Escape to Accra

Accra is my new favorite place. Got here yesterday morning and instantly fell in love with the place. The warmth, the openness, the constant positive references to Africa, it’s too much so now I must find some way to spend more time here. On Thursday evening I went from the airport in Nairobi to a dinner in the course of which a mad plot was hatched to get up the next morning and go to Jomo Kenyatta Airport and buy a ticket to Accra. In the last 48 hours I have been to Johannesburg, Nairobi and now Accra. Verdict? Accra is so much easier to enjoy and the people – seriously and not just to throw around cliches – are just so friendly and open to outsiders – very different from my experience down South and of course in the ‘new’ Kenya. More stuff coming up on this visit if only as an interlude from the bleak posts on Kenya that have dominated lately.

Chilling in Djibouti

I just got back from Djibouti and the amazing Palace Kempinsky. It is a beautiful behemoth of a hotel with almost no guests: courtesy of it having being built for the recent COMESA Heads of State Summit and with very few other conceivable reasons for existing. But then before I get into that let me welcome myself back to this blog which I have left for more than a year. The strange thing is that whether I am blogging or not, it gets approximately the same number of visitors. So here is to the end of 2007, a year that has to rank as one of my better ones. I feel like it was the year that I awoke from a sort of reverie, an illusion so grand and long lasting that I had assumed it to be normal run-of-the-mill life.

In the past twelve months I have done my usual frantic running around the Horn of Africa, To Dubai, India, to different parts of Europe (including Rome for the first time where I quite inexplicably wept like a child in St. Peter’s Basilica) and to Algeria. It was fun but there is something about constant travel when you do not truly have a place to call home, a safe port to which you are called, that has a sad aspect. There was nothing to really stop me from saying that I could leave Addis and settle in any of the cities that I visited. So much freedom felt somehow constricting. Don’t ask me, I can’t figure it out either. Here comes 2008. How did it ever come to be 2008? What’s the bloody rush?

Anyway, here are some pictures of Djibouti. I just recently purchased a point-and-click to at least try and preserve some of what I see to permanent memory. I used to dislike the idea of taking pictures instead of looking at what was in front of me. It felt somehow like a greed to possess, like those kids who will save little scraps of unfinished food under the pillow. Anyway, away with all that. Just tried to upload some photos and do not have a clue how to do it.

Jamhuri Day Party in Addis Ababa

Last night I attended the Jamhuri Day party at the Kenyan Embassy in Addis Ababa, an event which is on every diplomat’s and Ethiopian taxi driver’s calendar. There were at least five hundred people who attended and the food and the tusker were in full flow. So much so that I heard myself, as if from afar, roaring all manner of greetings to people that I knew. ‘Welcome to Kenya,’ I would find myself shouting repeatedly to every Ethiopian acquaintance or friend who attended the event. I steered them this way and that, pointed out the banana trees and asked, ‘do you like those Kenyan banana trees? how about this Kenyan building? And Kenyan food, do you like the food? Isn’t the music lovely? Hey how about that ambassador? Coolest diplomat in town right?

It went on this way, fuelled by the generous portions of tusker that I was pouring into myself, and I fear that I was probably the most fearful bore of the party. I was having fun though and I think in some way I was revenging for being made to answer all the foreigner/ferenji questions that come at me on a daily basis. For instance, not a day or two pass without my being asked whether I like injera. Now the answer, and not just for the sake of politeness, is yes. But this question, I think, is really not about injera but about what I, a foreigner, think of this country. There is no option to say no because if there is one thing that some months of being here have taught me is that non-Ethiopians walk on egg-shells around Ethiopian pride. It’s all good though. Pride is good. I guess.

Anyway, back to the party. A young Kenyan who I suspect is a student at the university sauntered up to the bar and stood alongside me. He had short dreadlocks, and had a dark sweater with green, yellow and red stripes worn over a squat, powerful frame. He was very drunk as became apparent when he slurringly and quite belligerently ordered the bartender to pour him a drink. But the bar, he was told, was closed even though the bartender was busy serving me and others – who were all to a man in ties unlike this young revolutionary. He did not take it lying down: ‘Pour me a fucking drink,’ he shouted. The drink, gin, was poured with him insisting that it be filled to the brim. Once it was in his hand, he dashed it to the ground and screamed, screamed is the exact word, ‘to Dedan Kimathi!’

The bartender, a peaceable man till just then shouted back, ‘why you pour drink? Who is this Kimathi?’ Their back and fro, full of outraged explanations by the student and complete confusion on the bartender’s part, entertained me for a full fifteen minutes before we all staggered away to dance to Lingala.

A couple of hours later, this young Dedan Kimathi was spotted fast asleep on embassy grounds. One of the Kenyan diplomats took the opportunity to deliver a lecture on the importance of handling your liquor well – met by slow nods from Kenyans in the circle who were too drunk to do more than mutter guilty agreement. But this group of inebriates came alive in protest when the diplomat made to wake the young man up and kick him out. ‘He is in Kenya,’ ‘how can you kick him out of his own house?’ These and similar remarks came fast and furious so that the diplomat eventually backed down, probably having decided to do the kicking out more discreetly. But the incident seemed to me to speak to a certain, increasing Kenyan ownership of our spaces, and an unwillingness to accept the official point of view. Or am I romanticizing and over-interpreting a small, meaningless incident?

Charm kills art and I fear it has murdered in Addis Ababa

I was recently rewatching Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited when a friend of mine, who is on a one-year writing fellowship in London asked whether he should move house to Oxford so that he could commute to London for his classes. Oxford, which is a city that I enjoy and like, is ever associated in my mind with charm. As in walking its cobblestones always yields the thought of how charming it is. Yet this I suspect is not what Oxford is at all, its charm is a velvet glove worn over a monstrous self regard which like all malign things that are English is hidden by a facade of good manners and prettified surface.

In any case, here is what the character Anthony Blanche says to Charles Ryder, a modestly famous artist of famous country houses played by Jeremy Irons: “I warned you. I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.”

This charm is what I have been seeing in many of the galleries I have visited here in Addis Ababa. The artists seem captive to a desire to please and delight, and little more, so that canvas after canvas, all somehow avoiding the world the artist lives in, become like a giant lie that soothes so that it can sell. Charm, in addition to being a facet of personality, is a magic with dangerous, hypnotic qualities. Who would want to hypnotize if not for the purpose of some sort of harm? Charm as magic in the hands of the pleaser and delighter, the artist who avoids honesty, who steers clear of controversy at all costs, recruits him into society’s ruling army of dissemblers. In fact the dictator is more honest in his manipulations and betrayals than is the artist who paints little cute flowers as tanks roll by in the streets.

It was not until I met Richard Onyango (old NYT review) in Nairobi this past weekend that I was able to recognize what I had been seeing in so many galleries here. Onyango’s art is the practice of honesty and it shines through. His life with Souzy Drosie is captured in all its pain and frustration and happiness. His painting of a KBS bus evoked in me such a powerful memory of a day in which death missed me by an inch and ploughed its tons of metal into a schoolboy who was standing less than two meters from me. Onyango does not charm, he delights and challenges and makes me feel that I must be more honest in my writing, and yes, to be a bit dramatic, in my living as well.

(Btw, here is another great quote from the Brideshead Revisited series. This time by Father Mowbray: “But yesterday I got a real eye opener. The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.”)

Change of Subject and Trip to Asia

I suspect that there is a saboteur out to get bullets and honey; in the last week paragraphs have disappeared from the blog and I just now had a techie friend fix the problem (with embarrasing ease.) Maybe this is what I get for dipping my toes into Kenya’s treacherous tribal wars, in which case I must get away. And by that I mean that I am planning to visit Asia for the very first time.

Yes, this son of the soil is going to get into one of those machines made by man to visit at least a couple of cities in India and possibly one in China. I will be there for a week or two at the most so I suspect that I will not have the chance to see much. But planning and thinking of the trip has brought me low in shame. China has a billion people and I do not have a single close friend that I can call there. How pathetic is that? India is the same with all the Indians I know in the States or in Kenya so that again I do not have a person to call on anywhere on that sub-continent (except for the folks I will be working with for a few days.)

For this reason, I have lately been trying to chat up my Indian neighbors in the hope of some introductions with very little success – they just nod politely and keep walking. Yesterday afternoon I saw a piece of paper on the ground and picked it up only to find that it was a letter in english with some Hindi writing (I assume); I guess it must have been dropped by one of them or blown over from their place. Curiosity got the better of me and so I read it. The only exceptional item was the question whether the recipient had ‘managed to make any new negro friends…’ The thing is that I have been re-reading my James Baldwin lately and so this word negro has been much on my mind but I had no idea that there were still people using it to this day. Is it a bad thing? What does it mean? Assuming that the letter belonged to my neighbors, I really think I should befriend them – maybe all their words are frozen in 1960s ‘jive-turkey’ Americanisms.

If I do get to make this trip, I will be the second person in my close family to have been in Asia. My grandfather fought with the King’s African Rifles in Burma. Well, he didn’t really fight since he was a medic (and therefore was called doctor by everyone in Sigona, Kiambu till he passed away) but he was over there.

Most Kenyans do not know with what tenacity and success our grandfathers fought in that campaign since our relentlessly nationalist reading of history leaves no space to acknowledge Africans who fought for the British against the Japanese or the Germans. What this means in my own life is that I grew up around men who had traveled the world, maybe had even performed great feats in battle and never got to hear about it. I wish I had known what I know now before he died. So many memories in my family seem to just be buried and forgotten. And yet daily I read accounts of other peoples who have fought this or that campaign, who have traveled across that sea or that desert, while not having a single idea whether my own blood ever had the same experiences. It is crazy shit to live in a continent that is the most ancient – the cradle of mankind no less – and not know anything much about my own grandfather’s life. I won’t even get into the fact that I have never heard more than a few words about his father and mother, or theirs.

