A Guide to the Birds of East Africa

by Nicholas Drayson

  A couple of months later he was leaving the Thursday morning editorial meeting.

  ‘Great column yesterday, boss,’ said one of his reporters.

  In a hurry to meet a new friend in town he just said, ‘Yeah, good,’ so it wasn’t until he was lying in bed later that morning with his new friend smoking a well-earned cigarette that it occurred to him that the only regular column that appears on Wednesday (a notoriously slow news day whether in Nairobi or New York) was the ‘Birds of a Feather’ column.

  ‘Do you ever read the nature column?’ he said to his new friend.

  She said she didn’t, but she had a copy of Wednesday’s paper. Together they turned to page seven to read a piece about jackals and hyenas fighting over the body of a dead gazelle while the lion, who had killed the gazelle, looked on with apparent indifference. A vulture appeared. That was all. ‘Eeugh,’ said his new friend. The editor put on his trousers and went back to the office.

  A couple of weeks later he caught two of his junior advertising managers laughing over another piece on page seven of the Wednesday paper.

  ‘Near the bone, that one, boss,’ said one of them.

  He snatched the paper from them and read in ‘Birds of a Feather’ a story about a hippopotamus and a marabou stork.

  ‘Will someone tell me what’s going on here?’

  It was left to his parliamentary reporter and letters editor to explain that the ‘Birds of a Feather’ column was not all it seemed. Though it could be read as a slightly idiosyncratic nature column, it was in fact a spoof, a satire. The lion, who else could that be but the President? The hippopotamus, it was obvious from appearance alone, must be the Minister of Agriculture and Tourism. The marabou was the Minister of Defence; the python, the Secretary of State for External Affairs; the hyena, Minister of the Armed Forces; the aardvark, his vociferous and deeply unpopular wife. The herds of gazelle, zebra, wildebeest etc. could each be identified with a tribal grouping or alliance, and so it went. And had he looked recently at those graphs of sales figures that appeared on his desk each week? The upward blip on Wednesday could mean only one thing. The column was popular.

  The editor thought he had better find out who was writing this stuff. At first he suspected it might be one of his own staff. At the next morning’s editorial meeting he began by referring to the brilliance of the column – he had wondered how long the others would take to spot the joke – but now it was time for its writer to reveal himself, and to collect his reward. No one stood up, no one spoke.

  ‘Come on now, gentlemen. It must be one of you, and it’s only fair to pay you for your fine work.’

  Everyone looked around at all the other people in the room, but still no one spoke.

  ‘I quite understand,’ said the editor, and he did. Though Kenya has a free press its democratic government, like many governments both democratic and not, has not always seen this as an advantage. As the editor (and Rose Mbikwa) well knew, there are many ways to silence criticism and to a person who decides to speak out prudent anonymity may well be preferable to a few extra shillings in the pay packet. In Kenya, people still disappear. But could it be that the writer was indeed not present? The editor found the original letter from Mr Dadukwa, dated 16th February (his chief political reporter, an Akamba man, had already explained the significance of the pseudonym). A junior reporter was despatched to find the owner of the post office box and discovered that a Mr J. Aripo had been renting it since April. He was sent back with the clear conviction that if he did not find out who had been renting the post office box on 16th February he could say kwaheri to his career in journalism. Three hours and several hundred persuasive shillings later he returned to the newspaper office with the news that the box had indeed been rented at that time to a Mr Dadukwa, who as far as the clerk could remember was a youngish or possibly middle-aged man of African or Asian appearance, dressed in darkish clothing but definitely with no noticeable deformity or speech impediment.

  Which meant very little to the editor, but which you will no doubt recognize as an uncannily accurate description of… Mr Malik.

  18

  There is a distressing but not uncommon condition of presidents and other world leaders known as Worrying about Africa. It is usually picked up overseas at a summit meeting on world poverty or disease, and symptoms include painful twinges of guilt over the discrepancy between First and Third World wealth, uncomfortable feelings somewhere below the stomach that perhaps unfettered capitalism is not the benevolent force for good we are constantly assured it is, and frequent attacks of calling for Something to Be Done. The best remedy is invariably a stiff dose of domestic crisis.

