Guess What I was Doing…

When not blogging, this is what I do in the Welsh countryside: wear stupid looking helmets and swing around on wires. This was a corporate retreat and we were doing the skytrek where you get transported for 2km high above the ground from platform to platform hitched to a wire. Then we did an ‘assault’ course and climbed a massive hill where a sheep actually charged us. All the while I kept feeling that my outfit – which is worn by a tank crew – was terribly fashionable and could start a whole new trend if I wore it in London or New York. After the swinging, which involved some moment of terror and burnt palms, it was time to pitch tents for the night. As a city man through and through, I was like a fish out of water and kept wondering why we should choose a cold, damp dwelling when there were perfectly good hotels nearby. A colleague and I then started a snoring war that actually kept the whole tent awake and drove one delicate soul to seek shelter in the truck. What a softie says I. The next morning we headed to the River Wye for a few hours of kayaking. Now as is well known (or at least became well known following my whiney excuses that I needed to stay on the riverbank and read) getting a land lubber like myself into a boat is not the easiest of tasks. Of course like everything I have ever been reluctant to try, it was enormously enjoyable. The thing that made the whole weekend special was that I actually like every single person I work with. Yes, I do, and it never ceases to surprise me what with the cynicism toward offices that I developed in my former job before I made the jump to academia. Now that I have camped, climbed a hill and a small rock face, I have decided to move to the next level: yes sir, next time I am home, I am going to drag myself out of the lovely Nairobi and attempt to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. Watch this space.

Woe unto you, ye shall hunger

I am in a sad mood today having just had an argument with someone very close to me and so have been seeing ill portents and darkness everywhere I look. And so this little story on Reuters caught my eye and seeing as I was already feeling kind of messed up, reduced me to hot little tears. Yes, I know, it is rather dramatic. It turns out that there is now food being made in factories just for starving Africans. Some of our societies have failed to the point that even food can no longer be taken for granted and charity has become a way of life. Plumpy’nut – made of peanut paste, sugar and a special vitamin – is not being made to feed people in hunger camps, it is being advertised as a charity intervention before starvation really strikes. In other words, preparations must be made for Africans even before they have started starving since it is reliably known that the need will be there sooner or later. “We wanted a product that doesn’t need to be mixed with water and fulfils all nutritional needs; we also believe food should taste good. Maybe that’s a French thing,” says Michel Lescanne, the creator of Plumpy’nut which is made in a ‘picturesque’ village in Northern France. Nutriset, the product’s maker, though formed as a non-profit, has few corporate rivals. With a staff of 50, its turnover is expected to be 15 million euros in 2005, a 50 percent increase on last year. It will produce some 2,500 tonnes of Plumpy’nut that will feed a quarter million children. So there you have it and good luck to them. If African entrepreneurs will not step in to create cheap food products then their countrymen shall either starve or shall provide opportunity for others. African misery is the greatest natural resource in that continent. While people argue about gold and oil, no one notices that there is far more money generated by the humanitarian industry on the basis of African misery than by mining or drilling corporates. It makes me wonder whether Niger has businesspeople at all. See more on Plumpy’nut.

The Love Affair Between the Maasai and the English

Colonialists like their savages savage in a romantic mould. There is a streak of masochism in having your material world dismissed by people who have little but vanity and some sick cows. Colonialists want to believe their subjugated people were worth conquering…they are also good for a shag now and then says AA Gill in the London Times to much hilarity…more>>

Shooting an Elephant

Written in 1936, George Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’ is a classic examination of the nature of colonial power and the curious administrative and moral posture of the colonialist. Go here for more of his essays.

Orwell: “I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing—no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.”

IN Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically—and secretly, of course—I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos—all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in sæcula sæculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.

One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism—the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old .44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant’s doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone “must.” It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of “must” is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours’ journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it.

The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of “Go away, child! Go away this instant!” and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man’s dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend’s house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.

The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant—I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary—and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.

I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant—it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery—and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of “must” was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.

But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd—seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing—no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the beast’s owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.

It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.

There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.

When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick—one never does when a shot goes home—but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frighfful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time—it might have been five seconds, I dare say—he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open—I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.

In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.

Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

Persona Non Grata: Kenyan Athletes After Helsinki

Qatari citizen Saif Saaeed Shaheen (formerly known as Stephen Cherono) reacts to smashing the world record and winning the 3000m steeplechase at the 2005 World Championships. I do not care if he is a citizen of the moon or Qatar, there is nothing better than seeing a Kenyan on top of the world.

President Kibaki recently urged Kenyan athletes to resist the temptation to change their citizenship for money. This is a statement that can only have come from a man with a obstinate Panglossian ‘all-is-well-with-the-world’ streak. The sad fact is that talent or heroism are under-appreciated and downright dangerous qualities to have in Kenya. Kibaki is a leading member of a ruling elite that has consigned talent and integrity to the rubbish heap even while he admonishes those who would rather go where they are more appreciated and respected. And the Kenyan public, bunch of innocents that we are, ever blaming the government for our every national shortcoming even as we look to its for every solution, only notice these athletes every four years at the Olympics. They give us a brief glow of warm pride and are soon forgotten along with their achievements and the challenges that they face. When is the last time that you heard that a civic group of any kind had gathered to honour one of our athletes? How many products are endorsed by them, what schools and streets named after them? The real question I am asking is this: what is heroism in Kenya and how, if at all, is it linked to our national life?