In the States, my black American friends would occasionally remark on how wonderful it was that I ‘had a history’ and a ‘name’ when theirs had been stolen from them by history. How to explain that in the most personal terms, they could trace their lineages further back than I could mine. That they could pop into courthouses and libraries and come away with records and stories of their grandparent’s parents when I could barely name mine or even tell where they had lived, what they had done. It is as my friend Wambui says, I live in an ancient world without having a history. How to explain to them that I may not have a “slave name” but that I do not really know the meaning of my name. It was handed to me from my grandfather as he received it from his grandfather but I was never told what it meant, where it came from, why for heaven’s sake our naming system was as it is. And please do not tell me of pyramids and the great Kush, they are as remote to me in personal terms as the Han Dynasty or ancient Greece. Of course I feel some nationalist pride once in a while at the thought of the Swahili trading empire or even Nubia and Egypt but I have no a personal sense of linkage with that time and those people because my history looms up short – maybe eighty to a hundred years at the most.
I wonder what this does to me. Am I freed by not being bound by a past, freer to create my life, to imagine different courses? Or am I like a corkscrew in a raging ocean, without direction, without the foundations of history on which to build my life? Hell, are these questions even relevant anymore?

Staring Death in the Face on the Drive to Jomo Kenyatta Airport

After a week of Digital Indaba polemics, entertaining outraged comments from South Africa, I had my moment of Outrage on the way to the airport yesterday morning. My flight for Addis Ababa from Nairobi was scheduled to leave at such a time as made it necessary for me to be at the airport by 5.30am. As is always the case in Nairobi, this departure was heading toward the ‘one for the road’ till flight-time script. But Sohos where we were downing beers – and which I dislike and yet for some reason keep finding myself patronizing – closed early and I was forced to return home in good time to pack and get some sleep. The plan was for K____, my usual taxi driver, to turn up in good time and so he did. As I got into the battered Toyota, I noticed he was quieter than usual, that the front end had a new largish dent and that he seemed to have forgotten the way out of my place. But then I thought it must be the late hour and that perhaps even the curious slowness of his driving was due to his having woken up earlier than usual. This working theory, plus the mild hangover I was suffering all fled as we were pulling into Mbagathi Way (a highway under construction so that both directions of traffic have to share a single road.) My dear K____ was at the stop sign for a full minute though the road was quite empty of traffic. He only decided to pull out, with excruciating slowness, the moment cars were bearing down on us from both directions. They came screeching to a stop and one of the drivers rolled down his window and let go such a furious – and at such an early hour, impressive – flood of curses. K_____ merely nodded his head slowly from side to side as if in sadness that the other drivers could be so unreasonable and unskilled. It was only when he proceeded to drive in the middle of the road, seeming to weave toward the path of oncoming cars, as if somehow their headlights were what to aim for, that I realized that K____ – he of the frequent lectures on the importance of responsibility and punctuality in the working man – was roaring drunk.

‘K____,’ I asked carefully hoping not to distract him further, ‘have you been drinking?’ Silence. ‘Have you been drinking, please tell me,’ I pleaded knowing by this time that the answer must be in the affirmative. Oncoming cars were hooting and driving half on the road and half off it to avoid the Grim Ripper who was clearly now in control of that Toyota. And K____ was his angel of death. What with his sleepy answers, sunken, darkened cheeks, that now as I looked at him made me realize that for the past year I have been getting rides from a man who has ceded much of the flesh of his body to cheap liquors and late hours. I knew that we were never going to make by the time we got to the roundabout near the Barbados Children’s Home, about two kilometers from my first realization that he was drunk out of his mind.

‘I think I must have eaten something that disagreed with me,’ came the reply after long minutes of waiting. I have myself used this never-to-be-believed phrase and the next one as well. ‘I think I am just really sleepy, I have been having such a tough time sleeping. I even scrapped a gate on my way to you.’ The grave for mmk it was, even before the end of the Digital Indaba talkfest. Perhaps this is what comes of questioning do-gooding. That God, the lover of justice and empowerment, sends a drunk driver to your doorstep who crashes you head-on into an oncoming truck. Maybe K____ too had been rude to White South Africans as he carried them from the airport and so Justice was going to kill two birds with one stone.

‘Pullover K____, now!’ by this time I was hysterical. What a bad way to go.

Long story short: he stopped and I took over and drove to the airport with him fast asleep and even snoring in the back. I parked the car with him still fast asleep in it and took my flight. Once again Nairobi having ushered me into its curious blend of terror and comedy, on the way to Addis Ababa where dangerous driving such as K’s would not even make me twitch an eyelid as common and normal as it seems once I am here.

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.

From the Land of the blondes to that of the Two Niles

I left Copenhagen a few days ago and find that my experience of that city was quite underwhelming even without having expected much on arrival. Perhaps it is because I was there for too short a time to appreciate anything more than its architecture and its tourist face. But even on the level of the gut, I only felt a mild stimulation and it usually takes me a very short time to appreciate the pulse of a city. This pulse, when faced with the foreigner, especially the African, beats fast from hostility and defensiveness. The Africans that I met there told me horrific stories of the racism and xenophobia that they had suffered since their arrival. Their variety of stories had in common an inward looking Danish culture that feels vulnerable to the outsider while simultaneously feeling superior to him.

A Ghanaian professor who took his doctorate from the University of Copenhagen and later taught at the same school told me of students who walked out during his introductory class: they refused to be taught by an African, thinking that there was no possible way he could be qualified. He would start his classes with the painful joke that he ‘had not come to play music.’ This was said to me with a laugh but I could tell that it still hurt him all these years later. He observed that early in his sixteen-year stay Copenhagen, he was criticized for not speaking Danish. Immigrants had to integrate into this new society and learning the language was the first and most important step. But once this was done, he said, the charge became that skilled migrants like him were there to take jobs from the locals. It is the same refrain heard in many European countries that reflects a fear of a world that those same countries have benefited so much from by trading with or conquering it in the past.

A Nigerian taxi driver told me repeatedly of the slurs that he had suffered there, the provocations. The Cartoon Controversy according to him was less an assertion of free speech than a much publicized provocation that all those who are not white and Danish feel in their new home. It seemed a great shame that a society so accomplished would lack confidence to the extent that it fears people who are merely seeking a brighter future for themselves. But let me not make it seem like all was doom and gloom.

The Danes know cocktails. I had the best margarita of my life there: the phi phi. The magic ingredient in it is chili so that the slight burn of the tequila as it went down my throat was followed by the warmth of the spice. The lounge in which I had numerous phi phis was like a million others in any major city that you care to go to. It had low lighting, jazzy music playing and a hum of conversation at the exact pitch and volume as New York or Nairobi or London. There is a convergence of desire I have been arguing to all and sundry, a decades-long rise of an urban elite that is essentially global in its outlook. And it is this very elite that I think can be argued, even without the benefit of the phi phi, to be managing the convergence of state norms and operations. This has led, especially in Europe, to governments that appear cut off from popular consensus and drawing their legitimacy from a kind of internationalist elite worldview. It is the calm cover to a roiling and boiling sea.

There is a tradition of gift giving to the state and the country in Denmark that fascinates me. The queen’s residence is four palaces contributed by seventeenth century merchants. They face – across a small body of water – the city’s opera house which was built for half a billion dollars contributed by Mærsk Møller of Maersk shipping fortune. I wonder why this same tradition has not taken root in Kenya. Perhaps it is because the way the idea of the public space is constituted is as a trough from which to grab wealth and not to deposit it. You take from the center, a center that no-one seems to believe that they occupy (you will notice that Kenyan politicians and bigwigs wear a perpetual cloak of victimhood and a sense of operating from the margins.)

For the days I spent in Copenhagen, I run every morning. And got lost each time. Running in a new city tells you a lot about it. In New York for example, where I lived for some years, runners will nod to each other. I used to feel free to sidle up to a fast running one and ask whether we could push each other. The answer was invariably an enthusiastic yes. But in Copenhagen, I felt watched and suspected of some crime. Perhaps I was just a surprising sight. But in a city with pretensions of sophistication, I felt like I was in a rural town, what with the wide-eyed ‘who are you?’ stares and the averted ‘I am not seeing you’ gaze.

Next post is on Khartoum, Sudan where I have been for the past twelve hours.

Up North in the Land of the Blondes

Back to the land of high-speed wireless internet. Otherwise known as heaven. I must post about Copenhagen even if it is only about my initial impressions which are shrouded in a heavy fog of ignorance. Before I do that though, do you believe that there is such a thing as destiny when you meet people? On the flight from Alexandria to Heathrow, I met an architect from Oslo who specializes in building villas from the simplest materials who was coming from her project in Ethiopia. It was just as I was thinking of having a small place somewhere in the Rift Valley that I could visit when I am in Kenya and need to get away from it all. Well, after a long conversation on books, the relative merits of one duty-free perfume versus the other, we started plotting a villa that would be cheap and made very simply. Watch this space since if this plan, which I have had with a few friends of mine gets underway, I intend to blog every single step of building my own little out-of-town heaven 🙂

It took just under two hours to fly here from London but no two airports or cities seem more different. Heathrow of course is much bigger and perhaps because of that is so much more impersonal. Full of grey carpeting and scowling staff while you step off your plane onto parquet floor in Copenhagen, and it a much friendlier and intimate space. Instead of taking a taxi to my hotel I took the train to the city’s central station. Because night had fallen by the time I landed, I could see very little as I pulled up to the Copenhagen Strand. But I had to get something to eat and decided to do some late night foraging.

Map in shameful (I need to consider myself a traveler not a tourist) hand, I walked to Amager Torv, a square I was told has restaurants that serve food late into the night. The streets were quite empty of walkers and cars but I felt no sense of threat or nervousness despite never having been here before. I felt no surprise, no sense of revelation as I walked. The streets just as I expected had cobblestones and the buildings were a mix of the sleekly modern and older styles that I felt that I had seen before in many other European cities. In Europe surprise seems to have been packaged into a restrained charm. In place: obedient to the whole. The more I see of the continent’s cities compared to those in my part of the world, East Africa and the Horn, I become more convinced that it is the westerner who is the more communal being than the African despite the present wisdom which holds the opposite view. Here there is a rigid social and historical skeleton – especially writ in the architecture – underneath individual individuality. The few people I met in their variety of funky styles seemed in a way to be unable to break out from the unmoving solidity of the buildings leaning over them. This town, like the others I have seen in Europe, seems to constantly remind its citizens that IT and not them are what is enduring and worthy of that continuity.

