Death of the Kenya Dream?

Written for The East African (Nairobi)
July 31, 2006
By Parselelo Kantai (posted here with the author’s permission)

AT THE LAUNCH OF LOTTE HUGHES’s book, Moving the Maasai, Professor Bethwel Ogot stood up and declared the Kenyan project dead.

Ogot, the father of Kenyan history and Africa’s most celebrated historian, has spent most of his career writing Kenya into being. When he started out over 50 years ago, Africans were said to have no history. They lived in a continuous unconscious present, a land of perpetual childhood.

He challenged this racist assumption, traced the origins of many of the disparate peoples that occupied the Kenyan geographical space, forged links with the nationalists of the Independence era, promulgated and defended the project that was the Kenyan nation state.

And now here he was in the twilight of his career, presiding over a slice of imported sub-nationalist history.

Ogot’s sentiments reflect something that most Kenyans – especially those marginalised by, and in, the past – know but are afraid to talk about: that the idea of Kenya is a political fiction that will not bear close scrutiny. In fact, the official version of Kenya as born of a heroic armed struggle against colonialism is a narrative that automatically excludes them.

Them: at the top of that list is, in fact, the Mau Mau themselves – the armed strugglers. As Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson shows, the Mau Mau were losers in both war and peace: ‘Kenyatta had been asked about Mau Mau. His answer had been unequivocal: ‘We shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya- Mau Mau was a disease, which was eradicated and must never be remembered again.’

Independent Kenya was founded on a pact of forgetting the past – the spirit of Harambee. To achieve this, histories both collective and personal had to be swept under the national carpet; questions about how notorious collaborators, torturers from the Emergency era, had come to the centre of power were suppressed.

The drama of forging the nation was a single narrative in the continuous present tense – the narrative of Development. Any invocation of the past brought instant punishment, as the late Bildad Kaggia discovered.

Kaggia was the assistant minister for education and the MP for Kandara in then Fort Hall district. In September 1963, he wrote to the minister of agriculture, lands and settlement, Jackson Angaine, inquiring about the restoration of lands confiscated from the Mau Mau, “the freedom fighters who were then known as terrorists”.

In response, Angaine warned him against disrupting the ongoing government land resettlement programme: “Any attempt to disrupt the present consolidated areas- would lead to agricultural chaos, a grave setback to the economy and be in direct contravention of the spirit of Harambee whereby past differences are to be forgotten.” Kaggia, freedom fighter and detained with Kenyatta at Kapenguria, was persistent. It cost him his job – he was forced to resign over the issue – and earned him a lifelong tag of Public Enemy.

Nationalism was meant to be a transformative project. Like the missionary’s civilising mission before it, it would shake the tribe out of the nascent citizen, feed him on a diet of English and Kiswahili, wean him from poverty and disease. Successful, it would have been glorious vindication of the founding ethos, the national need for amnesia.

It was not successful. In fact, after a few earnest gestures, the nationalists themselves began to actively sabotage their own project. Broke when they inherited the state, they needed to eat. To do so, they formed networks of sub-nationalist privilege that operated on the principle that the tribe – and therefore the tribal patron at the centre – was the unstated vehicle of distribution of public resources. Nationalism became a byword for private accumulation.

ANY CONVERSATION of the past is therefore deeply uncomfortable. It is the closed realm in which the personal stories of an ageing political elite are too closely entwined with a public, collective history. Opening it up would force the wenye nchi into an accounting process that they would no doubt rather avoid (wenye nchi means they who own the country, as against wananchi, people of the country, ie, citizens).

Time is on their side, and history returns the second time as farce. It was perhaps a mark of how mysterious these histories had become – how thick the blanket of national amnesia that covered the past – that, soon after NARC came to power, the public was treated to a series of historical faux pas.

One of NARC’s first orders of business was the search for Dedan Kimathi’s grave – in order to exhume the Mau Mau leader’s remains and give him a hero’s burial. The writer Andia Kisia had a year before written a story with an alarmingly similar scenario. Called A Likely Story, she describes the search for Kimathi’s grave. It ends in farce. While digging around the Kamiti Prison grounds, it slowly becomes clear that nobody can actually remember where Kimathi was buried.

Fact proved as strange as fiction. In the event, a highly political event graced by Cabinet ministers, nobody could remember where he was buried. His bones have never been recovered.