Diary of a Mad Kenyan Woman has recently blogged about David Munyakei the whistle blower who alerted the country to the Goldenberg Scandal and how he has since been forgotten by the public. WM says it so much better than I could:

Who are we that we glorify and protect the avaricious, the gluttonous, and the ostentatiously, graspingly corrupt, the liars and the tyrants (why isn’t Moi in jail?). Who are we that we do this in order precisely to make the shabby, cringe-making, shame-amplifying nature of our complete disregard of those who guard and rescue and restore our sense of self more marked by contrast, more significant by difference? Just so we can underline the dichotomy, in case someone had missed it? To sum: you need to f**k Kenya up, not pluck it out of the lion’s jaws. This is the correct trajectory to follow to fame and fortune; failure to which, you will not even be a footnote in history.

As a career and lifestyle choice, I highly recommend that you strike OFF your list the idea of doing something good for Kenya, since we Kenyans assure and guarantee you that no good deed done for us will ever go unpunished.

This then is the world of the Kenyan hero: either forgotten or destroyed.

Many Kenyans are clamouring to vote with their feet, they want to leave that little paradise we call home. And the runners, like the doctors, the nurses and the thousands of Green Card Lottery applicants, want to step out too. It is at this precise moment when the exit door is beckoning that their international accomplishments have fallen.

When the rhetoric of Project Keenya was strong enough that its disconnect with the lived reality of many Kenyans was not readily apparent, our runners made off with gold medals galore. But since the late 1990s there has been a wholesale collapse of the idea what we are in a collective vehicle called Kenya whose destination shall benefit us individually.

This project I have argued in the past was merely an extension in blackface of the colonial desire to civilise and develop the ’savage’. Its collapse was inevitable and there is a Kenyan being born from its ashes who is more competitive, self reliant and skeptical of the government and its nonsensical postures and actions. It is only when faced with Kenyan athletes cutting and running that there is a sudden surge of concern and a recognition of their worth. As is usual the government’s position can be trusted to be stupid. Sports Minister Ochillo Ayacko speaking about migrating athletes said, “we will declare these athletes as persona non grata and cannot permit them to enjoy facilities available in the country while they compete against us at World championships.” Eh, these facilities of course being the government constructed hills and trails of the Rift Valley. If you are a European tourist you are welcome to come and run up and down whatever you wish, but dare you be an ex-citizen who wants to do the same…

Watching the Ethiopian athletes power ahead in Helsinki and at the 2004 Olympics, I felt that they were running from a psychological and emotional space that their Kenyan counterparts have not occupied for a long while. And there will be no getting back to that place soon since we must first elevate talent and achievement to the highest dais of our national life. For this to happen, the moral state of our communities will have to be revitalised beyond the church step and into the home and all those other ordinary folks’ spaces. But this is a discussion for another day I suppose. For now, I am sad that those Kenyans who competed in Helsinki did not do better but glad that the negative commentary about the performance might be making us ask tough questions about what our country does to its best and brightest.

P.S.

(Shaheen or Cherono is just a small tip of the iceberg. Beyond the athlete is Dedan Kimathi still in a Kamiti Prison grave, Pio Pinto, David Munyakei broke and close to breaking and numerous others. Kenya produces heroes as a kettle will release steam to relieve the pressure of boiling water. Our heroism, like heroism anywhere else, is the product of adversity; therefore our heroes by the very actions that elevate them often incur injury. It is in how we deal with these injuries that the esteem we hold them in is revealed. Also revealed is what we think of ourselves since the hero at hand has only become so presumably for our collective benefit: they have borne a load greater than themselves and by doing so have relieved us of an unpleasantness that was ours. To ignore the hero, to leave them by the wayside is to deny the existence of a collective self to which the hero sacrificed himself. If Kenyans ignore or do not care for a Kenyan hero, then there is no such thing as Kenya outside of a geographer’s map.)

The Mythology of Project Keenya

Binyavanga Wainaina is back, this time with a rant on this blog’s favourite subject, Kenyan or African nationhood.

Most mythologies of nationalism cannot stand the scrutiny of logic. This is why one party states, and KANU (Kenya’s former ruling party) youth wingers and the hundreds of choir masters whose career consisted of composing praise songs for leaders existed: to cajole, beat, legislate what we would never have naturally chosen if we used our common sense.

So what was Project Keeenya? We were told that the colonial infrastructure (designed and perfected to benefit a few white settlers and their dogs) would remain pretty much unchanged – so it was the responsibility of us citizens to reformat ourselves and fit into that tiny little box. So for forty years we sang KANU ni baba na mama, and bent and twisted and rearranged, and studied with feet dipped into icy water, and headstands and parents allowed their children to be beaten into submission in school so we could fit inside this Kenya.

The Applications, by Karanja wa Njama is a short story which was published in Kwani 3. It is about a woman, Faith Karoki, who lives in Buru Buru, and who was brought up to believe in Project Keenya. They said if you work hard in project Keenya you will build the nation and build your life. In the 1990s, when project Keenya revealed itself to be a massive illusion, she went mad, and stopped applying herself.

Extract from The Applications:

“During the same period, Mrs. Karoki had also found reason to savage and throw away all the books she had collected all her life. Ngugi wa Thiongo, her Christianity in Africa series, A Long Walk To Freedom, Watchtower magazines and numerous Mills and Boon paperbacks all found their way to the garbage dump. She got rid of her bed, and laid her mattress on the floor. Only her fire and brimstone, King James Bible remained, with its cover etched in blood red, set in the deepest black.