Nairobi in contrast is a city of its people. Its physical manifestation pales in comparison. (This is half the problem if we are assessing the city’s many problems.) In a very real way in Nairobi people are the institutions, they are the buildings. That is what makes all the dirt and the poverty and the crime there co-exist with a sense of vitality that once you have tasted is very difficult to stay away from or to replicate anywhere else. Anyway, back to Copenhagen.

I had an excellent steak at Pasta Basta just after 2 am in the morning. Wonder what talented chef agrees to keep such late hours. The tables around me were filled. One notably with a group of young men who were painfully thin, had clearly drunk an enormous amount of beer if their loud shouts of laughter were any clue and who I imagined were musicians discussing their latest road trip. Another table had two women, one who kept getting up to go out of the restaurant to take mobile phone calls. She would return and they would immediately plunge into bitter condemnations (they were speaking in english) of some guy who clearly kept calling just as his rival was sending texts. Her companion, clearly the loyal support during some kind of break-up drama, kept nodding along seemingly agreeing with every rant that emerged from the other’s mouth. It was such a universal scene. I imagined that on the other side of the phone was a guy also seating in a bar with a friend who was was also nodding along in agreement at whatever analysis his injured buddy made about the mobile calls. Love, as wonderful and teary in Copenhagen as it is elsewhere. The few people I have seen so far in the city by the way are very physically attractive: fit and tanned and energetic.

Walking back to the hotel, I got lost and walked for over an hour before I finally found my way. At some point, at a distant, I saw a group of about ten youths (yuuuthhss or yuuts as Joe Pesci would say) milling about next to the canal. Behind me was a man pushing along his bike. It was the first time all evening that I felt nervous. I suddenly wondered about all the stories I have read on neo-Nazi attacks on Africans. Though I can remember hearing of none in this city, the closer I came to them, enough to see that they were observing me closely, the more nervous I got. Yet I felt unable to turn back the way I came and there were no side streets to turn into. Besides, I told myself, they had me in their sights now and if it was indeed going to come to some late-night violence, my turning down a darkened road might have made the whole matter worse. My imagination, which is ever coming up with one unlikely scenario after another, by this time was serving up horrible images of what was to come. Bloody images of yuuts tearing cobblestones off the pavement and using them to bludgeon me unconscious before throwing me into the canal. Or of me grabbing a brick from the side of the road and charging toward screaming in inarticulate rage and terror. I must confess that my eyes, as they seem to always do in situations where I suspect the slightest physical threat, searched frantically for a weapon. It is this fear of mine for violence which lends me to believe that the coward is possibly the most violent human being there can be. His fear of others allows him leeway to commit terrible crimes to assure his safety. In any case, the kids were probably just as curious about me as I them. As I passed by slowly they ceased talking so that it felt that I was inspecting a kind of Danish teenage parade of soldiers armed with skateboards and pocket keychains.

That was my first day in Copenhagen. More to come if I can work up the stamina to seat in front of this keyboard when it is summer outside.

The rudeness quotient for Copenhagen (with 1 as very polite and kind, and 10 as boorish and unwelcoming) on day 1 is a 5 since what I have experienced in my interactions so far is a politeness that emanates more from efficient professionalism than voluntary hospitality. The score may change by the time I skip town this weekend.

Destination Djibouti

My brother and I have been in Djibouti for the past six hours or so and I am already in love with the city. In the first place, after more than fifteen winters in the US and the UK, there is nothing I enjoy better than extreme, humid heat. To celebrate, I foolishly went out for a run this afternoon in the 40 degrees plus heat. Of course after a few steps, I settled on a sluggish walk about the city. It is beautiful: Moorish architecture, wide, clean streets and a long, curving driveway along a beautiful Red Sea beach. How strangely the future can turn out. If you had told me that I would be here six months ago I would have said you were insane. I am here with my brother who is all of 22 years old and studying astrophysics just outside London. He is one of the better travel companions I have ever had even though he keeps trying to get me to understand why string theory should excite me when I cannot even get beyond the fulcrum. But he makes such a good counterpoint to me on the road with his soft touch and polite manner when I can sometimes tend to be a bit barky and anxious. We are here through Thursday and I am already sorry to be leaving. More details tomorrow and possibly even some photos.

48 Hours and Counting

Ok, I have been in town for the last two days and I am hoping that I could spend a lot more time here in the future. I just returned from having an amazing dinner at a restaurant called 7 Freres. Our host recommended we have fresh fish baked in a clay oven and smeared in spices and lemon. On the side was roti bread, honey and pounded, ripe banana which we washed down with cold beer. Then we followed a huge crowd making its way to the People’s Palace (if I remember the name right) where there is an open air concert being held by a Congolese lingala band.

Djibouti is a country that feels like it is on the brink of getting wealthy. One of its great boons is the standoff between Eritrea and Ethiopia which has made the latter unwilling or able to use its traditional Eritrean port. Perhaps more importantly, the government officials with whom I have had a chance to interact seem keenly conscious of their duty to facilitate the trading desire of their people and take advantage of the country’s strategic position in the Red Sea. Then the large French and American military bases are a huge revenue earner though there is clearly a social price being paid by having thousands of heavily muscled, horny and aggressive young men with money rampaging about.

More later…

And then I woke up in Amsterdam

Your friendly blogger has been in the Netherlands for the past couple of hours after a long sleepy flight from Addis Ababa. How surreal it is to step off a plane a few hours later and be somewhere so different from where I left. I have never gotten over the feeling that flying is magical. It is probably because of my deep ignorance of all matters relating to physics and anything with the slightest mechanical function. All I know is that I am in a metal tube full of very heavy people that somehow is making its way through the heavens. How amazing is that?

Amsterdam feels so still, so ordered. Are its differences compared to an Addis or a Nairobi merely a matter of wealth in one and not the others? Blogging at an internet cafe next to a ‘coffeeshop’ from which is wafting the smell of marijuana. It is one of the reasons I love Amsterdam: they know people smoke pot and so why not just legalise it and limit where it can be smoked? It is a policy that I think can only arise from a people who have divorced themselves from grand utopian visions and whose moral concern is focused on the individual and not the group. Having said all that, I do not think I would much enjoy living here. The place of dark-skinned folks like me seems distressingly low. Also, it might be the hour of day but the few Dutch I have encountered today seem ruder than I remember them. Let me walk a few cobblestones though before I make any conclusions.

Concorde or my first two hours clubbing in Addis Ababa

And so now it can be said: mmk has visited the famous Concorde in Addis Ababa. And what little shreds of innocence that were still (reluctantly) hanging off me have now been stripped and buried for all eternity. Oh yes, to this son of the soil, innocence is a past state of being. Where to begin?

In the past two weeks, a number of taxi drivers have been recommending that I should visit the Concorde Hotel on account of it being lots of fun and very popular with foreigners. But since realizing that taxi drivers in Addis are made precisely from the same clay as those in Nairobi, namely that they are out to fleece anyone with the sucker look one wears in a new town, I was not willing to take them up on the offer. Besides, I have been trying to sustain a no-alcohol pledge; and thought it best to stay away since I do not associate nightclubs with sodas.

On the night in question, this past Friday to be exact, I went to have dinner at a workmate’s home. In the course of conversation, it turned out that the Concorde was just a short walking distance away. We decided to check it out and my curiosity only grew when he assured that I would see, ‘things you have never seen before bwana aiii!’

Once at Concorde and having paid the 20 birr cover charge, it took less than three minutes to realize that its popularity has nothing to do with its music or cocktails: it’s the sex for sale that draws the crowd. We were in Addis Ababa’s version of Nairobi’s Florida nightclubs.

There was an Ethiopian band playing to a crowd whose mood is best summed up as ‘hurry up and stop all that singing and dancing, we are here for other things.’ After an hour of excruciatingly unenthusiastic performances, the club music kicked in spurred on by an MC who bounced around the small space rapping along with whatever hip-hop was in any particular song. The DJ (and please oh lord I beg for leave to issue a critique that I hope does not extend throughout the city) seemed trapped in an American mid-western, early 1990s music hell. I suppose there must be a fundamental existential crisis DJs suffer when they have to play for western tourists or expats and local prostitutes. Imagine the dilemma as they build their play list for the night: do I play hip hop for the 18 year old girl who will cajole the John to buy drinks and stay longer or to her 60-year old John from a small town in Missouri? Add to that the insistent little voice in the DJs head that insists he is an artist and should be above all other concerns.

His attempt to unify the disparate audience at Concorde meant that a jazzy song was succeeded by rap, then by Lingala and then that national anthem of American middle-age angst: ’18 till I die, 18 till I die…yeah!’

One wall of Concorde is mirrored. For the two hours I was there, several women stood in front of the mirror dancing with their own images. They were so absorbed, so taken with the obvious beauty in front of them; it must also have been a good vantage point from which to get a view of who was checking them out most ardently. The weird thing is I found myself concentrating more on the image in the mirror than on the woman standing in front of it. It was as if by looking so intently at her image, she drew me to her image and away from herself. But then since the image was also looking at her… Let us turn to our Lacan here because there is clearly a need for some further confusion. I have not read Lacan but do know at least that he wrote on the mirror stage. Imagine again this young, tightly trousered, nubile woman dancing in front of the Concorde mirror. When she was younger and had done the same thing, Lacan would have said that she was involved in the initial and necessary act of self manufacturing – by identifying the self according to the Other. And if indeed I do understand any part of other arguments he made, then perhaps the woman in the mirror was not actually her at all, but a stranger, an Other. This of course must be quite close to the truth of selling sex for money. It requires, I would suppose, a distancing, an ability to say that this is me and that woman over there in the bed under the heaving weight is some other person. A tough person who does what she has to do.

(Please do not ask that it make sense because nothing Lacan says makes sense to me. Actually nothing anyone says that involves the words self, other or identity make any sense to me anymore. I have been far too corrupted by an Anglo-Saxon veneration of words for authority’s sake. If you want to get into this a bit more, I suggest you go to Wikipedia – not that it helped me in the least)

In Greek mythology, Medusa whose gaze turned people to stone was herself turned to stone when Perseus the hero held up a mirror to her. Snow White’s Wicked Queen needed the reassurance of a magic mirror to know that she was the fairest woman in all the land. And my favorite: Harry Potter in one of the books glances into a magic mirror that reflects his deepest desire. Destruction, revelation and yearning. Surely the women in Concorde could in some way relate to the three mirrors. Or perhaps this riff of the subject is just my way of dealing with the fact that I am once again procrastinating from my long suffering thesis.

