was a congested maze of improvised houses and streets thick with lurking kids and traffic and an odor of decrepitude: sewage, garbage, open drains, the stink of citified Africa.
Going slowly, our car was surrounded by ragged children pleading for money and trying to insert their hands through the half-open windows.
‘Be careful when you see totos like this,’ Kamali said. ‘Sometimes they can take their own feces in their hand and put it on you, to make you give them something.’
Giving you shit in the most literal sense.
The traffic was being held up by a crowd of people rushing across the road, and by curious drivers, slowing down for a better look.
‘Look, see the thief,’ Kamali said.
It was a sight of old Africa, a naked man running alone down an embankment and splashing across a filthy creek, pursued by a mob.
‘They have taken his clothes. He is trying to get away in the dirty water of the river.’
But he was surrounded. There were people along both banks of the creek, holding sticks and boulders, laughing excitedly at the man who was so panicked he did not even think to cover his private parts, but just ran, his arms pumping, splashing in the disgusting mud.
The crowd surged towards him, swinging sticks, and then the traffic began to move.
‘They will kill him,’ Kamali said.
Once, even in my memory of it, Nairobi had been a quiet market town of low shop houses and long verandas, two main streets and auction halls, where farmers came to sell their harvest of coffee or tea. It was overnight by train to the coast — because of the danger of bilharzia tainting freshwater lakes and rivers, Mombasa-by-the-sea was the only safe place to swim. In the opposite direction it was overnight by train to Kampala. The Ugandan line through the highlands was bordered by farms.
The White Highlands had been aptly named: Indians and Africans were forbidden to raise cash crops by the British colonial government. Indians were shopkeepers, Africans were farm laborers, or else just lived in villages and worked the land. The few tourists who visited were timid sightseers or just as timid hunters, taken in hand by white guides and brought within range of wild game. Apart from that Kenya worked on the old colonial system of landowners and businessmen being squeezed by greedy politicians, and the rest of the population were little more than drudges and whipped serfs.
Little had changed after independence. Jomo Kenyatta’s face hung in a framed portrait in every shop where Queen Elizabeth’s had been. Some schools were built, some streets renamed. But educated people are a liability in a dictatorship: all the schools were underfunded, few of them succeeded. A great deal of foreign money was given to the government and most of it ended up in the pockets of politicians, some of whom were assassinated. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the fatness of corrupt African politicians.
Just after Christmas 1963, on my way to Nyasaland to be a Peace Corps teacher, I saw Jomo Kenyatta on Kenyan television. Slightly drunk, corpulent and looking jovial, he slurringly wished everyone a Happy New Year. I walked down a shady road to the Nairobi library. Two Englishwomen were at the checkout desk, stamping library cards. At the Anglican church, an Englishwoman was polishing the brasses. Stories of scandals and steamy romances among the white settlers circulated. I took this for provincial boasting, the way Englishmen in rural places habitually gloated about how drunk they had been the night before at the pub. For such drinkers there was nothing to talk about except drunkenness.
I suspected even then that I was looking at a British colony that had hardly changed in 100 years. Nairobi had been modeled on an English county town, but with so much cheap labor available it ran more smoothly.
Kenya did not explode at independence. It did not even change much at first, and it was only superficially modernized. It merely got bigger, messier, poorer, more squatters in the country, more slums in the city. More schools, too, but inferior ones that could not alter the social structure, because power was in the hands of a small number of businessmen and politicians. That remained the case. Jomo Kenyatta died in 1978 and Daniel arap Moi became president. We used to joke about his saying, ‘L’état c’est Moi’ — but the expression accurately described his rule. Thirty years later, Moi was still president, and a terrible president at that.
The Nairobi I entered in that overcrowded taxi, at the end of my long road trip from Ethiopia, was a somewhat recognizable version of the small market town I had seen almost forty years before. It was still at heart a provincial town, with the same people in charge, but it was huge and dangerous and ugly.
The worst part of Nairobi — everyone said so — was the district where I arrived: the bus and taxi depot. That neighborhood was old-fashioned in that way, the floating world of travelers arriving and departing, mobbed with jostling youths and hucksters and stall-holders, people selling drinks and trays of food and bunches of sunglasses. Prime pickpocket territory, for it was so crowded, so crammed with urchins, snatching and begging, as well as with the blind, the leprous, the maimed. I was reminded again that medieval cities were all like this. African cities recapitulate the sort of street life that has vanished from European cities — a motley liveliness that lends color and vitality to old folk-tales and much of early English literature. An obvious example was Dickens’s London, an improvised city, populated by hangers-on, hustlers and newly arrived bumpkins — like Nairobi today.