  During the early part of his second term President Clinton went through a short but intense attack of the condition, and before young Monica arrived to administer the cure he had not only set up a Special Senate Committee on Africa but sent his trusted friend and aide Dr Ronald K. Dick on a comprehensive five-day fact-finding mission to the continent. Dr Dick’s extensive itinerary included nearly nine full hours in Kenya.

  After hearing his report back in Washington, the Special Senate Committee agreed that while more financial aid to the region was undoubtedly called for, this must be linked to the various efficiency measures recommended by Dr Dick (though, of course, only if freely agreed to by the governments concerned). High on the list of these measures for Kenya was a restructure of the ministerial transport arrangements. During his brief but in-depth visit to the country Dr Dick had been provided by the US embassy in Nairobi with a car and driver from the embassy car pool. Ministers in the Kenyan government, he noted, each had their own personal car and driver. This car and driver might be idle for most of the day – while the minister was in parliament or his departmental office, or having lunch or wherever else he chose to spend his time. It would clearly be more efficient if car and driver could be used elsewhere during these periods of idleness, and the way to ensure this would be a car pool – why, just like the one they have at the good old US embassy. The senators were so impressed with this simple but effective recommendation that they made it one of their key conditions for further aid to Kenya. No car pool, no cash. The sovereign government of the Republic of Kenya freely agreed to this condition. Among the people affected by their decision was Thomas Nyambe, whom you have previously encountered as Mr Malik’s companion on the bird walk.

  Thomas Nyambe had until then been personal driver to the Minister of Education. At six o’clock every morning except Sunday he would arrive by matatu at the minister’s home. He would wash the car and take the children to school (yes, even on a Saturday most children in Nairobi go to school). For the rest of the day he would be on call for the minister – sometimes taking him to his office, or to parliament, or wherever else the minister’s work and whim demanded. Now his work schedule changed. In any one day he might find himself taking the Minister of Tourism to the airport for an early flight, the Minister of Agriculture to a restaurant for a luncheon appointment, and the wife of the Secretary of State for Trade to the market in the afternoon (for as the Minister of Transport explained to the senior under-secretary at the US embassy in charge of car-pool compliance, it was surely more efficient using a government car to drive wives and family around rather than the ministers having to do it themselves). And he now got Sundays and rostered Tuesday mornings off.

  Thomas Nyambe had always been a government driver. He was the son of a government driver. When his father’s eyes got so bad that, squint though he might, he was unable to drive into the sun without being completely blinded, he had passed on his job and his uniform to Thomas. His father taught Thomas how to drive, and how to be a driver. So Thomas learned not only how to operate and look after a vehicle, but how to play the part that employers expect their drivers to play – safe and silent.

  Ask any taxi driver and they will tell you that they sometimes get the feeling that they are invisible. People in the back of a taxi will talk about their most important and intimate affairs
as if there was no one else there, as if the car was driving itself. It is the same with government drivers. Though Thomas’s father had told him all about this, he had not taught him how to read and write and neither had anyone else. Thomas Nyambe could ‘read’ road signs, of course (though this skill is seldom called for in Kenya, the paint on the few road signs that exist being usually faded to illegibility). He knew all about numbers and money. He knew to the nearest shilling the cost of petrol, oil (both engine and transmission), how much it costs to fix a little puncture, a big puncture, and all the other things that a government driver needs to know. But the world of letters hardly entered his consciousness, and though he learned much about the workings of government and the doings of the government ministers while driving his car, and from talking to other drivers in the car pool, it wouldn’t have occurred to him to record any of this information any more than it would have to record the birds he saw on the Tuesday morning bird walks which he had regularly attended on his rostered morning off for the last five years.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Mr Malik had first met Thomas Nyambe outside the Nairobi Museum on his very first Tuesday morning bird walk. Despite a warm welcome from Rose Mbikwa, Mr Malik had been feeling a little awkward, a little out of place. A black man whom he had noticed standing back from the others, always smiling but never speaking, came over and introduced himself, and from that moment on he and Thomas Nyambe became friends. It really was just like that. It’s happened to me, and it’s probably happened to you. From the first exchange of good mornings they had recognized in each other a kindred soul. Though neither spoke much to start with, they felt an immediate ease in each other’s company that was both surprising and yet the most natural thing in the world.