Anyway, to get back to the scene, the twenty or ladies on the floor were swaying patiently to the music. They were not actually dancing as much as showing off their wares, waiting for the prod in the back, the one that says ‘can I dance with you or buy you a drink?’

In the dim light, their eyes shifted slowly from one male face to the other. They peeled away my pretension that I was just a local accompanying some ferenjis (foreigners) out on the town. The table between me and the dance floor had white expatriates seated around it. They were behaving as if they were on dates with women whose body language to everyone except their ‘date’ reflected an utter boredom relieved only by practiced touches filled with a detached erotic promise.

At an adjoining table was a smooth looking dude in all-black clothing and exuding manicured airs. The women kept walking up to him and drifting away minutes later. He coolly appraised each as if he knew their secret which in his mind must have amounted to ‘I know what you want and it is me you want’. I suspect that he actually felt that beneath all the solicitations was a genuine desire for him since he was clearly irresistible. There are Johns whose visits to prostitutes are only made bearable by maintaining the conceit that love can flourish somewhere within the money-for-sex transaction. I found myself disliking every man in the room except for the waiters and the grossly fat, exhausted looking bouncer.

As we sat there, with me trying to hold onto my non-drinking pledge, I noticed a woman looking at me more intently than any of the others. Her eyes were filled with come hither and so I tried filling mine with ‘I am scared of you and have a wife and am considering becoming a monk.’ But her eyes ignored such pleas and insisted, ‘you know why you are here, why else would you be here if not because of me?’ By the time I came back to the table from a toilet break, her eyes had stopped talking and her mouth had taken over.

‘You want to dance?’ she asked loudly to be heard above whatever song the bastard of a DJ was playing.
‘Um, no thanks, I don’t like this song.’ I answered.
‘You want to buy me a drink?’
‘Um, not today, I am just about to leave.’
‘But I love you.’

My colleague interjected then with loud and, to my ears, very welcome laughter. ‘These ladies,’ he said into my ear, ‘they know only three words: drink, love and condom.’

Such was the adventure at the Concorde where you are promised to fly very high or very low or whatever kind of flying provided you are ready to pay the fares.

Addis Ababa Bombings

If you have ever wanted to know what you think of terrorism, try and be in a city that has just had bombs go off in a public place. This is what happened in Addis Ababa (where I am staying for now) on Friday when at least six explosions went off and killed three Ethiopians while wounding a score.

This is the third city I have been in (the others being New York and London) where civilians have been targeted by groups pursuing some kind of political agenda. I cannot stand it. It is fashionable to point to the political oppression or marginalization endured by certain groups and to conclude as understandable or even supportable those among them who choose in turn to terrorize other civilians. But being in a targeted city, not knowing whether the minibus you are riding in will explode or whether the car parked outside the cafe in which you are having coffee has a bomb in it is unbearable. I guess that is the whole point of the exercise, to make the state appear to have no control or for the state itself to wield such violence to justify its authoritarian controls. Either way, if you are a civilian it just means that you are a sitting dark, waiting for men in the shadows to make of your body and life what they will. It sounds such a discordant note to the control I have come to consider I have over my life – that there is someone somewhere who wants to make a point to someone else through my bloody remains. I think that the people in this city are very hardy. Perhaps they are made so by their history which is bloody and peopled with leaders who considered their lives expendable.

Terrorism’s great evil is in considering a stranger’s life expendable in a cause that is at most indirectly connected to that person. Whether you are bombing a ‘target’ from thousands of feet in the air knowing that you will kill a stranger or swinging a machete at them or blowing yourself up with him, the evil is in not knowing what you have brought to an end. What gross ego to consider that single life with its incalculable threads of obligation and love and hope to be irrelevant to the ideas and feelings swimming around inside you. This is why I dislike ideologues nowadays. At the logical extreme of their words lies death for strangers and privilege for themselves. I particularly dislike the ones who would mouth ideologies, especially radical ones, without having the good grace to accept that the road to their utopia is littered with broken bodies. Better those grim types who know exactly what they are willing to do to realize their plans rather than the soft self indulgence that would celebrate death at a distance while holding onto moral uprightness. I feel for those three people and their families and can only guess at the rage and despair that their deaths have caused. All for some arsehole to feel bigger and better.

My Best Friend’s Wedding

I just got back to London from Washington DC where my close friend was getting married this past weekend. Now this is a friend I have had since boarding school in Nairobi; we went to the States for university at about the same time; and roomed together in Brooklyn for some years. BK or Fort Green to be exact was one party after the other, ‘shots all around’ being one of our more frequent utterances and of course where there is alcohol and testosterone, seeking the company of women was par of the course. Because of so many years spent as close friends we had developed our own private language. One of its more important concepts that we repeated like a mantra was ‘standards and rules’. These were applied to women. We carefully calibrated our individual preferences, analysed them over many beers and over time codified our romantic desires and how to go about satisfying them.

It was quite juvenile really but I think very serious for all the jokes we made about it. Sometimes I think it was an attempt to create some kind of order in the chaos of being single in New York City. We formed a little community with its ethics and battlegrounds even if they were only located in lounges and the succession of parties we frequented. Our enemy, I think, was loneliness. The feeling of not being wanted in a city built on the principle of aspiration and the conceit that only those who are weak or unworthy do not realise their every dream. New York has a way of inflating or redirecting your desires. For example, you may have thought that you wanted to date a funny and down to earth person when you got off the bus from some small town or country. A few months later, you would be telling your friends that you wanted to only date funny and down to earth supermodels willing to share you with their supermodel friends.

The city makes you believe that your most fevered imaginings are just a Thursday night away, just a matter of being at the right place at the right time. That place of course being yet another darkened lounge playing the same relentlessly funky jams and filled with people who manage to simultaneously seem completely unique and uniform. Fun is what it was. So much fun that I had it coming out of my ears so that it stopped being fun – like being made to laugh continuously without being able to stop or tickled for hours on end. Our standards and rules created ever finer distinctions. Before I got to New York, I had not fully appreciated the Eddie Murphy character in Boomerang who rejects a woman because her feet have cones. With the benefit of hindsight and at a distance, I now realise that I was actually having an almost sexual relationship with the city itself. I desired it as it was reflected in all the people I used to spend time with. Proof came when I left the city for London with my mobile phone holding hundreds of numbers. A few weeks after settling in London, I scrolled through these numbers and could not recognise two-thirds of them and had no desire to speak to more than a handful. Yet these other strangers were people I had spent many hours with, shared all manner of experiences, slept with some and argued with others. But it was really never about them as much as it was about being in love with the city that forced them into the same lounge I was in or even into my bed. The city demanded fidelity and very rarely gave anything that did not sharpen your appetite for its other (waiting) charms.

When my friend and his girlfriend decided to get married, it was an act of rebellion. It could only have succeeded once they removed themselves from their relationship with New York, which they did since they now live in Washington DC. He threw off ‘standards and rules’ which allowed him I think to see that these never had the ability to help him find his bride who is so much more than what he had thought he wanted when we were in Fort Green. His asking me to be best man forced me to turn away from the language that we had honed for so long since it could scarcely help digest the course he had chosen for himself. And what has been so great about it in the last year is realising progressively that our friendship which most people who know us would think is entirely based on partying was filled with all this other good stuff which had been getting built parallel to our life of tequila shots and thong analysis.

The wedding had about 80 people and was very simple. I got to be MC and so spent most of the day stressed that I was going to drop a clanger and be forever damned. I did drop several but I think only a few people noticed them. The more I think of it and our previous friendship as single men in NYC – since we are now in a different place – the thing that makes me happiest for him is that he has looked within himself for what he wants and not allowed external standards and rules to make the decision for him. I suspect something special happened to me this past Saturday as well but time will tell, for now though I know it was one of the happier days of my life.

The bitter tears shed when I compare my trip from home to Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta Airport and from London’s Heathrow to my flat.

Back to the African Bullets & Honey monster after more than a month away from its ravenous hunger. I only got back to London early this morning after a month in Nairobi. Allow me to once again – because I believe I have blogged about this before – give you a glimpse of the inevitable culture shock that I always have when I compare the trip from our Nairobi home to Jomo Kenyatta Airport and then from Heathrow to my London apartment.

Nairobi 28th February:

Flight leaving at 23:25 meaning that I am meant to check in at 21.25 latest. But of course I only leave the house at 21.15 in a two-car convoy carrying friend, sister and mother – well three cars when you include my other buddy meeting us at the airport. This little posse is not only an outpouring of love; the airport trip to the middle class Kenyan, since the economic hard times of the 1990s, is like a confirmation that an escape route exists to hope, to a rebirth, a fresh start. The first time you are escorted to it, there are tears of sorrow at your departure, others of envy at the supposedly better life you will have abroad. We get to the airport at 21.45 and spend the next 15 minutes or so chatting by the curbside and saying repeated goodbyes that are interrupted by some comment. Then the hugs, the misty eyes (none by yours truly; I am a tear-less ninja except when it is time to blog when I shed with the sheer frustration caused by the AB&H monster’s cruel hold of me) and the final shouted goodbyes. Naturally, being the African-with-a-chip-on-his-shoulder, I hate flying British Airways and avoid it whenever I can. Not this time though, revolutionary principles must after all yield to cheap internet fares. Imagine my surprise – and disappointment – when with my teeth bared to attack any sign of British condescension, the manager instead decides to upgrade me to premium economy. Next stop: the friendly immigration officer who admonishes me not to stay ‘out there’ too long. After a cup of java coffee and a slice of carrot cake, I move to my seat next to a development consultant who (I swear this) spends the eight hours of the flight reading a long, hair-pullingly boring development report. He must be worth every penny, that poor SOB. But this is a story for another day…

London 1st March:

Pilot:

‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain, thank you for flying British Airways.’