Lying on her mattress one afternoon, she felt an impression on her back. Muttering, she upturned the mattress and stumbled on the few truths she’d been looking for all these years. The All-Purpose Letter Writer edited by Keith Johnson contained samples of letters that Mrs. Karoki found useful. The book, which had pages missing, still held letters on money matters, accommodation and other miscellanies.

After flipping idly through the book, Letter Placing An Order, Letter Complaining About A Service In A Stronger Tone she came across a Letter Citing Grievances In a Marriage (Unofficial). Excitement engulfed her as she recognized the couple. It was Esther, her college roommate who had moved to the UK with her British husband about 10 years ago. Mrs. Karoki couldn’t remember Esther’s husband’s name. The letter gave her no small amount of satisfaction as it was evident from the words that the marriage had since broken down. Of course it was Esther! The polite timid English manner was, of course, the only way Esther could speak to her husband. He was, after all, English. The words dimmed in front of Mrs Karoki’s eyes, which filled with sudden tears like when she read the Bible.

55 Plum Road
LONDON
SW3 8YT
14 August 19-

Esther Wilkins
Forms Ltd
27-76 Bridgeweather Road
LONDON
EC1 3SD

Dear Lawrence

Marriage Certificate No U6677

I am writing to complain about several grievances I have of our ten-year marriage. Granted that I moved to your hometown of my own volition some of our problems I firmly place on your shoulders…

At this point Mrs. Karoki was so overwhelmed that she carefully tore the letter off the page and decided to reply immediately without reading the rest of it:

Dear Esther

He! You remeber our life of eating mnocttyledons and beans. What happend to mbari cia Steven and uria twethaga Maria. Ari from coast when we were at the Teaching College. Have you seen my son Kandle Kinuthia there with two small boys. I hope you well tell my where all these peolpo went. Where the connection was between mbari cia Steven and Dorcas. Kairitu kau gaciaratwu nuu. Ona hidi ndathiaga bus station iu etagwa atia. Ati Machako onaogo tii nyadike. We were with mutumia wa binamu …

At this point she became so exhausted she put away the letter to continue another day. It was better to read what everyone had sent her, she thought guiltily. She discovered the book held letters from many people of her past, in varying emotional states. Some of her friends like Margarita were in debt and others like Mrs. James Ngoga were rich. It was fulfilling to hear from so many people at once. She decided it would be nice to write back to all the people she had known, with advice on how their wishes would be granted. So as she continued to build the mosaic in her room Mrs. Karoki wrote over 1000 applications for her friends. They were all addressed to God.”

““““““`
At the school where she taught, nobody noticed:

“At Buru Buru Primary School where she taught, no one really minded the new and improved Mrs. Karoki after a month or two. She stopped going to school to teach and only appeared now and then to wander around the empty school fields, talking to the crows and the kites that wheeled in the sky. When it rained she could be found sitting in empty classrooms in the evening, hours after the children had left.

This went on till a new headmaster was appointed to the school under the new Board of Education Application Rules and he chased her away from the school. He also declined to forward her name to the Ministry of Education when they asked for a new salary roster. An efficient cog at the Ministry however automatically added her name to the list, tsk tski-ng with annoyance at the oversight. Karoki Faith he wrote, and Mrs. Karoki continued to draw a salary for exactly five years, when she achieved the optional retirement age of 50 and got her pension. Mr Karoki bribed several individuals for the pension to be paid out. Mrs Karoki did not bother with the money for the next two years. Money was one of the foreign and hostile smells around her.”

Like many in Kenya in the 1990s, Mrs. Karoki found refuge in God, and while the thin crust of privilege fattened itself, fangs latched onto out tax, our institutions, our schools and hospitals and graveyards, we slowly started to rebuild ourselves. I come from a generation of Kenyans very unlike Mrs. Karoki, or Mr. Kibaki.

I expect nothing.

Those people were subsidized into existence, they were scholar-shipped, and fast-tracked and Africanised. They were the shiny vaseline faces of progress, polished by Carey Francis and they were doomed to failure. Mrs. Karoki was so well-drilled to be what the good Fathers suggested, she was incapable of finding ways and means to thrive when her comfort zone had crashed and burnt.

So, we took to the streets, and prised Kenya open. We installed a glass wall in parliament and in state house, and watched the comedy. We discovered that our smooth, educated political elite are only smooth when the presidential press Unit has edited them. Mostly, they behave exactly like Redyculass satirized them.

Now we have them naked. They have lost the power of secrecy, we can see their dripping fangs; their opinions about ordinary wananchi, their treatment of freedom fighters, and presidential chauffeurs are wa-pumavu: we can see the sheer, shameless selfishness of their cause. And in a way it is terrible. In another way it is the best thing to happen to Kenya since independence. They have been rendered meaningless. The entire government and its sycophants and allies and friends are a source of mirth. There is nothing they can do to seem credible. you see, they studied under the School of Governance invented by the British and fine-tuned by Kenyatta and bankrupted by Moi. They are overseeing their own demise, while thinking their baby-faced Saint Mary’s sons will inherit Kenya.