Then a man was brought in from Ethiopia and presented to the public as the disappeared Mau Mau hero, General Stanley Mathenge. That act in itself, taking a survivor out the national closet – with all his pent-up secrets, his 50 years of anonymity – seemed to confirm that NARC’s victory over 40 years of Kanu rule was the key to opening up the past.

It was not to be. After a few nervous days in which he was presented to the public and then to his family (who tearfully embraced him) “General Mathenge” couldn’t take it any more. He revealed that he was actually Lemma Ayanu, an Ethiopian peasant farmer.

In perhaps an even more comical display of national amnesia, he was dispatched to the national laboratory and DNA-tested, then swiftly sent back to Ethiopia. The results were never publicly released, a little detail that betrayed the fact that the soul of the new regime was still as paranoid as the old one. And as if to emphasise that NARC was largely a collection of the same old wenye nchi in populist disguise, the promised exercise of opening up the past through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was quietly dropped.

But still. The fact that at least three books touching on Kenya’s colonial experience have been launched in Kenya in the space of 18 months would seem to suggest a limited admission of the need for a national conversation on the past. The launch in Nairobi of Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson, The British Gulag by Caroline Elkins and Moving the Maasai by Lotte Hughes would not have been possible under either Kenyatta’s or Moi’s Kanu.

All these books are loaded with the seeds to plant Kenya’s fraught and tragic histories firmly in the present. They are, each one of them, highly successful experiments in a kind of forensic investigative history. They name names, they profile victims, they point accusing fingers.

In my heated imagination, I envisioned the wenye nchi scampering around for places to hide, hastily launching cover-ups, Commissions of Inquiry. Instead, the expected swords turned to ploughshares, only furrowing the ground of a dormant nationalist imagination. Among the invited guests to her book launch, Caroline Elkins had included the vice-president and the First Lady, both of whom declared the books tremendously useful, in the way that you would describe returned museum artefacts.

What had happened?

Two things, it seems to me. First, the nationalist moment has passed; the fervour with which the past could be used to flay the skins of the saboteurs of nationalism no longer exists. The past has lain under the carpet for so long, it seems to have rotted away and died. In its place is a growing sub-nationalist culture, in which the survivors of colonial injustice seek to point their victimhood in a more profitable direction: British courts and British society, both of which are writhing in the guilt of their imperial past, and which can be forced to pay for past sins.

Both the Mau Mau survivors and the Maasai activists are planning on making claims against the British government. In Andia Kisia’s A Likely Story, historical documents are missing. The protagonist, a man driven to frenzy by his search for the truth, soon discovers why. There is an official who is eating them. He catches him at it.

A similarly Kafkaesque culture of denial, disappearing and forgetting – as Maasai activists discovered when then lands minister Amos Kimunya told them to come back in 900 years if they wanted to reclaim their stolen lands in Laikipia – simply means that confronting the Kenyan state within the bounds of litigation and democracy is an exercise in futility. The Kenyan state only reacts to the vocabulary of mass mobilisation and violence. The Maasai discovered this quickly, when they demonstrated in 2004, attempting to reclaim Laikipia.

The second thing that happened is this: the books, all of them, are pointed in another direction. Their vitriol and indignation is part of an essentially British conversation about its colonial past. On the right of that conversation are those claiming the intrinsic good of Empire – its bequeathing of modernity to erstwhile savages. On the right are the likes of Hughes, Anderson and the American Elkins, who have uncovered British colonial frauds and crimes – the colonial swindle of the Maasai that paved way for British settlement in the White Highlands; the concentration camps and hangings that silenced the Mau Mau during the Emergency. Crimes that shatter the strangely enduring myth of “Empire as a good thing”, making British imperialism look like Nazi Germany.

In between right and left is, however, where the games begin – the contested territory of agency. Who speaks for the “subject races”, yesterday’s “savage natives”, today’s victim claimants? It is, as the writer Michela Wrong recently commented, ironical that the attacks on colonial infidelities and atrocities – on the white administrators who presided over the colonial project in Kenya and elsewhere – are coming from white Westerners:

We are white Westerners, which means that however we may empathise, however vicariously angry we may grow as we pore over old documents, ours remains an essentially intellectual interest. It wasn’t our ancestors who found their paths barred by prejudice, their lives shaped by laws and taxes devised by Africa’s uninvited guests.

