by David Lamb
I wrote a story for the Los Angeles Times about the Ngeis and a few weeks later received a letter from a California reader saying she would like to pay for Hannah’s education, perhaps even sponsor her at a school in the United States. Could I get in touch with the Ngeis? the writer asked. I returned to Mathare Valley. But in the time between my two visits the bulldozers had come and the Ngeis had gone. Someone said they were still in the valley and had set up their shack in a different place. Trying to find Mrs. Ngei was like picking a single face out of a sell-out crowd at Dodger Stadium. Two hours later, having failed, I went back to my office. Even good fortune had mocked the promises of the city.
Millions of Africans today, from Kenya to the Ivory Coast, from Niger to Botswana, are following the same path as the Ngeis, lured off the farms and into the cities by the dream of a better life. The result of the rural exodus is an urban nightmare: slums, crime, psychological trauma and economies that simply cannot expand fast enough to provide jobs or social services for the world’s youngest and fastest-growing continental population. Here are some capital statistics: The population of Lagos, Nigeria, has grown from 300,000 in 1970 to 3 million today. Nouakchott, Mauritania, had 5,000 residents twenty years ago; today it has 225,000. Nairobi, a city designed for 250,000, will have 7 million residents by 2050 if current growth rates continue. In 1960 only one black African city, Kinshara, Zaire, had a population of more than 500,000; now there are ten.
In Kenya the minimum monthly wage is $43, but the jobless rate runs about 45 percent, and as in other African countries, there is no such thing as unemployment compensation. Thirteen percent of Nairobi University’s 1,800 graduates will be unable to find work for at least three years. According to the International Labor Organization, 60 million Africans—half the adult population—cannot find work, and if Africa is to meet the ILO’s goal of full employment by the year 2000, it will have to create 150 million jobs, a target that is clearly unattainable. Upper Volta’s major export is people, with 600,000 laborers doing seasonal work in neighboring countries. Unemployment in Djibouti can be as high as 85 percent, and the closest real job market is on another continent, in the Persian Gulf states.
More than half of Cape Verde’s fisherman population has left the island republic for want of work, and today there are more Cape Verdians living in Massachusetts and Rhode Island than in Cape Verde. In Ethiopia and Tanzania city jobs are so scarce that the governments truck people, sometimes at gunpoint, back to the rural areas. Botswana, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Mozambique send tens of thousands of their unemployed young men to the South African mines.
Just a mile or two from Mathare Valley, in the heart of downtown Nairobi, Francis Thuo can look out of his window in the International House at the sprawling city below and can see, far off in the distance, the African plains where giraffes and zebras and antelope still roam in great numbers. Thuo, a prosperous businessman in his mid-forties who is chairman of the Nairobi Stock Exchange, wears a three-piece business suit with a Lions Club emblem in the lapel. He sends his five children to private schools and his office is tastefully and expensively decorated, with wall-to-wall carpeting and mahogany furniture.
A long time ago, shortly after he had dropped out of school, Thuo remembers walking across a bridge in Nairobi with his father, a meatcutter who could not afford the fees to educate his eight children. They stopped to watch a dozen men, bare-chested and sweating, labor with pick and shovel along the roadside.
“Look at them,” his father said. “If you do not take your studies seriously, you will end up like them. There will be nothing for you to do in life but dig ditches.”
Thuo never forgot the advice. He went to work in a gas station, then for an accounting firm. He taught himself to read and write. He studied economics at night and took correspondence courses in history, and in 1964, the year after independence, opened the first African brokerage house in East Africa. He is proud that he bucked the odds and won, particularly when he recalls that in his youth the colonialists gave the Africans virtually no opportunity “to prove our worth” except as common laborers.
“What concerns me these days is that our children are having it much too easy,” he mused. “Unless we push, they just don’t seem to be pulling their own weight. They want life handed to them on a silver platter.”
His anxieties aren’t much different than those you might hear in Middle America. That’s not surprising, for Africans like Thuo—members of a new, emerging middle class—have dreams and goals and values with a distinctly Western flavor. They are educated, economically ambitious and dedicated to making their children’s lives better than their own. They sacrifice for their children, complain about inflation, worry about the unruly behavior of today’s youth and are greatly concerned with increasing their own wealth and security.
Thuo escaped from his past through sheer hard work and tenacity. Others moved up in class more through circumstance than design, being the benefactors rather than the creators of a system inherited from the colonialists. They simply stepped into the void left by the departing colonialists and expatriates, and as often as not, stayed there more because of tribal nepotism than merit. But Africa’s new middle and upper classes, as minuscule as they may be, are an encouraging portent for the future. If they can grow and become a majority class, as happened in the United States, they could become the foundation of economic and political stability in Africa because more people will have a stake in their country’s well-being. The Nairobi Stock Exchange that Thuo chairs represents a noteworthy step in that direction.
The exchange surely must be the world’s smallest and most informal. It has no trading floor, no permanent home and no assessment for a seat. The five members of the exchange meet every morning over coffee to examine the status of Kenya’s health. For about twenty minutes they scribble notes, bicker and barter, accomplishing their ritual with the good-natured kidding of old friends. International events have little influence on the market; it is local conditions that matter.