  As they exchanged more and more words over the following weeks Thomas Nyambe found out that Mr Malik was a widower and Mr Malik found out that Thomas Nyambe had worked for the government as a government driver for nearly thirty years. He had a wife called Hyacinth and seven children, two of whom had recently died.

  ‘I too have a son who is dead,’ said Mr Malik. Even now, after four years, he seldom talked about his son.

  Mr Nyambe told Mr Malik that he lived in Southlands, but over the years he and his brother had saved up enough money to buy a small farm on the coast just north of Malindi, where their father had come from. His brother was building a house there now and would then build another for him and that is where they would move to when he retired from his job as a government driver.

  ‘It is good to have your own land and grow your own food. And you, Mr Malik, will you ever move out of Nairobi?’

  ‘I am no farmer, Mr Nyambe. My grandfather used to grow vegetables, but I think I must take after my father. It is said that the soil in Nairobi is so rich that if you planted a seed you must stand back quickly – so as not to be injured by the growing plant, you know. My father could have planted a thousand seeds and the only injury he risked was cutting his foot on the hoe. He was not a farmer, and neither am I. I think I will stay in Nairobi.’

  ‘But there are more birds to be seen on a farm than in the city, is this not so?’

  ‘This is true, Mr Nyambe, and as you know I like watching birds. But I see them in my garden and around town and as long as I keep coming on the Tuesday bird walks I will keep seeing them.’

  Yet behind his mild exterior Mr Malik’s new friend was a passionate man. His passions were his family, his birds and his country.

  19

  Like Mr Malik, Thomas Nyambe had grown up in a Nairobi very different from today’s sprawling city. Back then, the city centre was just a few streets surrounded by parks and gardens. The river was lined not with the cardboard shacks of the slum-dwellers but with papyrus. On the short walk from the GPO to the railway station you might see a family of guineafowl running across the road, or a night-heron roosting in its favourite fever tree in the Governor General’s garden.

  ‘There are still some birds to be seen, as you know, Mr Malik. But now you have to go a long way to see a night-heron, or even a guineafowl.’

  For Mr Nyambe, to be able to go and watch birds with like-minded people in comfortable cars, that was indeed a joy and a privilege. There is something about birds, their beauty and freedom, that is good for a man’s soul. But a man who is saving money to buy a farm and build a house cannot afford to fritter away his shillings on buses or matatus just to get out of town for the morning, even if it is for his soul. On bird walk days Mr Nyambe invariably travelled in the front passenger seat of Mr Malik’s old green Mercedes. Of course, he always made sure that he brought along a little something – some spiced pea-cakes or sugar biscuits that his wife Hyacinth made for him to take – to show his appreciation to whoever might give him a lift. Mr Malik had grown to quite like pea-cake, though he would only eat one sugar biscuit and that was out of politeness.

  Mr Nyambe’s love for Kenya was as strong as his love for birds.

  ‘There is surely no other country like it, Mr Malik. Where else can you find a snow-capped mountain of such magnificence as our own Mount Kenya, and a coast of palm-lined beaches? What other country has deserts and forests, lakes and rivers, hills and plains like ours? Where else are the men so handsome and the women so beautiful?’

  ‘And where else, Mr Nyambe, can you see so many birds?’

  ‘Not only birds, Mr Malik. Lions, elephants.’