It is a question fraught with Africa’s post-colonial contradictions. The collapse of the nationalist enterprise devalued such former prestige projects as research and, as said earlier, effectively silenced its more intrepid practitioners: the men and women detained and sent into exile for asking the most basic questions. The vacuum left has been filled by researchers in Western universities.

Their interest – in the subjects and the subject matter – may be intellectual, but that should not be confused with a benign interest. The territories they now possess are today in their way as valuable as imperialism’s most prized overseas possessions at the height of colonialism. And that doesn’t just refer to funding opportunities. By occupying this intellectual territory, Western academics in African studies departments are also managing perceptions – perceptions of what Africa is and how it can be engaged with.

People who import their histories are doomed by the failure of their own imaginations. Constantly acted upon, they will struggle with a lack of self-belief, and play out whatever roles are assigned to them without ever quite understanding their place in the world. This is the true meaning of “Third World”, the writer VS Naipaul’s “half-made places” that have failed to imagine themselves into an existence beyond the assignations of their former conquerors. The repossession of this territory is the new frontier for the African intellectual.

(c) Parselelo Kantai

The Rule of Law (you say you want it?)

From:
To: KCL SS&PP Students (University of London, King’s College)
Sent: Tuesday, August 29, 2006 4:30:37 PM
Subject: DVD & video borrowing restriction

Dear all,
Please see the dull but important message below, which will principally
affect users at the Maughan Library.

************

Dear student,

We have recently implemented a borrowing restriction regarding the ISS
DVD/VHS collection.

In compliance with the Video Recording Act (VRA) 1984 the British
censor must classify (U, PG, 12, 15 or 18) every video or DVD
distributed in the UK. It is an offence (under Section 9) to supply a
video or DVD that hasn’t been classified unless it lies within a very
narrow class that escapes classification entirely. This class includes
sports and educational DVDs. ERA recordings (off-air) are also exempt.
Not all foreign imports have been classified, though those that have
had a theatrical release already will certainly have been rated.

It is also an offence to supply a DVD/video that does not feature the
correct certification labels (Section 13). No foreign imports will have
UK markings. Under the Act, the word “supply” is carefully defined and
it includes “letting on hire” or loaning, even for no reward.

Therefore, having consulted with the KCL Legal Compliance Team we can
no longer allow unclassified videos or DVDs to be removed from the
building (except for classroom teaching on prior authorisation).
However, they can be issued for viewing in the Library & ISC itself.
This use apparently escapes the statutory definition of “supply”. This
category of DVD and video now features a red reference card stating
where the item can be played as well as a short loan label, with the
last loan period ending at closing time.

We particularly wish to avoid any embarrassment or arguments at the
main counter and security gate so we would appreciate your co-operation
in this matter.

———————-
Information Specialist – Social Science & Public Policy
Information Services & Systems
King’s College London
Franklin-Wilkins Building
Waterloo Campus
London SE1 9NH

Less Kids in Africa Equals Better National Security for America

Jeffrey Sachs who leaps over tall buildings in Bolivia and Russia in a single bound and lands in Africa to solve its many problems is at it again (read article in Scientific American). Where he once promoted the power of unfettered markets, advising the Russians on the ’shock therapy’ that left a bulk of state assets in the hands of a cabal of crooks, he is now an environmental activist urging benign state intervention in economic development. His latest campaign involves helping the environment by helping poor people in Africa and the Middle East whose numbers are rising too fast according to this descendent of Thomas Malthus.

Allowing that people in the rich countries live on about $30,000 per year, well above the global average of $10,000, which itself is substantially more than most Africans consume and earn, his suggestion is that giving birth to less poor people is the best course of action in the future. Sachs is worried not about the suffering of the unborn poor should they live like their parents in scarcity and ill health but rather that they may actually manage to fulfill their economic aspirations. At present growth rates by 2050, according to UN forecasts (not usually worth the paper they are printed on by the way), world population will be 9 billion with 2.5 billion of this number born in the poor countries. If this ’surplus’ somehow finds a way to earn and consume today’s $10,000 average, it would by Sachs calculations cause untold environmental stresses especially due to the fact that cruel fate has chosen to locate ‘biodiversity hotspots’ among the unwashed masses. He worries of the unhappy fate of these hotspots especially since they are a critical part of the ‘Global biological heritage’ a phrase that irritates me to no end because it consigns our part of the world to a perpetual poverty only relieved by the trickle of Birkenstock wearing nature tourists and their cousins, gigolo hungry European grandmas in Mombasa. Our economies are not supposed to grow, or if they do only slowly, according to this view. The African the environmentalist would love to see come to be is a gentle soul who wants nothing more than to live in rude but serviceable shelter, to consume a little food he has grown in the small plot out back, provided it does not kill off that rare species of caterpillar, and who in all things is guided by the desire to live ’sustainably’. Sustainability for the west to be exact. Not for that African – who thank God will never be – access to the comfort and security that comes from building of wealth. They are going to have their nature even if it requires that they get rid of the hungry, ambitious, dare-to-want-to-survive poor’ – before they are born.