Prices are established during the morning “call-over,” with the five members meeting in a different colleague’s office each day. Actual trading is done over the phone or through the mails by Nairobi’s five brokerage firms, which offer their clients seventy stocks valued from a few cents to a few dollars a share. (Blue-chip stocks in 1982 included City Brewery at 40 cents a share, Nation Printers and Publishers at 70 cents and Brooke Bond tea, $2.65.)
Thuo says “an educated witch doctor’s guess” would be that about 1 percent of Kenya’s 16 million people are stockholders. That is a significant figure, considering that Africans in the colonial era had virtually no money and usually reckoned their wealth by the size of their family or herd.
“Capitalism has been part of the African life since time immemorial,” Thuo says. “Measuring your wealth in cattle or the size of your family was a sort of capitalism. This is a new world we live in now and what we’re dealing with is just another form of capitalism—money instead of cows.”
With powerful binoculars you could very nearly see the village of Meto—and another face of Africa—from Thuo’s fourteenth-floor office window. Meto, tucked in thorn-bush-covered plains south of Nairobi, is populated by several hundred Masai, tall nomadic tribesmen who wander with their cattle in an endless search for grass and water.
On the surface, Meto appears stationary in time. The people still live in clusters of one-room huts known as bomas that are made of mud, sticks and cattle dung. Small and comfortably cool even in the heat of summer, separate bomas are reserved for each of the owner’s wives, and inside there is one section for the humans, another for the calves and goats.
The Masai calculate their wealth in cattle—a man with, say, a hundred head would be considered a millionaire—and each cow has an almost mystical significance. The cows are seldom sold or slaughtered. They are merely collected, much as a Westerner builds his assets in a savings account. The cattle provide all the Masai’s needs: milk and b
lood to drink, meat to eat during special celebrations, bones to make jewelry and plates, skins to lie on, manure to build homes, urine to brew into beer.
Circumcision rites last for several days and are a cause for great celebration in Meto. The girls of the village are circumcised at puberty, the boys when they are sixteen or seventeen years old. The boys are now considered adults and allowed to lay with women for the first time. Thus begins their seven-year apprenticeship as morani, warriors charged with protecting Meto and its cattle. They carry spears and wear only red clothes, which are tossed loosely around one shoulder and fall to their knees. Strutting like peacocks, the morani sport braided shoulder-length hair, are smeared with red ochre and adorned with ostrich feathers, and they call after the young women who walk by with shaven heads and ankle bracelets tinkling with each step.
The problem is that there really isn’t much for the morani to do these days except to preen and look dashing. Tribal warfare no longer exists in the traditional sense and the government has forbidden cattle raids by neighboring villages. There aren’t even many lions around Meto anymore, so the warriors no longer have to stalk and kill one of the beasts as part of their initiation into manhood, a practice that continued until just a few years ago. Suddenly understanding math is more important than handling a spear.
“I was going to school in Nairobi but my father told me, when I was seventeen, to come home, to become a moran like my brothers had done,” said Gideon Mardadi. He returned to his small dusty village, and he was circumcised in a ritual that lasted three days. He killed a lion with his spear and then for three years he idled about. “I soon came to realize that it was not good work,” said Mardadi, now twenty-seven years old. “It was boring. I left and went back to school. I do not like to show disrespect to my father but there are other things that are important besides herding cattle.”
Mardadi runs the farm-supply store in Meto, an unlit one-room shop that sells fertilizer and grain and various medicines for cows, all further evidence of the twentieth century’s encroachment on rural Africa. He wears slacks and a red sweater and has a trim mustache. Except for the silver-dollar-sized hole in his left ear lobe, from which once hung beads and bones, he looks just like a man who has spent his life in Nairobi or New York.
The store Mardadi operates is part of the Kenyan government’s attempt to settle the nomadic Masai and teach them modern management methods for their cattle. The program, if successful, would lead the Masai into the mainstream of Kenyan society. Says one Kenyan legislator: “It’s time the Masai put on pants.” Still, the government does not want to do too much for the Masai; they might become a threat to Kikuyu domination. In Meto, it has gone so far as to give them title to land, install water taps and build a health clinic and school. But the Masai will not be able to have both modernity and tradition. They will have to choose, as Mardadi already has done.
The three faces of Africa we have seen—Mary Ngei, trapped slum dweller; Francis Thuo, self-made entrepreneur; and Gideon Mardadi, warrior-turned-shopkeeper—reflect the vicissitudes of a continent where every life and every way of life are in transition. All three are Kenyans, living within a hundred miles of one another, but their lives are not unique to Kenya. For all across Africa, new pressures are reshaping old values, and old traditions are facing new challenges. The African’s spiritual identity remains entwined with the heritage of village life, but his eyes are cast on—and increasingly his feet are planted in—the cities, for it is there that he can, with good luck, hard work or a combination of both, escape the bondage of poverty and ignorance that have enslaved an entire continent. Every young African coming to the city knows exactly what he wants: a Mercedes-Benz, the most singularly important symbol of wealth and status in Africa. The goal is so widespread that in East Africa wealthy members of the new upper class are referred to as Wabenzi (wa indicating the plural in Swahili).