So Project Kenya is dead … what happens to us? Well. I live in South B. We have our own security, our own residence association, our own garbage collection. For the past twenty years Kenyans have build their own institutions to help manage our lives. Academies and churches, SACCOs and boreholes, generators. Rents in business premises in Eastleigh are now higher than city centre. Our leading poets do not come from Kenyatta university or Nairobi campus or Makerere. They come from Dandora and Mathare and California.

Nairobi University has become a institution from a bygone age. To pay an official visit to a department a visitor needs to written permission of the vice-chancellor. Nairobi university behaves as if it was still in the 1960s when the whole of Kenyan literature was their department, when newspapers said The University. This year we had the privilege of hosting Ayi Kwei Armah. Professor Kimani wa Njogu spent weeks seeking the permission of the Vice Chancellor for Ayi to speak at Taifa Hall. A dean was not enough and getting to see the VC was more difficult than entering State House. Eventually permission was granted, and days before Ayi arrived, we found out that the literature department could not host Ayi for tea at their offices because that needed us to ask for a different kind of permission from the vice chancellor. So Ayi spoke at Taifa hall, straight from his hotel, and was whisked back to his hotel afterwards.

The Poetry of Richard Katrovas

One of the most enjoyable results of my visit to St. Petersburg a few weeks ago was meeting Richard Katrovas whose poetry I had never read before. At his public reading, which I managed to get to in spite of the hellish vodka hangover that had me in its evil grip, I was taken by how his poetry managed to be simultaneously intensely personal and engaged in the world. It is no easy thing for me to express admiration for a poet, it is a form whose beauty came under such a sustained assault by a variety of teachers that I have not managed to fully rid myself of their narrow pedantry. But Katrovas’ poetry is honest and funny, and has the wisdom that only comes from someone who has lived and been knocked around a little.

Love Poem for an Enemy

I, as sinned against as sinning,
take small pleasure from the winning
of our decades-long guerrilla war.
For from my job I’ve wanted more
than victory over one who’d tried
to punish me before he died,
and now, neither of us dead,
we haunt these halls in constant dread
of drifting past the other’s life
while long-term memory is rife
with slights that sting like paper cuts… (read more of Richard Katrovas)

A Day in the Life of Idi Amin Dada

Welcome and thanks to Binyavanga Wainaina who knowing my desperate need for some giggles on this blog, as opposed to the recent diet of rants, has contributed a story. Enjoy!

A Day in the Life of Idi Amin Dada

1983. It was that time of the day when the streets of Nakuru seemed to stand still. A Monday at 11 am even the hot dry breeze was lazy. It would glide languorously collecting odd bits of paper, have them tease the ground, threaten to take flight, tease the ground. Every so often there would be a gathering of force and a tiny tornado would whip the paper into the air, swirl dust around, dogs would lift their ears, tongues lolling, then burrow their faces between their forelegs as the wind collapsed, exhausted. Children were in school, long lines of spittle reaching their desks, as they tried to keep awake.

Even Daniel Arap Moi, Kenyan the president, who usually woke up at 4 am, was now taking his nap – trying to summon his favorite dream: that the entire nation of Gikuyus were standing in line at his gate to await execution, cash and title-deeds in hand, to hand over at the gate.

Idi Amin Dada hunched over Mrs. Gupta Shah like an insistent question mark, jabbing. She was chewing hard at a bit of blue-gold and red sari, trying to keep from screaming out loud; they had put on a movie on the video and set it loud to muffle the sounds: some Bombay song: Chal Chal Chal Merihethi….on the screen Idi could see a pouty maiden at the edge of a cliff, and a man with a giant quiff of hair, and sideburns sang in a shrill voice. She leapt off the cliff, and he followed her in a few seconds…they lay draped elegantly at the bottom of the valley; their fingers touched and they died, then the nasal Hindi music escalated in intensity, went beyond drama, beyond melodrama, and achieved genuine Bombay Belodrama.

Idi Amin Dada jabbed deeper into Mrs. Gupta, his plantain sized fingers digging deeply into the folds of her stomach, which usually undulated serenely between two wisps of sari as she hummed her way through the day.
“You want my banana?”
“I vant your banana Idhiii? Give me your banana Idhi…”
“I give you my banana till you are fed up.”

““““““`

This was Idi’s room; was also Idi’s afternoon workplace. Had been for twenty years, since the early 1970s. This morning; every weekday morning, Idi would drop Mr. Shah at the grain-mill his family owned. At 9 he would drop the petulant Maharajah at school: The Shrival Manahaval Shah Academy For Successful Gentlemen Who Will Go To Oxford and Cambridge. We start to train them at 5 years old! Book Now For Half-Price Discount on Swimming.

The Maharaja’s mother would beg him to get into the car,
“Oh my baby Pooti-poo; my Mickey-Mouse; my Diwali Sveetmeat, don’t cry babeee…”
Mr. Shah remained silent; sometimes he tried to imagine this rosebud managing the Grain Mill and failed.
As soon as the car was at the gate, the Maharajah would wriggle to the front passenger seat of the Mercedes.
“Idi – buy me goody-goody toffee gum or I tell Mammi-ji that you pinch me here.”

This routine had ceased being a to-fro conversation. Idi would extract a wad of goody-goody’s and the boy would stuff the toffee into his mouth and launch into muffled brags about Sapna’s father’s car’ of Rakesh’s trip to Disneyland.

Idi was once in the army, and was used to handling such humiliations with a deadpan face and a slight flaring of his nostrils. He always dropped off the prince without argument before rushing back to fuck the Prince’s Mother in the ironing room.