‘London today is quite cold, under zero degrees.’

‘We hope you have enjoyed our service and that you will enjoy your stay (you poor suckers hahahahahahaha…)’

THE IMMIGRATION INTERVIEW:

‘Where are you from?’ (peering intently at old stamps and visas. You are one of them: the illegal immigrant, the African with a behind crammed with ecstasy…or at least cocaine or heroin.)

‘What do you do here?’

‘I am a student’

‘Of what?’

‘War studies.’

‘What? Did you say war, like fighting?’

‘Yes, I study how to yank out immigration eyeballs with the peace sign…I bet you always thought the sign (as in ‘peace dude’) was … like, um, peaceful. Right? Well let me tell you something you poor, 5.30AM African harassing, passport caressing, squinty eyed, nose picking-with finger-that-then-touches-my-passport-photo-bureaucrat, the peace sign is kung fu for the eye-stab move. Bet you didn’t know that. And yes, I have no intention of remaining in your country forever when there is a three-car convoy filled with beery people waiting to pick me up at JKA.’

I wish that is what I had said because the European IMMIGRATION INTERVIEW is an absurd, hypocrisy by a west that speaks the talk of open boundaries to goods and capital when it cannot stand the same for people. The 21st century meeting point between African Livingstones and Lugards and Europe’s petty gate-keeping chiefs. Just beyond the immigration officer’s shoulder are little offices which if you ever have the misfortune of visiting always have a scared looking African seated patiently awaiting some grim fate. You don’t make conversation since it is clear to both of you that the other is a criminal and must be consorted with. But I digress.

‘How long were you away?’

‘Too briefly, I wish it had been forever.’

‘When does your doctoral course end?’

‘When the sun burns itself out; when the hens come home to roost; when the Fat Woman sings; just a moment before the grim reaper strikes me down; (sobbing) why must you ask such hurtful questions?’

‘Welcome.’

Illegal Nigerian Taxi Driver at Arrivals Terminal:

‘Taxi? Looking for taxi?’ (whispered with averted gaze that immediately pulls you into the kind of conspiracy that the IMMIGRATION OFFICER suspected you of being mixed up in.)

‘Yes. I want to go to Elephant and Castle. How much will it be?’

‘Forty pounds alone, thirty pounds if you wait for me to pick up another passenger.’

(I realise why this negotiation always discomfits me: it feels like I am a john trying to pick up a prostitute so – not that I would know what that is all about by the way.)

As I stand trying to decide whether this is a better deal than lugging two large suitcases up and down stairways, seating for an hour in a cold tube train and the ten minutes walk from the station to my door, another taxi driver sidles up to me, trying not to be noticed by the first one who is shouting into his mobile phone.

‘Where are you going?’ he asks ‘I will be cheap, cheap.’

‘Elephant and Castle’

‘Ok, thirty five pounds. We go?’

‘Sure, but only for thirty’

‘Fine, fine. Go to that elevator there and I will meet you inside. Don’t tell him that you are coming with me.’

Struck by guilt, reeling from the cold, bumping shoulders with angry looking people who never meet your eye and lugging my massive bags, I limp after him to the taxi. A traitor and a cheat within 30 minutes of getting to London, and feeling what a john must feel: tawdry, embarrassed and broke.

The ride takes an hour in traffic and I read a newspaper whose headline announces that the European Union has just introduced legislation that kids as old as eleven will have to be in car safety seats or fines of upto £500 can be levied on the driver. I have arrived. Back to the fire.

Fearful Streets and Burning Hearts in Addis Ababa

I just flew back from Addis Ababa where I have spent the last couple of days attending a meeting. The streets were empty of traffic, as most city residents remained indoors in response to demonstrations and riots that have wracked the city for the past week. At least forty-five civilians are dead, killed in clashes between the police and opposition protestors who charge that the 15 May elections were rigged by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s ruling Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolution Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition. It was my first time in Addis and I everyone I encountered was fearful of the ongoing crackdown by the state. I heard of mass arrests, more than ten thousand young men in jail I was told with others claiming that the number was far higher. A young women whose brother was arrested, feared that his punishment might be getting forced to the frontline should war between Ethiopia and Eritrea break out as is seeming more likely by the day. She told me that her mother was in tears daily, dreading the worst for her child, her memories of what happens to people in Ethiopian prisons overcoming any comfort that her daughter and friends tried to provide. I cannot by any stretch of the imagination claim to be deeply knowledgeable on Ethiopia, but I could not escape the feeling I got of it being governed by a state that evokes great fear in its people and that has failed them outside of building wide streets filled with a self regard that gave these poor, brutalised people scant comfort. I hope to return one day when it is more peaceful and I can have the opportunity to discover the city when it is less fearful and when the government is not flexing its muscles.

Mommy, When I Grow Up I Want to be a Gigolo in Monaco!

Your friendly blogger is in Monaco and blogging less than fifty yards from where this photo was taken. Yes, indeed, it is time to break into song:

Well we’re Movin’ on Up!
Movin’ on Up!
To Monaco!
Movin’ on Up!
To a dee-luxe apartment in the sky, We’re movin’ on up!
Movin’ on Up!
To Monaco!
Movin’ on Up!
We’ve finally got a piece of the pie!

Fish don’t fry in the kitchen,
Beans don’t burn on the grill.
Took a whole lotta tryin’
Just to get up that hill.
Now we’re up in the big leagues,
Gettin’ our turn at bat!

I wish. By all outward appearances, I am attending an insurance conference (to provide gory analysis of war and pestilence) but in reality it is a masochistic exercise. There is nothing worse on earth than to be a broke doctoral student attending an insurance gig in Monaco. The water costs about $10 a bottle, the typical meal is expensive enough to feed a small village for a week and you just do not fit in without a Ferrari and a yacht. So here I am, in a tie, in 75 degree weather, being treated like a nuisance by waiters who sniff my income from a mile off and from the intensely close reading of the menu that I have been engaging in. My eyes in Monaco are ever on red, smooth cars and orange tans on Botox-smooth skin. There are old people everywhere, and they look angry: perhaps because they can buy everything except the one thing they really want, which is their youth. My Monaco trip has led me to a highly scientific theory: there are more ugly rich people than ugly poor people. Yes, I know, you might think that a superior diet would make for better looks but this is not the case. What has happened over millenia is that the uncool kids who no-one really wanted to hang out with have spent their time reading and working hard while all you cool cats sit around and admire yourselves. Then BLAM, they have a yacht in Monaco, enough money to afford Botox in chemical warfare amounts and no end of beautiful women and men catering to their every whim. And this last point, the beauty of the prostitutes and the gigolos – a career that every PhD student has considered at some point I wage – actually redoubles the rage I was talking about earlier. Here they are having ‘made it’ and what happens? They are now old and still need to pay to hang out with the kind of cool cats who first spurned them onto the road leading to Monaco. OK, whatever, I am not even sure I believe all that. Back to sado-masochism. Yesterday, I ordered a cup of coffee for about 10 euros and it arrived cold. In a fury, which I carefully disguised as a reaction to the coffee’s temperature, not its cost, I took this poor waiter to task. After a brief but intense rant, I was gripped with guilt at messing the guy’s workday until I saw him and a fellow waiter looking at me and sniggering away. I could just imagine one whispering to the other, “zat a—hole zere is poor, zis poor ones are ze worst and I will wash his cup with zat orange woman’s…”

Dr. Roland Returns to Breakdown Riga’s Art Nouveau Architecture

A few months ago, after I had visited Paris, my cocky little pronouncement on IM Pei’s glass pyramid was taken to task by my friend, the redoubtable Dr. Roland, who wrote an entertaining and thought provoking post on the symbolism and ideas in architecture. A couple of days ago, fresh from Riga, I asked him to breakdown that city’s art nouveau buildings. And as his style, he has returned to show that architecture is not just ‘a story of bricks and mortar, but one of a people.’ If you know an architect in an African city, please invite them to comment about their city’s style here.

Kima,

I would love to give you a long dissertation about Art Nouveau but I don’t know much about it. Add to it the fact that I don’t care for the style very much and you see perhaps why I don’t know much about it. I will give you what I have and let your readers add to it and do their/your own analysis.

I’ll start off with an excerpt from A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals by Spiro Kostof.

“Most everyone agrees that the Art Nouveau started in Brussels in the early Nineties with Victor Horta (1861-1947), and it aspired to that obsessive goal of modernism, freedom from the past. Its signature was a florid, sinuous line suggesting organic growth, the burgeoning of plants. Metal membering, thin and pliant as it was, served the style well, and the frank use of iron now entered domestic architecture for the first time… In the salon of Horta’s Hotel van Eetvelde in Brussels of 1895, we can observe how these supple Art Nouveau filaments swirl about like tendrils, weaving together walls, ceiling, and supports… …the structural and the decorative live inseparably. The other reference would be the to late Gothic—the skeletal élan, the transparency, the flicker of ornament. All this, involving as it did an endless round of individualistic, custom-made invention, did not recommend the Art Nouveau to the functionalist wing of modern architecture.”

We can see that Art Nouveau emerges at the turn of the last century. The first question one should ask is partially answered by Kostof above. Art Nouveau should be considered as part of the modernist movement — but a movement whose rules had not been set in stone. The leading modernists of architecture – such as Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius etc. – were still in their infancy. The great ideas of the left — Marxism, socialism, futurism — still retained the freedom to be vibrant and unrestrained. No dogmas had set in yet. Art Nouveau reflects this. Only later would architecture refine itself and develop the “form follows function” idea that many of you know so well. As you know, many movements develop organically and some explorations become dead ends. While I think it would be too harsh to call Art Nouveau a “dead end”, it clearly did not emerge as the leading form of modernism that you all know today.

