Kenya’s reputation was so bad that some foreigners treated it as a throwback, satirizing it as a cannibal kingdom. Around the time I was in Kenya, the mayor of Toronto was offered a trip to Mombasa, a chance for him to speak to the Association of National Olympic Committees of Africa, to solicit support for Toronto as an Olympic venue in 2008. He turned it down.
The Canadian mayor explained, ‘What the hell would I want to go to a place like Mombasa for? I just see myself in a pot of boiling water with all these natives dancing around me.’
Germans still vacationed in Mombasa and Malindi, where Kenyan hotel managers routinely spoke German; tourists had never ceased to go on safaris; game viewing was popular, bird-watchers went to Lake Baringo and saw more birds in two days than they were likely to see in an entire lifetime back home. Despite the elephant killing and the smuggling of ivory and the poaching of lions and leopards for their claws and skins, there were still quite a few animals in Kenya’s game parks. These high populations of game were due partly to the earlier policies of the ubiquitous Richard Leakey who advocated that park rangers shoot poachers on sight.
Tourist Kenya — predictable, programmed, day-trippers kitted out in safari garb, gaping from Land-Rovers — did not interest me. Tourists yawned at the animals and the animals yawned back. And the Kenya of big-game hunters and the sentimental memoirists from Hemingway and Isak Dinesen to the mythomaniacs of the present day such as I Dreamed of Africa’s Kuki Gallmann just made me laugh. If the self-important romanticizing of Out of Africa was at one end of the shelf, the other end was crowded with safari books such as Ilka Chase’s Elephants Arrive at Half-Past Five. You would think from the writing that Kenya was just farms and devoted servants and the high-priced rooms at Gallman’s luxury safari camp. Of the even more expensive rooms at the Mount Kenya Safari Club outside Nanyuki, one guest commented in a travel magazine afterwards, that they were ‘So luxurious you forget you’re in the wilderness,’ oblivious of the fact that Nanyuki is not in the wilderness.
The orbit of big-game viewing and beer drinking on the coast was a world apart from the life of Kenya. Even when I lived and worked in Africa, I regarded safari people as fantasists, heading into the tamest bush in zebra striped minibuses, with hampers of gourmet food. Nor did these credulous people take the slightest interest in the schools where I taught. Now and then a news item noted that a famous person had come to Uganda or Kenya to hunt. In the late sixties, one of Nixon’s cabinet members, Maurice Stans, visited Uganda with a high-powered rifle, in search of the shy and elusive bongo, a large-boned antelope, which was hunted with dogs. It was the stag-at-bay method: the dogs pursued the bongo, and when it was trapped, its head down and trying to gore the mutts, he was shot through the brain or the heart. Stans bagged one or two. Now there are no bongos left in Uganda. Though Maurice Stans is dead his species is not in the least endangered, while the poor bongo has just about been eliminated in the rest of Africa.
‘Kenya is much more than animals,’ an African said to me one night at a Nairobi party. He introduced himself as Wahome Mutahi, and went on, ‘I would say that the small things that people do here are more significant than any animal.’
Wahome had been a political prisoner. ‘I was tortured, too,’ he said, smiling. ‘My story is too long to tell here.’ I made a point of seeing him the next day.
One of the many African ex-prisoners I met on my trip, Wahome was a journalist and novelist, widely read in East Africa. He had an oblique manner and a self-mocking smile, always speaking of himself and Kenya’s contradictions with amused wonderment. His writing style was the same — understated and bravely ironical. In his fifties when I met him, he had been young enough at independence to witness every folly and false promise. He was a real endangered specimen — an intelligent homegrown opponent of the brutal regime, who still lived and worked in his native land.
‘There is less debate, less intellectual activity than you saw in your time,’ he said over lunch at the New Stanley Hotel.
I had stayed at the New Stanley Hotel thirty-eight years before, when it was new, and the white hunters drank at the Long Bar inside and the tourists fussed at the Thorn Tree Café out front. At that time the predators had been in the bush; now they were in the Nairobi streets and in the Kenyan government.
‘There was a coup attempt in ’82, which failed,’ Wahome went on. ‘After that there was a clampdown on intellectual activity. I was arrested in August 1986 — and jailed.’
‘You were charged — you got a trial?’
‘I was charged with neglecting to report a felony. So I was guilty of sedition. They said that my crime was that I knew people who were publishing seditious material — that is, material critical of the government.’
‘Was that true?’
‘No, I didn’t know anyone. I was just a journalist on The Nation, just writing.’
‘But you confessed?’
‘Yes’ — he smiled — ‘but it wasn’t simple.’ He put his knife and fork down and leaned forward. ‘The Special Branch came to my house at night, looking for me. I was at a bar at the time. When I was told of the visit I disappeared for a few days. They found me some days later at my office at The Nation, at about ten on a Sunday morning, and they took me to Nyayo House to interrogate me.’
Nyayo is a nice word. It means ‘footsteps’ in Swahili. On his becoming president in 1978, Daniel arap Moi had said he would walk in Jomo Kenyatta’s footsteps. Nyayo became a byword for tradition and respect. Nyayo House was an office building for the police, respectable-looking above ground and barbaric in the basement, for down there was the interrogation center, the cells and, as Wahome found out, the torture chambers.
‘I was held there for thirty days, but the first days were the worst. They interrogated me in Nyayo. They said, “We’re not holding you for an ordinary crime. We know you’re in an organized movement.”
‘I said, “If you have evidence against me, take me to court.”
‘That made them very angry. They stopped talking to me. They stripped me naked and beat me — three men with pieces of wood. They demanded that I confess. Then they stood me in my cell and sprayed me with water. My cell was about the size of a mattress. They soaked me — water was everywhere. Then they locked the door and left me.’
In Wahome’s novel, Three Days on the Cross, just such a scene is described. The accused prisoner, Chipota, is beaten until he is bloody, then a hose ‘like a cannon’ is turned on him with such force it knocks the wind out of him. He turns away from it. The hose is aimed at the ceiling, the walls, and the cell is flooded. The door had a raised floor frame, so that water could not flow out. Chipota realizes that the cell was specifically designed to be used for this diabolical water torture.
Wahome said, ‘They left me. I couldn’t tell day from night. I was still naked, and really cold, standing in the water, in the darkness. The water was dripping on me from the ceiling. I don’t know how much time passed — maybe twelve or fifteen hours.
‘The door suddenly opened and a man said, “Una kitu ya kuambia wazee?” “Have you anything to tell the elders?” ’
The elders (wazee, plural of mzee) was another nice word for the torturers.
‘I said no. They left me again for a long time and then the door opened. The same question — Una kitu…? — and I said no.