Piles of freshly ironed clothes sat on a boat-shaped basin next to the bed, clothes Idi had ironed last night. Vishal’s bookshelf had been moved to this room since Prince Number 1 left for Oxford: the top row full of Louis L’Amour Cowboy thrillers; the bottom row had a copy of Heart of Darkness, scribbled all over with A Level notes and next to it sat VS Naipaul’s A Bend in the River.

Mrs. Shah gave a low gnashing answer that blew soft cardamom flavored wind into Idi’s ear. He grunted in assent. Idi had a lot of questions. Every 11 am he asked them.

He loved ironing. Every afternoon he would put on some Bollywood film, and turn the Shah family’s washing into crisp battalions of soldiers. He loved shrugging shirts into broad, identical shoulders, arranging them in wardrobes, watching them stand at attention. They were his to command. A Natural Leader, his sergeant had called him. The room was once a stable, but was now a Servant’s Quarter. At 6pm exactly, he would go to the shower, and smoke a joint and dream of shining brass buttons; dream of the embrace of a Luganda woman – sucking at his nerve endings like a fish; turning and twisting him around; smelling not of ginger and tumeric; but of musk and steamed bananas and Nilo beer.

The 1960s were full of landslides: as the British Administration screeched to a halt those that were waiting for a trajectory to come and grab hold of them were left stranded. In those days being dutiful mattered; NOT taking initiative – when they had decommissioned the special forces, afraid that they would remain to leak what had really happened in the forests and the African townships in the 50s; some soldiers had auctioned themselves to the new leaders – as bodyguards; as hired fists: these guys climbed up dizzyingly. Amin had waited for his loyalty to be rewarded; had hung about Nakuru – 10 miles from the Barracks waiting for the call. In 1970, he was about to give up; was about to hitchhike to Uganda and sell illegal liquor in Arua like his mother had done, when he had found a frail Indian man being pulverized by a 10 year old parking boy, outside the wholesale market, with market women cheering the boy. He had rescued the man. Mr. Shah. And he got a job. It wasn’t bad: Mrs. Shah was exactly the same as Sergeant Jones: insistent, fanatic about time, a goddess of routine. Infatuated with her power over this black exhibition of muscle.

Idi had joined the army as soon as age would allow it. It was his way out of a life that seemed aimless. His mother had sold liquor and her body to army officers. He loved his mother to distraction. At thirteen, he had beaten a thirty year old Acholi private who had come to their home to insult his mother.

At fifteen he was six foot four, and when Sergeant Jones had seen him walking in Arua, he had offered him a place in the army at once. Idi was terrified of whites; and he could sense that Jones feared and was fascinated with him. Jones would spend hours with Idi in the boxing ring, teaching him new skills. He loved to punch Idi softly; to wipe seat off Idi’s back; to test out Idi’s muscles – always gruffly, always lingering. During a bout, his adrenalin pumping sweat flying, Idi was like a machine: looking for every angle to kill; never angry. Clinical. He loved it, loved holding into himself, loved the control of violence. One day he caught Jone’s eye, saw the fear in it – fear; and Idi felt like God, standing there showing his power; the feeling was almost sexual.

Idi rose up the ranks in the Army because he was the dream soldier. He had no father – had no problem being a boy to his superiors. He took his punishment with a wry mischievous grin, followed by a YESSIR AFFANDE! He loved to catch Mau Mau terrorists – it was all a marvelous game. Most of all he loved the gruff pride that Jones would flash when Idi had done something exceptional. He shrunk like a child at Jones’ criticism. One day he drunk chang’aa and came to barracks with a prostitute (he loved older women), the sentry who challenged him was floored. Jones found him in the gym, thrusting away. He slapped Idi twice, and sent the woman away. Idi did not talk to anybody for days. Three days later, after winning the Gilgil Barracks Boxing Crown for a second time, Jones patted him on the back, and Idi grinned widely and said,
“ Now I am the bull afande.”

“““`

Mr. Shah liked to spend the morning working on his novel: Conquerors of the British Empire. He was already 1000 words into the novel, and was still finding it impossible to squeeze characters into the dense polemic. His theory was simple: that India, already with a foot in the door in Kenya, should take over the continent, and use this leverage to take over Britain. It is the only way to make a National Profit from hundreds of years of British Rule: the more territory we control, the more we can dictate the cost of raw materials, the final profit will be manned by our guns. We must be Lords of the Commonwealth, and let the English carry us on their backs! Why build afresh when we can inherit what is already there?
His first born son, Vishal, was disdainful about the book.

“Rubbish Dad. Pseudo-religious xenophobic polemic Dad. VS says the Indian Industrial revolution is petty and private. If Nakuru Shah’s and Patels are fighting over 10 shillings, who will unite us? We are greedy Dad…VS says we are ‘a society that is incapable of assessing itself, which asks no questions because ritual and myth have provided all the answers, that we are a society that has not learned “rebellion”. Maybe Daddi-ji you need to read some real literature before writing this. The Russians…”

Vishal was brought up by Mrs. Gupta to be the Bollywood hero she had expected to marry all those hazy, plump years ago; to be NOT his father; Not her father. Vishal treated his parents as if they were trinkets: colorful mantelpiece trinkets who chimed once in a while, but who were so divorced from any viable reality they could only be treated with contempt. It gave his father a twisted sense of pride to hear his son: what a man I am to produce a son, so un-Dukawallah! A son for Oxford! But he was hurt when the boy left. Now what would accompany his quiet mornings at the office?

