‘The signs are not positive,’ Ambassador Carson said, referring to the textile scams. He went on to say that unless Kenya curbed corruption, respected the rule of law and human rights, and pursued sound economic policies, this preferential deal would end. The diplomat’s scolding and finger-wagging was quite different from the patronizing noises about negritude Kenyans had heard from past ambassadors. But this was a different Kenya, a different Nairobi, crime-ridden and corrupt. I did not long for the past, I longed for the hinterland again, the simpler happier bush.
It was easy enough to leave Nairobi. Rail service to Kampala had been suspended, but there were plenty of buses to the border. They left in the early morning from the neighborhood that was associated with danger — especially dangerous in the pre-dawn darkness when the buses left. I was warned, ‘Take a taxi.’ I followed the advice, took a taxi three blocks with a driver named Bildad, who went on warning me, filling me with dread, until just before the bus left.
We set off in darkness and at sun-up we were traveling through the Great Rift Valley, among smallholdings. The valley that had once been a vast green empty and curved expanse, deepening to the northwest, with yellow flat-topped forests of thorn trees and beneath them antelope or bush buck nibbling grass, was now overgrazed and deforested and filled with mobs of idle people and masses of ugly huts.
Longonot Crater, a dark burned out volcano, was a reminder that the whole of the Rift Valley was a series of fault lines, stretching in an irregular rent from the Dead Sea to the Shire River valley in Mozambique. The Rift was created by an intense epoch of vulcanism that had torn open the heart of Africa with massive eruptions and lava flows. One controversial theory held that the two different climate zones created by the Rift Valley had influenced human evolution: the tropical forests to the west had become a home for apes, while hominids had had to adapt to the openness of the eastern savannah. Certainly the oldest hominid fossils in the world had been found in this eastern portion of the Rift.
Mount Lengai in Rwanda was still erupting and displacing villagers. Kilimanjaro was dormant, and so were the Mountains of the Moon in Uganda and the twenty-mile-wide caldera which was the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. Some of the titanic cracks opened by the eruptions had filled with water and become Lake Victoria, Lake Tanzania, Lake Malawi. Most of what was visible as landscape — the high Mau Escarpment just to the west of Longonot, for example — was the result of those early volcanoes and the plate shift.
The town of Naivasha looked quiet enough, pretty and purple with its jacarandas in bloom and a thickness of petals on its streets. Like many places in Kenya Naivasha had a murky past and a just as murky present. Everyone in Nairobi knew the story of Father Kaiser, a Catholic priest from Minnesota, who had served in a church near Naivasha. He had been a missionary in Kenya for more than thirty years and, alarmed by growing ethnic and tribal hatred, he began to collect information on specific acts of violence, which he suspected were politically inspired. No one else was keeping a record — not the police and certainly not the government which denied the accusations, denied even that AIDS was a problem in Kenya. Father Kaiser, now scorned as a scaremonger but in fact a serious threat to the government’s credibility, had a growing file on the subject of rape and murder
Knowing that the police would be indifferent, because a politician was involved, two young girls came to Father Kaiser in great distress and reported that they had been raped by a government minister. The minister was well known, a member of the ruling party, KANU — Kenyatta’s party, Moi’s party, the party that had ruled Kenya for forty years; still in power.
Father Kaiser went to various high officials and raised the matter of the rapes as well as details of some of the other crimes. He was at first rebuffed, and then came under pressure to cease in his publicizing of the facts. When he kept at it, he was denied a work permit and told to leave the country Still he resisted, calling attention to the high crime rate and especially the government denials. In August 2000, Father Kaiser’s corpse was found by the side of the road. He had been murdered. As I was passing the scene of the crime the murderer still had not been found, though the man accused of rape was still sitting in his ministerial chair, in Moi’s cabinet.
‘Kenya has a stable government,’ an agent from a prestigious London-based safari company insisted when, inquiring about game viewing, I raised my doubts about security. She denied the government was corrupt and unreliable, and warned me, not of crime but of her company’s safari prices. ‘I must tell you we are incredibly high-end — we tailor each safari to the client, designing the safaris to the clients’ comfort and interests.’
‘Authoritarian’ is not the same as ‘stable,’ but anyway the safari client is mainly interested in big game, not politics. It is possible, using helicopters and armed guards and tight security, to assure a client’s safety in Kenya. And the client must not stray from the narrow itinerary.
I mentioned to a white Kenyan that I had traveled south by road, from the Ethiopian border to Marsabit and Isiolo. He was a tough man who had traveled throughout Kenya. He had one of the most powerful Land-Rovers I had ever seen — the newest model, with a BMW engine. He had never taken that road.
He said, ‘No one goes on that road.’
The shallow and corrosive soda lakes near Naivasha and Nakuru were justifiably famous for their flamingos. Lesser flamingos flocked to Lake Nakuru, the greater flamingo to Lake Natron. I could see big pink patches on Lake Elmenteita, thousands of the birds. They were feeding in the shallows of the lake, heads down, swinging their graceful necks, feeding by dragging their beaks through the lake, sluicing the water, straining the food.
Tourists would see only those lovely birds and know nothing of Father Kaiser or the dark forces in Kenya that had undone him.
We stopped at Nakuru for food and drink, for the revolting toilets. Nakuru had grown from a small market town with an agreeable climate to an enormous unplanned settlement of tin-roofed huts, with a newer community of the sort of tidy high-priced houses that have only just started to appear within commuting distance to Nairobi. ‘Middle management,’ I was told: Africans who had jobs with banks and insurance companies and car dealerships and import — export firms and foreign charities and donors. Old sun-faded signs were still visible on some shop facades of defunct colonial-era general stores, advertising patent medicine and cattle feed, and across one wall, U-Like-Me Porridge Oats.
Hawkers — coastal people mostly, Africans in skullcaps and galabiehs — were pushing trays of sunglasses and cheap watches at the circulating passengers. Improvised stalls were offering ice cream and fruit, hot dogs and fried chicken.
Half the bus passengers were African, little families that looked Ugandan; the other half were Indian, bigger families in the back and boisterous because they were in a group — carping men, silent women, squawking little girls and boorish boys with baseball caps on backwards. The African woman seated in front of me was reading Wayne Dyer’s Your Sacred Self, the chapter entitled, ‘Making the Decision to be Free.’
In an earlier time — the sixties, say: years I could verify — a drive to Nakuru and Kericho and Kisumu, where we were headed, would have been a spin in the countryside. Narrow roads, almost no traffic, Africans on bikes, cattle grazing on hillsides, now and then a farmhouse, the occasional herd of antelope. A green and empty land under a big sky. Places that had been little towns and truck stops were now large sprawling settlements; the sparsely inhabited bush had become populous and visibly nasty.