Sachs appeals to American national security and economic interest. His argument in summary is that the more poor there are the angrier the number of young men willing to take up arms against prosperous America. He bewails the Bush administration’s ‘religious right’ inspired refusal to support fertility control in the poorest countries. Better to invest in fertility control now he urges: it is the best use of dollars for a more militarily and economically secure future for America. He is kind enough to stress that this should be voluntary fertility programs. Heaven forbid that under the ambit of national security women and men in Africa should be led into little hospital rooms and rendered infertile. As usual Sachs is never one to pursue his arguments to their logical ends. Couched in his kindness is a kind of neo-eugenics: rid the world of the poor by ensuring that they do not give birth to more like themselves; we are running out of room for you especially if you are from the poor nations (which I read to mean brown nations.)

If it is really a matter of national security then under the present American administration’s pre-emptive doctrine against emerging threats, surely there is a need to limit the number of children that the poor have. Yes, this might be achieved by voluntary measures. But foremost will not be the issue of helping the volunteers improve their lives, it will be as was true in all eugenics programs, an attempt to protect ’society’ from the undesirables. It might appear to be a bit much for me to be comparing this kind of well-intentioned policy advocacy with the eugenics movement, but I believe that Sachs’ call folds neatly into those of a century ago and that once the more hysterical and less politically correct types make it, all will be much clearer to you poor, over-breeding buggers.

The humanitarians of the day are like the European missionaries of the nineteenth century, providing justifications for colonial misadventure ‘for the good of the poor, native blighter.’ They increasingly join their mission with the ‘imperial’ promotion of the west’s interests. So much so that western NGOs are now a critical tool in their military’s strategy, helping to blunt the impact of the bombs and bullets poured into a target population. It does not surprise me in the least that with the likes of Sachs running around aid agencies are increasingly being targeted as non-neutral in many battle grounds. The toothless and rudderless left to which Sachs is an honored member has become the sheep’s clothing for a hawkish, domineering constituency that needs fodder for its military adventures. What could be more convenient and humane than to save the poor from themselves while being able to pursue imperial goals clothed in the Good Samaritan’s robes?

In 1807, William Hazlit accused Malthus of making himself ‘conscience-keeper to the rich and great, especially to those of them who are not of a giving disposition, all in coining or at least popularizing for their use the magical phrase or formula ’surplus’ or ‘redundant’ population.’ Sachs too acts to promote the interests of the rich nations but, with a perpetual nod to political correctness and disingenuousness, he would rather he appeared to be regarded as promoting the interests of the poor themselves. He therefore urges the rich to give even more, despite much of this money coming to no good whatsoever and even being harmful in a lot of cases. The animating spirit of his ideas is a restless ambition to be counted first among the rich and great by opining as an expert on regions and matters where his knowledge is thin and mostly involves advocating policies that have been tried for decades and found wanting. Joined by the other hapless musketeers, Bono and Geldof, his is a media game joining concern for poverty with the celebrity bandwagon for the selfish pursuit of personal plaudits and the conscience cooling balm of the ‘feel good factor’. To hell with the poor made to swallow his bitter medicines no matter how ill it makes them.

As Samuel L. Jackson would say of Sachs: ‘How smart can he be? He’s peeing into the wind.’

On a Further Reading

Parselelo Kantai on the contested territory in writing and acting on history in Kenya, and the recent spate of books by white, western intellectuals decrying the oppressions suffered by Kenyans of various stripes under British colonialism.  One of them, Caroline Elkins (author of Britain’s Gulag) reviews Adam Robert’s The Wonga Coup, the story of a failed 2004 coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea led by British mercenary Simon Mann and part-financed by Mark Thatcher, former British PM Maggie Thatcher’s son.  Binyavanga Wainaina generously provides barbed pointers on How to Write About Africa – to hilarious effect.  When African Americans visit Africa, why are they considered white by some Africans?  James Campbell’s Middle Passages is a historical narrative of two centuries of African American journeying to Africa. 