When he was nine, Vishal had composed a song which he liked to sing at birthday parties to scandalize everybody (except the Marxist Habajan Singh, who liked his mettle). He sang it to the tune of a nursery school song about a Kookaburra.

Duka-wallah sit by de ole Neem tree
Merry Merry King of da Street is he
Run Dukawallah run
Dukawallah burn
Dukawallah hide your cash and flee

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Between 2 and 4 pm you can find Idi Amin at Nakuru Boxing Club. For years he has been the Nakuru Boxing Champion. He is getting older now, and some young bucks are challenging. Modesty Blaise Wekea is short. Very short. It is said he once lifted a plough over his head while working as a casual in the wheat fields of Masailand. He is copper colored to Idi’s black. It is his speed – the unbelievable speed of those bowed legs with thighs the size of a grown man’s waist. But there is something else. When Amin first exploded into the Nakuru boxing scene people saw a future world champion, “Aii Alikuwa kama myama!” he was like an animal: the discipline of the army, added to his natural ferocity to make him unbeatable.

He had no wife: many lovers: soft, yellow Gikuyu women desperately looking for a man with some skills – they complained that Gikuyu men were disdainful of frills – saw sex as a quick efficient drill; wira ni wira –work is work. Idi’s giant physical size, his soft and gentle eyes and wicked smile; his reputation for controlled violence attracted many women.

After his sparring session with a nervous young man with even larger limbs than his; a young man so scared of violence he could probably kill in fear, Idi had a soda with an old friend. Godwin, the only fellow Kakwa in Nakuru. Godwin Pojulu was a tailor for an Indian family: the Khans. Idi speaks his language badly; he spoke better in Luo and Acholi and Kiswahili, army languages. But when he was six or seven his mother had taken him to Yei town in Sudan – and he had fallen in love with the mango-lined avenues; and the gentle character of his people. Children were generally a nuisance in the colonial Labour Lines of Arua; in his maternal grandfather’s home, just off Maridi road, five miles from Yei was heaven. He was free to run and play as far as he wanted. Adults would swell to accommodate him – he would eat in the homes of strangers. His grandfather had told him the history of the Pojulu, his clan:

Generations ago, Jubek was posted to a place that came to be known as Juba town. Godwin tells me Jubek does not deserve this privilege. He was a coward, he says. He was reluctant to fight the Dinka, and keep them out of their territory.

The Bari army was divided into six groups. Each bore a secret code-name. The leaders of the group were determined by their abilities, or character. They would determine what action to take.

Eventually a group of frustrated soldiers took it upon themselves to defend Jubek from the North from the Dinka. Mundari was their codename. Mundari means “a hostile force that act without orders.

Paparrara are the descendants of Jubek. This name was shortened to Pari. This became Bari, some time after the arrival of the first Turko-Egyptians in 1820. The letter “P” does not occur in the Arab alphabet. Today, there are six groups of Bari peoples, named after the six groups of the Bari army: Kakwa, Pojulu, Kuku, Mundari, Nyangwara and Bari.

The people of Pisak are Pujulu, named after a great hero. Onyanyari was a leader of one of the six forces. A mild mannered man. Polite. An astute politician. Because of this skill, he was sent to the Zande kingdown in the North-West to try to persuade them to let the Kakwa to penetrate the area. His force was known as Pojulio, which means, Come My Friend. This group of Bari speakers is now called the Pojulu.

Godwin speaks to him about Sudan. About Inyanya 1 – the war. About old heroic days; about rumour and gossip coming from Yei town. Idi loved to hear the stories; would always ask Godwin to repeat stories he had memorized already. Idi has vowed to die in Yei. One day. They would eat soda and mandazi and talk till the sun started to set and Idi made his way to his room to do the ironing.

““““
The only person in the household who threatens Idi’s job is Vishal. Now he has gone. Since Vishal started to sprout whiskers he has been hostile to Idi. After reading Eldridge Cleaver, he took to calling Idi The Supermasculine Menial. He once asked his parents if they did not think that a man as animal as Idi would not one day attack them?
“You need to read VS Naipaul. He understands the black man.” Vishul said to his parents.

As crime has increased in Nakuru, Idi has become more indispensable. Two years ago he cornered three thugs, and beat them all up, and left with a knife-wound in his belly. The Shah’s are fearful – scared of the seething Dark out there. The presence of a tame Giant Dark is a consolation. Sometimes Idi thinks that Mzee Shah knows what he does with his wife every afternoon. But maybe he does not mind so long as it is secret. Mzee Shah is a man of peace – and Mrs. Gupta Shah has been less bullying, mellower, mewing even sometimes, since she and Idi started fucking.

He had caught her wailing one day in the living room, after Vishal had gone to Oxford. He had tried to slide backwards slowly out of the room; but she had leaped at him and grabbed him and wept on his shoulder, leaving long snail-trails of snot on his khaki shirt. Her mood had changed abruptly, and she attacked him: teeth and nails; her body so incoherent she had come by rubbing herself on his knee.

He likes to see the fear/desire in her eyes; the surprise at his gentleness; when she expects the thrust of a lion; of a legend about Black Men, related among giggles and whispers while samosas are being cooked and Gujarati Aunties are talking raunchy. He likes to ask her questions: see her eyes answer, Yes. You are a man.
He does not mind being a HouseBoy.
He is happy.