Implied in the description above is the idea that Art Nouveau was merely “decorative”. There is the idea that the style was just that, a style and nothing more. It seems to have no more import than to look…pretty. Its organic nature of “tendrils” and “the burgeoning of plants” did not link itself to any deeper movement towards environmentalism or ecology, none of which had yet emerged. Understand also, that the great ideas are such because they link themselves to other great ideas in different fields so as to create an even greater whole. I will leave you to see that Renaissance architecture, which is great in itself, links to Renaissance art, which, in turn, links to Renaissance sculpture and so on. Modernism in architecture links to Modernist art, Modernist music, sculpture, literature, philosophy and so on endlessly. This process reveals how we are able to create the great ages of mankind as the great people in any individual arena are dealing with the same central set of ideas. A modernist poet will always be able to talk to a modernist architect since they both have the same philosophical frame of reference. Unfortunately, Art Nouveau has little of this. It goes only so far as a “look.” Having not been planted on the rich soil of a deep philosophical idea, it has little to grow on and remains mired in the past as an early 20th century “style.”

[Here’s an insider’s tip. If you want to cut someone’s artwork to pieces without sounding vindictive, just call the work “decorative.” This is one of the worst insults you can give to someone’s artwork without actually sounding insulting. It is a left-handed compliment. In the same line you can say that someone’s work is “pretty.” That cuts. Although, when one says that Art Nouveau is “decorative” it isn’t so much an insult as it is the statement of fact that has been proven out over time. Also, we must state here that our arts need not always be laden with philosophical weight all the time! Imagine how horrible it would be to have Beethoven’s 5th as dinner music! (too heavy) Or Wagner! (way to heavy!) Would you be able to work well if your office had Picasso’s Guernica on the wall? Sometimes you need some whimsy, something light.]

Well, the above was just a little introduction to a style that I know little about. Remember how I analyzed architecture in the “Pei” essay. That was all about the shape and form of architecture and how you and I relate to it. Please use this type of analysis in your own interaction with it. Remember the questions we asked: big, small, skinny, fat, heavy, light etc. Most importantly, use these elements of analysis to make your own statements about architecture whenever you see it. This is one art form that we all MUST interact with. How does the building you are sitting in at this moment make you feel? Is it organized well/poorly? Come to your own conclusions and own your feelings. Make the interaction less and less of what I tell you and more and more of what you actually feel when you walk into a building. Try this exercise. Compare and contrast two buildings of the same type. I guarantee that all of you will do this when you decide which house to buy or which apartment/flat to rent. Does the building have a small entranceway that explodes into a huge central atrium? How does that make you feel? Does the house have a huge/small entertainment area? What does that say about its owners? In many art forms we are supposed to ask what the artist means by this or that so that we might have the correct interpretation of what he’s trying to do or say. In a certain poem or music you might be told that perhaps the piccolos and flutes represent birds. Not so in architecture. The feeling is much more visceral: no one needs interpretation when walking into St. Paul’s in London, you can’t help but feel it. Sure you may need some help with the little things such as crenellation, entablature, the type of columns, etc. But you have every right to own your feeling about a building, a space. No one can tell you that you are interpreting it wrong,that’s the beauty of architecture. Buildings must be made to serve people who know nothing about architecture and may be quite illiterate. Look at Gothic architecture in the Middle Ages. The architects had to elicit the proper feelings from peasants who could not even read or write, people who didn’t know the first thing about architecture. It was the architect’s job to bring the unwashed people into the cathedral and make them feel the awe of the stained glass window, the lofty spire, the glory of God, the peace and tranquility that was required for the religious purpose. If the architect was not successful in achieving this response he could not shrug his shoulders haughtily and say, “You are interpreting it wrong.”

Now that you have begun the process of analyzing the shapes and forms that you encounter, you can simply add a few questions as I have asked above of the who, what, where and when as it relates to the building. This is just a little sugar on top and should not affect your feelings about the building. As with everything man does, architecture is not just a story of bricks and mortar, but one of a people.

Now I must ask you for some insight, Kima. Here’s where you have the opportunity to do the analysis you have asked of me. Here are the questions:

1. What is the history of Riga? Have they always thought of themselves as unique? Do they think of themselves as Baltics? Sort-of-Russians? Almost-Scandinavians? I know that they were once part of the Prussia of Fredric the Great, which was quite proudly nationalistic and German. Do they feel this? Do they feel the need to separate themselves from Russia and make artistic statements of independence? Do they struggle to be less Russian? I know that many even in Russia acknowledge that “real” Russia is Kiev, whereas Moscow was created in an effort to be more western. Is this right? Does Riga reflect any of this? What is the character of the Rigan soul?

2. What is the immediate history of Riga? Did they have a mayor at the turn of the century that really wanted to make a statement with his city? Architecture is important for this. Look at Barcelona. All it took was an Olympics meet and a Frank Gehry designed museum and BOOM! All of a sudden Barcelona is hot. Next comes the whispering campaign, “Barcelona is hot now,” and all of the accoutrement follows—internet cafes, new nightclubs, and, of course, thousands of new, upscale shops. Could it be that Riga was trying to develop something like that 100 years ago?

3. Invariably an idea will catch on in some places more than others. All it takes is one professor of architecture at the local university who, maybe, was brought in from Brussels who espoused the style and taught it to several students that could have made the difference. Maybe there was a “Rigan school” of thought in architecture.

4. About this time Lenin was starting to make noises next door. How did this affect architectural choice? Were they trying to make anti-communist statements?

So now I will turn your request onto you, my brother, will you please tell me the story of Art Nouveau architecture in Riga?

Riga

A closer view of Saint Mauritius, patron saint of the Hanseatic League’s unmarried merchants.  

Riga 

Old Town, Riga. The dude behind me penned over 200,000 folk songs and stories which form the foundation of Latvian nationalism. Remember that you folks who are always goin on about wanting to record your grandparent’s stories (and yet never getting round to it). There are more than 1.2 million of the bloody things written down here so that an oral culture has become very much a written one. Latvians have quite literally imagined themselves into existence to paraphrase a famous egghead. 

Jurmala Beach, Latvia: “mommy, how come that uncle is so dark?”

My hosts using more energy than is healthy for a man on vacation like myself. A few minutes earlier, they translated how a little girl who had pointed at me while asking her mom politely in Latvian, “mommy, how come that uncle is so dark?” I would have loved to hear the answer.  

Jurmala Beach, Latvia: Stiletto Heels on the Beach

I noticed thousands of little holes in the hard packed sand on the beach and thought that they might be some kind of insect or crab nests. But they turned out to have been made by women walking on stiletto heels on the sand! I did not believe it till I saw it with my own eyes. 

Jurmala Beach, Latvia

Lazy blogger takes a breather on Jurmula beach on the Baltic Sea, 30 minutes by train from Riga, Latvia 

A closer view of Saint Mauritius, patron saint of the Hanseatic League’s unmarried merchants.  

Riga 

Alien in Riga, Latvia

I have just spent my first 24 hours in Riga where I will be for the next four days and yes, there is even a chance that I shall tear myself away from the sidewalk cafes and do some blogging. As I was expecting, I was the only brother on the streets with the exception of a statue of Saint Mauritius (or Maurice), a Roman-Egyptian martyr, who was the patron saint of unmarried merchants from the Hanseatic League. Their feasts were supposed to be so wild that they attracted Catherine the Great who was really no slouch in the debauchery department. Then there is this whole Latvian versus Russian thing going on; I am really curious about the existence of a strong sense of Latvian identity after more than 700 years of uninterrupted foreign occupation. But such wonders are mild compared to the footwear situation. The number of stiletto heels worn is unprecedented outside St. Petersburg. Every second woman I saw was perched on these fiendish (and very sexy) devices, miraculously navigating cobblestone streets without fracturing an ankle. Their male counterparts seemed to favour an assortment of muscle shirts and a cool ‘I am not looking at you’ vibe while they hurried after female companions who towered over them in those heels. From an afternoon of wining and dining, I can confirm that there are plenty of cheap restaurants serving good food, the sun is out and the city is more beautiful than I could have imagined. Methinks the next few days will only get better.

House of Blackheads. The figure on the right (kind of hard to see) is Saint Mauritius. I will post clearer pictures soon.

An example of Riga’s art nouveau architecture

The Stalin Pyramid, a not so little reminder of the Soviet era

Back From St. Petersburg

Indeed I am back, back to the land of boiled cabbage and queues. In the White Night of St. Petersburg’s summer, blogging, surfing and generally keeping up with the world receded in importance. The hangovers did not help for that is a land where beer is considered a soft drink and seeing some dude taking delicious little sips of ‘Russian Standard’ vodka at … well at, breakfast. But for the first time I was living in an idea, a conceit that killed millions, a city built by the will of a single man. Russia, and particularly St. Petersburg, I found, is a place that has been cut, ploughed, planted and whipped by a ruling class that has been determined to turn national life into an expression of philosophical ideas. It has, as M. Epstein says, been treated as a tabula rosa on which foreign ideas can be writ with all the necessary violence. Being in St. Petersburg, taking in my favourite building, Kazansky Cathedral, I knew that its beauty – and indeed greatness – reflected the relentless succession of projects that has blighted the lives of millions and destroyed lives past count. Projects, national projects kill. When the determination of Peter the Great to Europeanise Russia is considered, then the soviet period is soon understood to have merely been a version of this project. Russia, for we of 5-year development plans and nationalist aspirations, serves as a warning beacon. I will come back to this in the coming weeks, once I have gotten my feet under me.

Putin and His African Cannibalism Take

Being in St Petersburg and only now learning that Putin said that Africans had a history of cannibalism made me laugh till the tears rolled. Not because what he said was really funny, but because of the knee jerk outrage that poured out of my own folks over the statement and not the promise of aid he made. Here is a guy who on one hand calls you a cannibal and on the other promises you money, and you accept! That is so hilarious because the only other thing it could be is tragic enough to make me cry for days. This is what Trevor Phillips, the UK’s government-appointed commisar of racial equality, had to say: “What a preposterous thing to say. He is at best insensitive and at worst a downright racist”. Insensitive? How hopeless. The brother is trying to spin some poltical correctness game in the midst of madness. Putin knows perfectly well that he doesn’t give a shit about Africans but needs to play ‘the game’ which over the years has come to include merciful gestures for the doomed Africans. For the last week, I have been staying in the city where he was born. It was here that almost a million people died so that I could take admiring photos of the city and in this country that Stalin killed at least 20 million Russians not to even mention the millions that Lenin and Trotsky murdered. There is no need for outrage from the usual coterie of African guilt mongers. Who the hell cares that Putin says Africans are cannibals when he comes from the cruelest place on earth? I think he was joking and actually really didn’t give a damn how it came out. Two minutes in St. Petersburg will show you that political correctness here is absurd.