In Kenya and Africa, the Christian church has grown by leaps and bounds.  What is behind this hunger for transcendental truth?  Kenyan missionary Patrick Mukholi sets out to save heathen souls in Oxford, England.  If you’re a man, it turns out that the cut could save your life.  And now there are queues outside the surgery room after studies suggest that a circumcised man is 60% less likely to contract HIV than his uncircumcised counterpart.

 

‘Arrest me not,’ Mel Gibson telleth the centurion, ‘for I owneth Malibu. And thou lookest a bit Jewish unto me.’ Sayeth the centurion, ‘Tell it to the procurator.’

On the War Front

Ah, peace. Who is it good for?

‘”In Afghanistan, Americans have all the wrist watches but Afghans have all the time.” The enemy will attempt to control the clock with the strategic intent of winning by not losing. He will use the clock to wear down American resolve. Management of the clock will allow him to use patience as a means to offset American superiority in killing power.’ So writes Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales (Ret.) who is looking to historian Alan Beyerchen’s touting of touchy-feely soldiering as the next great advance in the theory of war fighting.

Israeli soldiers engaged in urban battle no longer conceive of the city as the site of engagement but rather a medium of warfare. They are leading the way in the development of a new kind of approach to fighting in urban areas where most battles in the coming decades will be fought. The IDF in Nablus in 2002, as is increasingly the case today, aimed to use ‘none of the city’s streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as ‘infestation’, seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares.’ So says architect Eyal Weizman who sees in ‘walking through walls’ tactics the coming together of post-structuralist thought and operational theory. Cutting edge military thinkers, many in Israel, are apparently eager to challenge their institution’s linear thinking, centralized planning and fixed concepts with thinking, and practice, that is consciously post structuralist and draws heavily on Foucault. At last it seems critical theorists just might earn themselves some Pentagon dollars.

Books

Steven Hahn reviews Eric Foner’s Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. At the heart of American freedoms is the history of Black America during the First Reconstruction. Eric Foner revises revisionism.

What if the history from which you draw ’self esteem’ were forged? Pride and mistaken identity.

John Updike tiptoes around Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Wizard of the Crow.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun brings the Biafra War up close and personal. Chimamanda recognises that history happens to people, that it is in the details of lives that the broader canvas of history is understood. Add to that, the book is a page turner.

Prize Winning 419s: I’m blind, also have Diabetes Insipidus, and Diabetes Mellitus

I am a fan and historian of the 419 scam email. I have noticed lately that they seem to be getting better by the day. Now they are written (supposedly) by middle class families in England rather than the usual relative of deposed African dictators (usually West African.) AB & H will henceforth dedicate a prize to one 419 per week selected from those received in my inbox. This week’s winner is Phill Adams whose wife needs a holiday since they have spent all their money on taxi fares to hospital to treat his blindness, ‘Diabetes Insipidus, and Diabetes Mellitus.’ Phill’s real innovation on the 419 email is providing a website from which you can make a donation to his wife’s 2-week holiday. And his decision to go for the heart strings as opposed to greed. Good for you Phill.

Hello,
I’m sorry to bother you but I hope you could spare a few minuets,
I’ve had a lot of ill health and my wife betty has been with my thru out, a real help and support to me, I’m blind, also have Diabetes Insipidus , and Diabetes Mellitus, I’ve had loads of operations on my eyes, and other various operations , and a few years ago I slipped and shattered the bone in my left arm, I’ve had 3 ops on this arm to correct it I still have little use from it, and have to rely on my wife’s help this has put a lot of strain on my poor wife, We live in England and I’d love to beadle to take her on a holiday to Devon in the UK where we live she loves the place and hasn’t had a holiday for some years as most of our money goes on taxis to hospital for me as I cant get around on public transport, could you please help me to give my wife Betty a 2 week break and put a smile on her face by making a small donation of small amount. I know she would appreciate a break
Thank you for your time and if you do spare a little to help me by visiting the link below

www.wifesholiday.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
Many Man thanks for your donation
Phill

What do George Galloway, Five-Fingered Betty and Erica Jong Have in Common?

George ‘Gorgeous’ Galloway with his overly orange tan, shiny suits, ‘indefatigable’ love of the spotlight and praises for Saddam Hussein is not my usual cup of tea but that man can do an interview. There is little that is better on TV than to watch Galloway tear a hapless interviewer to bits. Watch this clip on Sky News.