(c) Binyavanga Wainaina
thebinj@yahoo.com

Super Mum: The London Years

Read on for more on the ‘brain drain’ and the peerless mama mbugua…and then go to this link for another story on her.

Nursing a problem

Salil Tripathi

Tuesday August 9, 2005

Guardian Unlimited

Charity Kirigo Kimani worked long hours as a nurse at the national hospital in Kenya, finding it extremely difficult to make ends meet.
A mother of three, she did not see a bright future for her children if she stayed in Kenya – so she applied to the NHS, which was looking for nurses.

“Salaries in Kenya were very little,” she said. “Everyone had to have some side business – selling cotton wool, cooking, doing some other work at home – and it was very difficult to make a living. I had to take action.”

Ms Kimani came to England in 1995, just as staff shortages were beginning to hit the NHS. Between 1990 and 1997, the number of people coming into the nursing profession in Britain fell from 18,980 to just over 12,000.

Nurses recruited from abroad accounted for 26% of the 16,000 nurses registered in 1997, and five years later that figure had grown to 43% of the registered total of 37,000.

Many came from the Philippines, South Africa and India. Even though the number of African nurses was relatively small, it nevertheless represented a large proportion of the health workers in their countries.

Life wasn’t easy for Ms Kimani when she came to Britain, but she had access to a superior infrastructure and modern techniques.

She had to endure some humiliation from patients, who questioned her competence because she had come from Africa, but she saved enough money to send her children to university and to buy property in both the UK and Kenya.

Last year, Ms Kimani moved back to Kenya. “I had a target to help my children get a good education,” she said. “Once I knew they could stand on their own, I decided to go back.”

Now in Nairobi, she is working to raise £437,000 to set up a telephone-based counselling service, HIV Helpline, to offer advice to families living with HIV, and plans to recruit 20 workers.

Her story humanises the debate about healthcare professionals in Britain. It shows what is happening at the micro level at a time when the macro outlook appears so dismal.

Nevertheless, organisations such as Save the Children are critical of the influx of nurses from developing countries.

“Many African countries have limited funds available for health,” Mike Aaronson, the charity’s director general, said. “Vulnerable children suffer disproportionately when these services are failing. It is shameful that many poor countries are spending millions of pounds training nurses and doctors to prop up the NHS.”

The crisis is acute – around 36 African countries do not meet targets of one doctor per 5,000 people, according to the World Health Organisation.

Even in non-conflict affected countries such as Zambia and Ghana, there is only one doctor per more than 10,000 people, while disparities are evident within a country such as Kenya. In Nairobi, there is one doctor for 500 people, but in Turkana district the ratio is 1:160,000.

Aware of the criticism, the NHS has adapted a code of practice that bans it from actively recruiting staff from developing countries. But it needs workers – and thousands of people living in poor countries want to work in a better environment.

It is true that Africa’s health sector needs more resources, but those resources will not become available by preventing skilled workers such as Ms Kimani from coming to Britain.

What’s often left unsaid in this debate is the role of emigrating British nurses. That poses the moral dilemma that if a UK-trained nurse is free to leave for the US, Canada, or Ireland (the three most desired destinations) – and even beyond, to the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand – why shouldn’t Ms Kimani and her compatriots come to Britain?

There has been a remarkable increase in the number of British nurses moving overseas. More than 2,000 left for the US last year, a quarter of the 8,000 who left the country overall. In 1997, the number of nurses who went overseas was half that.

Overseas recruitment is not the only reason African health workers leave their home countries. For many, there are simply no available jobs.

“When I was studying in Kenya, we were absorbed automatically,” Ms Kimani said. “Now there are more nurses than the country needs or can pay for. If all the Kenyan nurses who work in the UK were to return to Kenya, there won’t be enough jobs for them … I am not betraying my country.”

Forcing people to stay at home will not work. As Kwadwo Mensah, Maureen Mackintosh and Leroi Henry write in The Skills Drain of Health Professionals from the Developing World, a paper published by the UK charity Med-Act: “Coercive measures to prevent departure work poorly; worse, they can intensify pressures to leave.”

There are inequities in this dilemma, but remittances partly mitigate the situation. According to the World Bank, migrant workers send more than $90bn (£44.7bn) to their home countries, the second-largest source of funds for poor countries after foreign direct investment. It is a significantly higher amount of money than that provided by development aid.

Health charities acknowledge the power of remittances, but remain critical because such flows go direct to families and do not replenish the loss suffered by the state in providing the subsidy in the first place.

With that in mind, the economist Jagdish Bhagwati, of Columbia University in the US, says states should tax their citizens who work and live abroad – something the US already does.

Several charities have argued that the UK should provide financial restitution and fresh development aid to Africa so that it can bolster its health sector. However, developing a grand plan would take time.

That is why individuals such as Ms Kimani are so important. Granted, all emigrant health workers may not return home, but their remittances lift their families out of poverty.

What can be done about the skills gap? “Skilled Africans are going to emigrate. I would propose a Grey Peace Corps, where our ageing and early-retired skilled professionals can be tapped for two and three-year stints to work in Africa,” Dr Bhagwati said.

“While Africans, whom we must train in vastly increased numbers at our universities, will work here, our people must work in Africa until the need for skills can be met meaningfully.”

• Salil Tripathi is a London-based writer who specialises in Asian and international economic affairs. The article can be found here.

SocietyGuardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

Gannibal: the Moor of St. Petersburg

On the right is Ibrahim Abram Petrovich Gannibal flanked by his great grandson, Aleksandr Pushkin.

The extraordinary Gannibal was the African great-grandfather of Aleksandr Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet, who spoke proudly of his own inherited “blackamoor profile”. Read a review of Hugh Barnes’ extraordinary biography about this Chadian who changed the face of Russian history.

Nairobi Woman Made a Slave, Police Investigator Says

By Jim Mbugua
For the Daily Nation

(See end of post for more information)

A Nairobi doctor and her husband are under investigation for making a woman a domestic slave in their household, the police said in court papers.

The victim worked 15-hour days six days a week, was locked in the Golf Course residence performed nearly all the domestic chores and was only allowed limited contact with guests to the home.

No charges have been filed.

Both the police and the prosecutor’s office in Nairobi declined to comment beyond what was in the public affidavit for a search warrant filed earlier this month in Kibera District Court.

The couple could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.

According to police constable John Twende, the victim’s story started in Ogembo, Kisii where she supported her three daughters by working as a caregiver for the doctor’s mother.

In early 2003, she was asked if she would consider moving to Nairobi to work for the Osogo family.

The woman agreed, hoping to raise enough money to send her daughters to school and provide better housing for them, according to the court documents.

The Osogos agreed to pay her Kshs 2500 ($33) a month, take care of all basic living expenses and buy uniforms and books for her three daughters who attend a government school in Ogembo town.

They also said they expected her to care for the couple’s young son during daytime hours, the court papers said.

The Osogos arranged for the victim to accompany the doctor’s mother on a trip to Nairobi. The mother stayed for six weeks while receiving medical treatment.

Soon after the victim’s arrival, she told police investigators, she learned that the doctor did not intend to fulfil promises made as terms of employment. The doctor was pregnant, and the victim said she was told she would also have to care for the baby after it was born.

She told investigators she was expected to do all the domestic housework and cooking, and was given explicit directions on how to perform each task.

Her workday began at 6 a.m. and ended about 9 p.m., she said, according to court papers.

Although she had Sundays off, she was still expected to prepare meals ahead of time for the family. The salary was inconsistent, ranging between Kshs 500 and Kshs 1200 a month, she said.

The couple told her that if she refused to comply, she would be forced to leave their residence, arrested by local policemen friendly to the Osogos and returned to Ogembo without a job, documents said. “None of the terms of the employment … (was) honoured.”

She was socially isolated, the papers said, and told not to socialize, and that she could be fired for visiting friends.

On Sundays, she sometimes went to church with the couple, and was introduced to a man at church who agreed to act as a mediator to negotiate for better working conditions.

In September 2004, the negotiator wrote the couple a letter, saying he was concerned about the victim’s employment status.

The couple told the victim “to pack her belongings and directed her to leave their residence immediately,” court papers said. She was given an envelope with $3500 cash and a one-way bus ticket to Ogembo.

The woman called the mediator, worried that the Osogos might try and get her arrested by their friends and not knowing where to turn for the remainder of the money they owed her…

The story above is actually about a Kenyan woman who was cruelly and illegally exploited by her middle class employers in Washington State (United States). The Herald reported on the FBI’s investigations into her ‘enslavement’ and I was struck by how exactly the circumstances matched those of my recent post on the Nairobi housemaid. The post and the story are exactly alike except that I have replaced American references with Kenyan ones. Though housemaids are often treated much worse than this in Kenya, there are no investigations into the problem by the police or the media.

The London Visit is at the Heart and Soul of Kenyan Politics

The British government has banned Transport Minister Chris Murungaru from stepping on UK soil. Joining him are a senior security official, a high-ranking civil servant at the AG’s office in a list including up to five ministers whose visas to Britain may also be revoked.

Though much of the coverage of this story has revolved around the diplomatic implications of the ban, let not the level of emotional and psychological anguish that a Kenyan politician feels at being unable to visit London be underestimated. From shopping at Harrods to strolling in the manicured lawns of their children’s boarding schools in the English countryside, access to the ‘mother-country’ is considered by Kenya’s political elite to be a key signifier of ‘making it’. Many own property in London – the abovementioned security official and civil servant for example reportedly own homes in the capital – and it is a favourite stop to bank suitcases of cash illegally procured from the public purse.

Since the Lancaster House conference, a series of three meetings in the early 1960s in which Kenya’s constitutional framework and independence were negotiated, the trip to London has always determined the trajectory of a political career in Kenya. With much of governing consisting of a slavish aping of colonial rule, the Kenyan politician requires psychological top-ups every once in a while. He visits London to be reminded of how high he has risen in the world: the distance he has put between himself and the dusty village he was born in and the mean streets he lords over.

The Kenyan politician exists in a tortured state when it comes to Britain, or England to be more exact. He loves all things English from the part of his personality that is aspirational. He grew up seeing the mzungu (the colonial settler or official) as a symbol of power and privilege, and more often that not was led into nationalist politics by a rarely stated or even conscious desire to one day follow suit. His lowly station in relation to the mzungu naturally made him burn with a resentment that was only compounded by his envy. The fruits of his success are not only wealth, but include the same paternalism and petty brutality that the British colonialist displayed toward the Kenyan. For the British to revoke Murungaru’s visa is to humiliate one of their political offspring; it is to arouse a similar anger among Kenya’s rulers as they would feel toward a deadbeat father.