Visitors to Kenya en route to game parks are whisked from the airport to the hotel and seldom see the desperation of Nairobi, which is not the dark side, or a patch of urban blight, but the mood of the place itself.
My idea was to walk fast and look busy, and not dress like a soldier or a tourist — no khakis, no camera, no short pants, no wallet, no valuables, just a cheap watch and loose change, for it was a rapacious and hungry and scavenging society. I left all my valuables padlocked in my bag. Women worked or cruised as prostitutes, but men and boys just stood around in very large groups, nothing to do, yakking among themselves or else staring at passersby as though to assess what article worn by that person was worth snatching. On the busiest intersections street kids twitched, hunger in their skinny faces, and seized upon strangers, obvious travelers, single women, old folks and foreigners, and followed them, threatening and pleading.
Even the wild birds were at it. Marabou storks, big untidy long-legged birds with dirty feathers and large muck-slobbered beaks, perched in the trees on the main roads where people sold food. The food sellers made such a mess that the storks had given up scavenging in the game parks where the pickings were uncertain, and had become permanent residents, hovering constantly, unafraid of humans, like the so-called beggar bears at the fringes of American forests, which raided garbage cans and trash barrels.
Kites and hawks swooped down and made off with students’ lunches, and what they dropped the rats ate. Bold mangy rats scuttled in Nairobi’s gutters and drains.
Deforestation, dramatic in Kenya, was also a result of scavenging. Hearing an account of my trip through the desert, a diplomat said to me, ‘Right, it hasn’t rained in the north for three years. Whose fault is that? They cut down the trees for fuel, they sold them to loggers, they destroyed the watershed. And they’re still doing it.’
After making some choice robbery notes in my diary I went to buy the Nairobi paper, so that I could read it over a cup of coffee and do the crossword. The news was that a German film crew on location had lost all their cameras and sound equipment in a theft from their hotel in Nyeri.
‘Dar is better,’ an Indian named Shah told me. ‘Indian women wear gold bangles there. Not here.’
Women confident enough to walk down the street wearing jewelry was one test of an African city’s safety.
Shah told me that his father had come to Kenya in the 1940s, looking for work. He became a dealer in second-hand goods, buying from the white Kenyans, selling to the Africans. ‘He bought anything.’ In the 1950s, with the Emergency and the terror of the Mau-Mau, white Kenyans started to sell their farms and move out — many went to South Africa. The senior Mr Shah bought their furniture and their family silver, picture frames, leather Gladstone bags and crystal inkpots, ‘anything old.’ The second-hand dealer of the 1950s and 1960s had, without realizing it, started a profitable antiques business, and this his son inherited. His son needed the business, for it was impossible to go back to India.
‘There is no one left, we have nothing there, even the family house is gone,’ the younger Mr Shah said. ‘I have no family in India. I don’t even go there. My brother is in Australia. I would like to go, but my shop is full of inventory.’
He worried for his children, who were terrified of the Nairobi streets.
Shah said, ‘My boy is sixteen. He is home all the time — afraid to go out. He has not been out alone at all. He has no idea how to shop — to buy the simplest things. He says, “Dad, let’s get some shoes,” when he wants shoes. But you see, he must learn how to get out from under the umbrella. For him it is like house arrest.’
A similar term was used by another Indian in Nairobi, but he was a recent arrival. He had been in Kenya for six years, running a restaurant.
He said to me, ‘I am alone here. My family is in India. If they were here they would not be able to go out. I go to India once a year. I am here to work. I don’t speak Swahili. Why should I keep my family here in a house prison?’
Because of all the stories of mayhem in Nairobi I seldom went out after dark. Instead of doing my note-taking in the morning, I wrote my notes at night in my hotel room. On the nights when I had caught up and had time on my hands I continued my erotic story of the man about to have a big birthday and his recalling the steamy relationship with the older German woman. The setting was Sicily in the early sixties, a decaying palazzo — auto-erotic writing counted as escapist entertainment, perhaps, but it was preferable to being robbed.
Even the wariest people were robbed. In September 1998, after the US Embassy bombing in Nairobi, three of the FBI men who had come to sift evidence were traveling down Kenyatta Avenue, one of the main streets. Their car collided with a taxi. They got out to examine the damage and were quickly surrounded by the usual Nairobi crowd of urchins, idlers, the homeless, the scavengers, the opportunists.
Without their realizing it, the FBI men were relieved of their wallets and pistols. Slapping their pockets, very angry at the theft, they faced a laughing mob, and the newspapers the next day mocked them for their stupidity.
Cynicism had been rare and unwelcome at the time of independence, but even my oldest, most idealistic African friends in Kenya were cynical. One praised the opposition leader, Mwai Kibaki.
‘He is unusual in Kenya in that he has gotten to where he is by being reasonable,’ my friend said. ‘He is one of the very few politicians in Kenya who do not see killing people as necessary for political power.’
A student of one of my African friends said to me, ‘You think it’s just poor people who turn to crime, but no, many of the people I graduated from university with are still looking for work. There is no work. So they become thieves. Boys with good degrees! One boy who graduated with a business degree was involved in a car hijacking. Another tried to rob a wealthy Asian man — he was caught and is now in jail.’
‘Is this what we call white-collar crime?’ I asked.
‘No. It is guns and robbery. Many of the robberies are committed by well-educated people.’
‘Most of the people in this country have nothing,’ another African friend said to me.
‘How are things going to improve?’
‘Some people say the next election might make things better,’ he said. ‘Donor countries tell us that if all state-owned utilities and industries are turned over to the private sector it will be the answer.’ He smiled at me. ‘But it isn’t the answer.’
‘So what is the answer?’ I asked.
He smiled. ‘Maybe no answer.’
Maybe no answer. The whites, teachers and diplomats and agents of virtue, at dinner parties had pretty much the same things on their minds as their counterparts had in the 1960s. They discussed relief projects and scholarships and agricultural schemes, refugee camps, emergency food programs, technical assistance. They were newcomers. They did not realize that for forty years people had been saying the same things, and the result after four decades was a lower standard of living, a higher rate of illiteracy, overpopulation, and much more disease.
Foreigners working on development schemes did not stay long, so they never discovered the full extent of their failure. Africans saw them come and go, which is why the Africans were so fatalistic. Maybe no answer, as my friend said with a smile.