Earlier this morning I run across a brutally delicious review of Erica Jong’s latest effort ‘Seducing the Demon’ which I probably will not read after such a flaying. When in primary school, I would save my lunch money and buy a used book every Friday at a small used bookstore in Hurlingham (which I recently discovered still plies its trade.) It was there – at the age of ten if I remember right – that I came across Jong’s Fear of Flying. I was initially attracted to the title with its promise of airplanes and pilots. But as I flipped through its pages I came across the sex: fevered ‘zipless fucks’ that roused me to no end. And for some years afterward, while the book was in my possession, the pages with the sex scenes were worn from continual reference. It delivered almost as good value for the money as Nick Carter, the spy whose third testicle was a mini-nuke, or Slocum the gunfighter.

Some years ago, as my mother was turning fifty, and, I think quite scared if her frequent laments were any indication, I bought her Jong’s Fear of Fifty. My reasoning was that the book must surely be about life continuing after this watershed, perhaps even of a life that is more sensual and satisfying. She never did tell me what she thought of it and I had forgotten my gift until I came across this review in the Atlantic Monthly. The gift I fear may have plunged her into an even greater depression. What is it do you think that explains such narcissism which seems to be the almost inevitable destination of baby boomer writers?

The mind being what it is, my remembering reading the Fear of Flying inevitably casts me to the (embarrasing) subject of self love. Or to five-fingered Betty as I heard this relationship with the self referred to when I got to college in the States. The former (or perhaps still-going-strong Marxists) at Spiked, the UK online magazine, have been taking dead aim at the ‘politics of self’ or politics emptied of all content except the narcissism that Erica Jong seems to exemplify. Frank Furedi in an essay on ‘Europe’s very first ‘Masturbate-a-Thon’ event’ shreds the state’s outing of five-fingered Betty. The very same Britain that is today celebrating masturbation as the ultimate self love was a hundred years ago gripped in a hysteria that it was responsible for the weakening of their empire as it presumably had the Roman one…

A Son of the Soil in Khartoum

I am in Khartoum and I need a drink. Badly. But there are none to be had here or at least in no place that I know. Most women are covered up demurely which only seems to raise my curiosity rather than diminishing it. This is my first time here and so far of all the trips I have taken so far this year, I have yet to encounter better hosts. In every office I have gone to, I have been given something memorable to eat or drink. There is a laid back feel to the place and graciousness to the people that put me immediately at ease.

The city itself sprawls over a large area with very few high buildings. Many are clay colored, like the desert, and have wide spaces between them which lends the city a sense of unfettered freedom which clashes somewhat with the careful covering of body and hair by many of the women. The avenues are wide: a runner’s paradise as I discovered this morning when I took what is becoming a small tradition in every city I visit. Unlike cities like Addis Ababa or Copenhagen where the sight of me running attracts a certain amount of attention, people in Khartoum just seem to take it in their stride even though I did not meet any other runners. There are new cars everywhere, and new buildings on the rise, this is a boom city. Oil may be a curse further to the south of the country but here in Khartoum it most definitely a blessing.

The situation in Darfur scarcely seems impact this city. To be here, you would never imagine that there could be such intense suffering in some other part of the country. Politically, one of the more striking sights is of the numerous posters of John Garang on buildings and street lights. In the few conversations I have had with ordinary folk on the peace with the SPLM, I have felt that there was a genuine desire for peace. But will it last I wonder? Should South Sudan opt to secede during the 2011 referendum, I wonder if the peace will be maintained. I hope I get to see more of the country, especially the South. Sudan has always loomed large in my imagination and yet I find that I am so deeply ignorant of it and its complexities.

I remember when I was just about five or six, I would take down the world atlas and insist that my mother play a find-the-place game with me. She would usually pick towns and cities close to Nairobi and I, believing that she would try and go for some distant, obscure town, would start my search in the furthest corners of what was then the Soviet Union. Once or twice she picked Khartoum. When it was pointed out to me (when on the verge of tears of frustration I may add), I would run my finger along the Nile all the way north through Egypt to Cairo. So how surreal it was to stand at the intersection of the White and Blue Nile never having imagined that fate would conspire to bring me here. To see the different currents, the differing colors and to be told that the waters from the two rivers even taste different.

More later.