The Vodka Haze and Related Matters in St Petersburg

Never ever try and blog as a Kenyan in St Petersburg, Russia. It is not possible; it is beyond the bounds of credulity and possibility. They have this clear, tasteless substance called Russian Standard Vodka and it really has been sad for this particular African. The toasts don’t stop, or the misplaced sense that you are in a familiar space when you are actually in the strangest city that was ever built. Throughout my life Russia has been a constant: its politics and, most importantly for me, its literature. After a week here, despite the haze, I have come to realise the self indulgence of my politics. Russians must be the toughest most stubborn people on earth because the cruelties leveled on them – by the Peters and Stalins – had to be a response to the size of their spirits. I want to live here and learn Russian and how to be a writer because this place speaks to so many things that I have never consciously articulated. I went to Kutuzov’s tomb yesterday. It is in Kazansky Cathedral and was my best moment in Russia. A country that prays while displaying the captured standards of Napoleon who brought death here and did not understand that Russians could endure more than he could wield. When I am reborn, I hope it is as a melancholic Russian writer who used to be a soldier.

 

 

Graffiti outside the flat that Raskolnikov supposedly lived in. Raskolnikov is the most famous of Dostoevsky’s characters. The dude basically offs old ladies believing that he is beyond the bounds of good or evil, and of course this has made him madly popular among angst-hungry western intellectuals.

 

This is a picture of an African scalp outside Kazansky Cathedral in St. Petersburg. I am living just up the street and have spent an inordinate amount of time seating in a small park next to the cathedral. It was, I am told, built at the beginning of the 19th century by Alexander I. It was during one of the Russian-Turkish wars thus the decision to build a large duplicate of St. Peter’s in Rome to prove that Russia was a serious superpower that Turkey shouldn’t mess with. It amazes me how notions spring up in a Czar’s head and they are brought to life at such horrific costs. One look at the huge looking mass with its dark stones is enough to let you know that folks done died putting it up. Anyway, word is that the project succeeded though I cannot really understand how. The Turks surrendered before the cathedral’s completion and therefore it was decided to not build a southern colonnade to match the northern one facing Nevsky (the main avenue where to be a woman not wearing high heels earns you an instant mob beating).

Now I quote and will put up more pictures the moment I am recovered from my lack of sleep:

In socialist times the cathedral housed the ideologically-slanted Museum of Religion and Atheism and had a graphic Spanish Inquisition exhibition in the basement, complete with a pair of legs jutting out of a cauldron. The current exhibition has a small section (in Russian only) on the history of Catholicism and a larger section on Orthodoxy which includes church art, historical paintings, and various religious knick-knacks.

Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, hero of the Napoleonic War, is buried in the cathedral and there are monuments to him and to General Mikhail Barclay de Tolli in Kazan Square, facing Nevsky. From a certain angle, General Barclay de Tolli seems to be doing something that he shouldn’t be doing in public; this is revenge on the randy general for sleeping with the sculptor’s wife.

An African in St. Petersburg: The Arrival

From today, I will try and keep a kind of diary of my two-week trip to St. Petersburg. Hopefully I will be able to find a computer that I can use to upload the pictures that I am taking.

The Arrival

I flew into St. Petersburg yesterday evening on a flight from Vienna. I have always wanted to put those cities in a sentence that involves me. As is the usual case for The African, immigration was a complex matter. It never ceases to amaze me how suddenly, when you are in an immigration queue, the crushing power of the State makes itself felt. While aloft, I was an international traveler, a privileged being that has taken flight. My troubles were behind and below me; ahead was possibility and optimism. When I landed, it was like being in a Toyland. The rows of planes, the terminal building and the little trucks zipping here and there all appeared a bit unreal, like a kind of children’s Lego set.

It is the immigration form that brought me to earth. It made no apologies for its demand of information: when was I born; where was I going; why was I going there; for how long; where did I come from; what was I carrying, weapons, acids, sharp objects, animals, plants…; citizenship; residence; date of birth; maiden name; address; passport number and date of issue and expiry; other? It is ‘other’ that gets my goat. What else could I tell? That I was carrying drugs or planning acts of terrorism? That I may have left behind heartbreak and that I hoped to one day win the lottery and that the expiry of my life, not just that of my passport, was a constant worry? Well, I filled the form. It is habit. I have been categorized, measured, weighed and credentialed so often that it now feels normal to squeeze my life into forms. And I also filled it because not doing so always has unpleasant consequences. 98.5% of all forms are a way of avoiding punishment, pleading and justifying. So I filled mine and got in line to speak to the most important individual in my life at that moment, the immigration officer.

By the time I inched up to the desk behind which sat, as always, a grim faced official my happy feelings of having been magically transported had dissipated. I was gripped by an inexplicable guilt, that I had committed some crime that the official would spot instantly. This is why I clutched my passport a little too tightly, and glanced repeatedly at the page with the visa to make sure that it was actually there and has the correct dates. Also in hand were my ticket, insurance form and the schedule of the writing conference that had brought me to Russia. I half expected that I would have to re-apply all over again for permission to enter. My overly active imagination started making up scenarios of the official ordering a search of my baggage and a joint of marijuana being found. I worried whether the friends I have lent my suitcase in the past could have left such damning evidence in it.

The Russians and Europeans ahead of me briskly stepped up to the official and were processed quickly and efficiently. She barely looked at their passports, seeming to be satisfied on the basis of the country that had issued them. The Austrian that I spent part of the flight conversing with kept up a lively chatter that I could not concentrate on. He had few worries; this for him was just a small irksome procedure. And that it is how it appears to Africans as well, after they have been successfully admitted. Before then, you can tell who they are by the silence that envelops them in the queue and their solemn expressions.

Finally it was my turn and as is my wont, I brightly said hullo taking special care to pronounce the ‘hi’ with a distinctly American accent. It was better, I calculated, to say ‘hi’ instead of hello or habari or niatia. Such greetings may mark me for some kind of rent seeking, asylum declaring African. The dirty little secret of the African in line is that he attempts to reduce his Africanness in every possible way. The passport from Kenya or Uganda and, heaven forbid, Nigeria, is trouble enough. Thus my chirpy ‘hi’ which evidently had been tried before since it was met with silence and a searching glance.

OK, have to run and meet the group for dinner. The Petersburg diary shall continue later.

Bob Geldof lets out the strange mix of profanity and plea making that has become his signature tune. Whenever I catch these so called Africa saviours on TV, the urgency of their appeals and the faux concern they exude always leaves me enraged. They use African poverty and suffering like a prop for already over-large egos. We are helpless beings who cannot survive without the concern of an Elton John (in the background) or a Geldof who has not written a hit song in a decade and yet can save Africa.  

Fisticuffs, Bitterness and Fame

I have just got this sudden craving to watch black and white talkies; anything with Lauren Bacall or Elizabeth Taylor, who in case you were not schooled became a celluloid goddess after her performance in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’. I dare you to consider going through with a marriage proposal after watching that train wreck of a film!

The other evening, while weighing whether to endure the guilt of procrastination or completing two overdue dissertation chapters, I decided on the former and turned to the TV in the hope of catching some good old Jerry Springer. If you have ever wanted to feel blessed, brilliant, loved and morally upright, I highly recommend an hour of Jerry ‘take care of yourself and each other’ Springer. Unfortunately, there was nothing to appeal to such base tastes. However, I did came across a late-night screening of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. And was soon riveted by the emotional disintegration of Jake La Motta the boxer character played by Robert De Niro. The film is two hours of cringe and is based on the true story of La Motta who was a middleweight fighter in the late-1940s and early-1950s.

From winning the world championship with the kind of ferocity that only comes from deep issues, La Motta starts throwing fights, brutalises his wife, sexually exploits minors, takes to heavy drink and finally ends up as a washed-up grossly overweight stand-up comic at an obscure nightclub. All the while De Niro is matching his character’s weight gain and you can see him literally falling apart physically and psychologically. The film has all the elements it takes to make the ab&h list of celluloid fame, fisticuffs, bitterness and fame. And of course it is about boxing, a subject that has long fascinated me to the point that I am in danger of being one of those old men whose constant refrain will be, “I couda been a contender son, then your momma done gon an gotten herself pregnant…”

So a few days later, I am doing my little pre-summer jogging routine and I start daydreaming that I am wearing a hoodie, running with a grim determination to win an upcoming title fight. Before you can say “snap out of it”, I am at my laptop doing a Google search for boxing gyms in the neighbourhood. And behold, there happens to be one a mile or so away. So what other option did I have but to inquire about joining in the hope that at 34, the gym owner would run his bleary eye down my library ravaged body and spot the savage beast within.

And that is exactly what the elderly and laid-back – to the point of unconsciousness – owner of the Fitzroy Lodge did. His sceptical eyes took me in, concentrating to my surprise not on my bulging with skin, bone and blood vessels biceps but on my ever so slightly protruding belly. With what I hoped was a tone implying that I had banged heads with the toughest of them but did not wish to call attention to a dark past, I announced that I was there to “work out.” He extended his hand in greeting and I shook his dry palm with what I hoped was a squeeze that would let him gauge a hidden strength that I imagine must be someplace in me even if its stayed well hidden all these years. And no, don’t you dare suggest that my hands gained their hard grip hanging out with five-fingered Betty in boarding school. But this is a digression that is not to my advantage.

The gym was tucked away behind a line of FedEx delivery trucks, under an unused rail-track giving it the slightly seedy, industrial atmosphere anyone who has watched Rocky associates with such ventures. Inside, the ubiquitous and much described in every boxing story was an overpowering smell of sweat, chalk and leather. I was in: the first step to a fight in Las Vegas’ Caesar’s Palace ring!

