by Paul Theroux
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.
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.
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.<
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‘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.
‘I came to a situation where I was living in a nightmare. I had nightmares all the time – dreaming of flying and cycling, but always crash-landing. Dreams about food, but torture dreams. I hallucinated. I saw food on the patches of the floor. I saw a sausage through the wall and tried to break through the cement to get it.’