Partly because the African was slow or unwilling to adopt Western ways, the colonialists branded him stupid and lazy. The myth was a cruel one that lingered far too long, for the African is neither. Given education and exposure to the outside world, he can be as articulate and alert, as sophisticated and intelligent as anyone you would meet in London or Chicago. Given an economic incentive and an obtainable goal, he is a tireless worker willing to accept great hardships. But the vast majority have neither education nor incentive, and in many cases these are the people who are running governments and armies. Thirty years ago only the black elite, less than 1 percent of the population, made it through the colonial system to positions of authority. Today anyone with the right connections can make it. The result is that Africa simply doesn’t function very smoothly or efficiently.
And what does the future hold? That answer rests with the African child, whose days are as harsh—and yet as full of love—as that of any child on earth. His life is one of toil, not toys, and he endures burdens unknown to children in the developed world. What is taken for granted in the West—health, education, a reasonable standard of living, even survival itself—is still in the prayers of the world’s poorest, least developed continent.
According to the United Nations, 40 percent of African children under the age of five go through a period of malnutrition severe enough to cause mental or physical damage affecting their growth.
The sub-teen African child-labor force numbers an estimated 16 million. The World Bank says that 27 children per 1,000 are in the African labor force, compared to 14 in Asia, 6 in South America and 1 in Europe and the United States.
One child in eight dies before the age of two, usually from preventable illnesses, and in nineteen African countries the average child will not live to the age of forty. Two million of Africa’s children are classified by the United Nations as refugees.
But practically nowhere in the world is the family as cohesive as in Africa. The young, the old, the infirm are never without care, food, shelter or love as long as there is a relative or tribal brother with anything at all to share. Individual interests are considered self-indulgent in rural Africa; what matters is the well-being of the collective unit. Elders are treated with deference and no child would dare question his word or authority. A child does as he is told, never forgetting that there is nothing more important than the family.
From his earliest days an African child in, say, Kenya, is strapped with cloths to his mother’s back, accompanying her while she tills the fields, gathers firewood and collects water. The child is coddled and fed on demand, not on a schedule, and it is very rare indeed to hear an African infant cry.
By the time the child is four or five he has assumed the responsibility of tending the herd or caring for younger brothers and sisters. He is seldom balky and never disrespectful to his parents. His freedom is great and largely undirected. He may cut off the top of a banana tree and use it like a rubber tire to float in a stream. He may entwine palm leaves to make a soccer ball or build a little cart with wooden wheels, greasing the “bearings” with fresh cow dung. But almost certainly he has never had a store-bought toy, and if he lives in a small rural village, he may never have seen an electric light, a telephone, a flush toilet or a comic book.
“In the first year the physical development of children in rural Africa is precocious compared to Western norms,” says Nina Darnton, an American child psychologist who spent three years working in Africa.
“There is tremendous stimulation and love between mother and child. Then, by the second year, the mother usually has had another baby and the first child is taken off her back and left pretty much alone, unstimulated. It’s like a sudden fall from grace.
“The precocity levels out then with Western norms. By the third year it has declined. This is when, in the Western world, mothers are giving their children toys and sitting down to explain the way things work. But a mother in Africa doesn’t have time for that.
“The children are left to their own devices. You have the feeling they’re crying out for stimulation and direction. They have a
ll this wonderful energy, a lot of it very creative, and nowhere to direct it.”
If African parents share a single dream today, it is that their children get an education, the end result of which is a government job and the security that goes with it. This is the African equivalent of a social security system, because Africa’s sons and daughters care for their aged parents as they would their own children. Education is pursued as an end to itself; the quest for knowledge is decidedly secondary.
The Njumbi primary school, not far from the town of Karai in Kenya, is typical of what rural Africa offers. You leave the paved highway and bounce along a rutted dirt road for fifteen or twenty minutes, through parched hills and past mud-walled, straw-roofed homes until you come to a cluster of low, weather-darkened buildings built with cement blocks during the colonial era. The headmaster, Michael Mathini, an energetic and amiable man of thirty who rides a bicycle to work, greeted us at the door. He led us into his office and pointed with great pride to a wall graph showing that his students scored above the national average in the annual state-administered examination.
The school had 620 students, four outdoor latrine pits, one dictionary, a few broken windows Mathini hoped to fix when he had some money to buy glass with, and seventeen teachers who earned from $80 to $135 a month. There were no amenities such as a library or classrooms with heat and electricity. The frayed books the children used were printed in London and contained illustrations of white children and Western-world fairy tales such as Jack and the Beanstalk and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Hardly the type of exercise that would reinforce the identity of a black child who came to school barefoot.
I asked the headmaster who the children’s heroes were, “Heroes?” Mathini repeated. “That is a Western idea. We don’t have heroes or idols in Africa.” Then, speaking of Kenya’s first two presidents, he added, “But we do tell the children that we want another Kenyatta or Moi. We tell them, ‘These people were born poor and naked like you, so you can advance without coming from a rich family.’ ”