  ‘Cheetahs, giraffes.’

  ‘Impala.’

  ‘Gazelle.’

  ‘Warthogs.’

  ‘Bush pigs.’

  ‘Wildebeest.’

  ‘Hartebeest.’

  ‘It is true, Mr Malik. We are blessed. It is a fine country that we live in.’

  As the friendship between the two men grew, Mr Nyambe found himself talking more freely about his work, which was something he seldom did, even to his wife.

  ‘That marabou,’ he said, pointing to a bird that stood tall and funereal beside a rubbish heap as they strolled together down Two Rivers Road on the bird walk one day. ‘It is not a pretty bird, Mr Malik. I am sure you have seen them, always fighting with the other birds – the crows and the egrets. Marabou is the nickname we – the drivers in the car pool, you know – give to the Minister of Defence. He is not a good man. He says he is a Christian, but do you know how many wives he has?’

  Mr Malik raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  ‘More than the usual number?’

  ‘Three – one in Kisumu, one in Kakamega and one in Nairobi. That is too many for one Christian man.’

  ‘That is too many for any man, Mr Nyambe.’

  ‘I think you are right, Mr Malik.’

  Mr Nyambe gave a sudden grin.

  ‘But the water snake – I mean Mr Matiba, the Minister for Security, you know – he thinks the Nairobi wife is his wife, so perhaps that makes it only two.’

  And so it went. Each Tuesday Mr Malik would offer Mr Nyambe a lift in his old green Mercedes and the two men would talk about birds and politics. Why is it that the little purple-banded sunbird likes to build its nests on the verandas of men, and does the female grey hornbill mind being sealed up by the male in a hollow tree behind a mud wall while she sits on her eggs? If the Minister for Education needs a new house, should he not buy the land to build it on rather than being deeded two acres of Karura State Forest by the Minister for Forests and Fisheries – for are not the State Forests for everybody? – and just why does the Secretary of the Treasury need to take so many private flights to Switzerland?

  ‘There is much thoughtlessness in the world, Mr Malik. Though I do not see it among ordinary people, among rich people and powerful people it is common. But when the elephant reaches for the plantains he does not see the shamba fence. It is us who elect them, is it not? Perhaps it is up to us to make them see what they are doing.’

  His friend’s words stayed with Mr Malik. It did not happen immediately, but after a few weeks a dim light began to glow in his brain. Yes, somebody should indeed make these men
see what they were doing. It was all very well to vote every few years, but was that enough? It was all very well to complain, but what did that achieve? Someone should do something. It took nearly two months for Mr Malik to work out that that someone was him. He was the one who must do it. Had he not longed to be a journalist in those far-off London days? Was this not the very opportunity he had been looking for, the chance to make a difference? That very morning he went into the city and rented a post office box. That afternoon he wrote a letter to the editor of the Evening News.

  And the next Tuesday after the bird walk he typed his very first ‘Birds of a Feather’ column on to a sheet of plain white A4 paper, sealed it in an envelope and popped it into the postbox at the corner of Garden Lane and Parklands Drive.

  20

  The ostrich was growing used to this. Each day just after dawn the monstrous beast behind the fence would awake and begin to roar. Slowly it turned towards him, slowly it advanced, its bellowing growing louder, its strange eyes reflecting the orange of the rising sun. The ostrich was a male and had a nest to protect. The shallow pit he had dug unaided with his bare claws now contained sixteen eggs that had been laid there by the three females he had courted and mated with. The eggs were only days from hatching. The ostrich drew himself up to his full three-metre height, fluffed out his wings to make him look as big as he could, and began to strut, stiff-legged and unblinking, in the direction of the fence. Onwards came the monster, straight towards him. Closer they approached each other and closer still. The beast’s roar was like a lion and a buffalo and an elephant all rolled into one, but the ostrich neither flinched nor faltered. It was the beast which turned. It turned on to the long track that led away from the fence and with a last roar sped down the track and off into the rising sun.