The room was dominated by two boxing rings occupied by bouncing, jabbing, parrying, shuffling pairs. They looked clumsy to me, I could already tell that they were not going to match the athleticism that saw me into the Lenana School rugby team all of fifteen years ago. Heavy bags hung from the low ceiling like big, red fruits that had somehow managed to make a roomful of men angry enough to whack at them with varying degrees of violence. From all the boxing sagas I had read, and my lifelong fascination with the Kinshasa fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, I knew that ‘working the bag’, as the latter did so famously, is an art form of controlled aggression and playacting since you must visualise an appendage-less opponent who looks like a red, squat four-foot long sausage hanging from the ceiling.

Standing out from the crowd of young, mostly white males was a thin black woman who was bouncing clumsily from foot to foot with a kind of crazed energy as she tried to pummel the bag under the watchful eye of the whole room. You could tell right away that everyone was intensely conscious of her presence and I wondered whether I would come in for the same attention – perhaps even a challenge to spar with a brutal customer who would try and ‘blood’ me. These impressions were brief since our walk across the room to the office was all of thirty feet.

To be continued … my ego can take no more writing for now. I must save the triumph or the agony for later; my chapters are calling for some loving attention.

Blam! And You Thought You Knew Architecture (I.M. Pei)

One of my best friends, Roland, recently sent me a response to a cocky little email I had sent him awhile ago just after I had visited Paris for the first time. On seeing I.M. Pei’s famous glass pyramid in the Louvre, I pronounced it Mitterrand and Republican France’s middle finger to the monarchism of Louis XIV. Roland’s eye saw more, so much more that I have been driven to sharing his email below. I think it is the most illuminating, learned and madly enjoyable critique of an architect’s work that I have ever read.

ab&h,

I’m in the middle of writing another little ditty to you and then I see that you are (or were) in Paris. I didn’t know you were going and if I did I would have written this for you before you left. Actually this is over two years old. I should have given it to you before I saw you in March 2004.

You wrote me an e-mail long ago with your observations on French culture and particularly I.M. Pei’s (pronounced “Pay”) the Louvre. You saw this stark modernist thing sitting right there and it caught your attention. You thought it was Chirac’s gigantic F___ you to France’s past. Not quite. Please be seated for the following lecture on modern architecture of I.M. Pei presented by noted architectural historian Dr. Roland. Exams will be on Tuesday.

Good afternoon. (ab&h, if you continue to throw those spitballs, I will be forced to send you to the headmaster’s office!) Today’s lecture is about the modernism of I.M. Pei. First we will discuss Pei’s use of modernism in the pyramid in front of the Louvre. Contrary to what one would think of at first glance, his pyramid is not an affront to the 2nd Empire style architecture of that portion of the Louvre. What is going on here is what you may have heard in art called “comparison and contrast.”

Let us look at form and break it down. This area of the Louvre is an interior courtyard surrounding the pyramid. What is the characteristic of the style of the buildings? They are all 19th century additions in a very ornate style, very richly and heavily decorated. What is the characteristic of the pyramid? It is a modernist style of steel and glass whose lack of texture suggests smoothness. You see? Highly textured versus smooth. This is the type of thing that is done to highlight the differences and bring out the uniqueness of both qualities. One contrasts with the other, not for the purposes of embarrassing the other or to say F.U., but to bring each other into greater relief. Next, we can see that the older building, being built of stone, is opaque. In contrast, the pyramid is made of glass. This highlights a juxtaposing of solidity, weight, permanence against transparency and light. The old buildings stand proudly on the ground pronouncing their import. The pyramid introduces a new subterranean level, which we must consider. The old buildings invite us to go up into them, but create clogged traffic flows that mess up the vista of the plaza and make it less appealing. (I can remember being accosted by little ragamuffin Gypsies constantly running up to me trying to sell/steal something, which took away something from the experience. Please excuse any bourgeois condescension here.)

The pyramid invites us to acknowledge the previously unconsidered subterranean and directs traffic flows down into it. Here the pyramid provides an accent to the composition that forces us to look at the old buildings again and concentrate on what their architectural statement actually is. In turn, the old buildings force us to look at the pyramid and ask more questions about it. Never does the pyramid function by itself, or overshadow the older buildings. As I said before, it “accents” them. It doesn’t call attention to itself for its own purpose, but only in serving the purpose of the composition as a whole. Now that the contrast between the old and the new has forced us to look at the pyramid more closely, even as we have just looked at the Louvre itself more closely, we delve to a different level of analysis.

We notice that the pyramid is built in a modernist style. But wait a minute, the pyramid is a very ancient form, in fact, the most ancient form of architecture. So we have an old form in a new style—again, contrast. Now let’s add the Louvre to the mix. Isn’t the Louvre supposed to the old building? But wait, again! The pyramid is harkening back to a form that’s older than the building that’s supposed to be the “old” one! Once again we have contrast. That which is really an old form is actually the newer form in this composition. That which is the newer form is, in many respects, the older form in the composition. In this way the two forms dance back and forth, never really allowing us to rest—never allowing us to take them for granted and constantly creating the slight tension that provokes passion, thought and interest.

Now for the coup-de-grace—context. Ask yourself which civilization does the pyramid bring to mind. Egypt, of course. Who in the modern world brought Egypt to Europe? That’s right, the French. One might say that they brought Egypt into their ongoing conversation about civilization, mankind and his origins known as European thought. But Pei asks us to think about this one minute. Is France really bringing Egypt to Europe or has Egypt brought civilization to the world? Who’s old? Who’s new? So is the Louvre really introducing the pyramid to us, or is the pyramid introducing the Louvre to us? Who’s the Daddy here?

Now look at the above and see all the different ideas. Note how they juxtapose—jumping back and forth. The “old” building is really the newer form. The old form is in a newer style. One is solid, the other opaque. One is above ground, the other primarily below. The “old” buildings, facing the pyramid, are really the newest additions to the Louvre. Once again, we are not allowed to rest, get complacent and be comfortable.

Now let’s look at two other places where Pei has used the same tricks. And you should know both of them because they both are in Boston! You’ve seen them a million times. One of these you (should) know very well!

The first is the John Hancock building in the Back Bay section of Boston. (Feel free at this time to do a Yahoo image search for “John Hancock Building” and “Boston.” Find a pic of the building plus Trinity Church at various angles (more). The John Hancock building is also a design of I.M. Pei where he had to deal with the relationship of a modern structure to an old one. The square footage requirements for the design were great, making the building outsized for the neighborhood. How did Pei handle this? First look at the site plan. He made the floorplan into a rectangle instead of the usual square (or something like a square). He then took his rectangular floorplan and turned it sideways to the neighborhood that might be most offended by its size, Back Bay. In so doing, he turned the skinniest side to them making the building almost disappear. Think of a person turning sideways instead of being seen straight on from the front. This works so well that you don’t even feel the presence of the building when walking in the square. (Normally buildings of this size hover over you and make you feel as if they are about to fall on you.)

This, of course, leaves us with a flat, broad side on the other two sides doesn’t it? Its mass couldn’t be avoided right? Well, what he does, instead of trying to hide its mass, is to use the whole side like a huge mirror. What does the mirror reflect? Trinity Church. Trinity Church is the main attraction in the square. That church was designed by H.H. Richardson and is a very important work that exemplified the now famous “Richardson Romanesque” style. Pei knew that this is the very thing tradition-conscious Back Bay people would want to protect. He knew that their first fear was that this new monstrosity would overshadow their precious church. So he made the entire building defer to the older church. He mirrored the whole building. It was quite fortunate for him that this style was “in” at the time. This allowed the building to step itself back in importance (Size usually conveys importance. This is why so many artists paint large paintings. A small painting of the exact same subject would not fetch proportionately as much. But I digress…)

Anytime anyone looked at the building, all they would see is the church, despite the building being hundreds of feet taller and thousands of square feet larger than the church. Which direction does the huge mirror face? It faces downtown, where a large number of people who would be interested could see it. Do you see the same contrast used at the Louvre? Something large and important must not be large while something small is to be made all he larger because of how it is handled. There’s that juxtaposition again. By deliberately not calling attention to itself, it, by turns, calls attention to how well placed it actually is and how well it works within the environment, which just might call more attention to it!

Next consider texture. Once again, the new building is smooth and the old building is ornamented. One building is highly textured and the other is like several sheets of smooth glass.

The church is heavy in its Neo-Romanesque styling yet the larger building seems as light as air. Now look at a picture taken from the base of the Hancock. Notice that the mirror now, no longer reflects the church, but the sky. One really has to look carefully to see whether you are looking at the sky or the reflection of the sky in the uppermost mirrors. The fact that it is 800 feet tall and mirrored makes the top of the tower virtually disappear. This also makes the tower seem much lighter and less likely to feel that it is oppressively leaning over you.

See the same contrasts? Light/dark, big/small, stone/glass, heavy/light. Now criss-cross them. Make the heavy thing seem lighter than the smaller thing, which should seem lighter by comparison, etc. Use that to highlight the differences, not obscure them.

What’s the next example, which as I said, you should know well? Any guesses? IT’S The Christian Science Plaza in Boston! Pei also designed this and it was the first thing I thought of. I know that you didn’t pay to much attention to CS and all that stuff pertaining to it, but I thought that you would at least catch that. Yes, Pei did the church plaza and he used the same tricks here as you saw in Paris and at the Hancock building aforementioned. (Please open picture now) If you can see the old Mother Church is in the Neo-Romanesque style and the Extension is Neo-Classical, you have identified the two “old” elements of the design. Can you find the contrasting new element? It’s not just the new buildings—it’s the pool. Yes, the pool functions as the same type of element in the design as the Hancock tower does a few blocks over.

While interesting in and of itself, it creates a soft reverse image of the “hard” and formal buildings on the plaza. I’m sure you will find a number of pictures of the plaza at night with its pool shimmering and all the lights lit. Notice the columns in the formerly named “Colonnade” building. Notice the repetition used to create a rhythm, drawing the eye all the way down the plaza. Note that the newer buildings could overwhelm the older ones but they never do. They are brought down a couple of notches on the grandiosity scale so as to allow the churches to continue to capture the center of interest. Please look for the same ideas and their various uses in other areas in this design.

This concludes our lecture for today. Remember, you exam is Tuesday. I think you now can supply your own critique from here on as it is 2am and I’m getting tired.

Dr. Roland

Professor of Pencil Sharpening

The beautiful sights one is likely to see in the Louvre Gardens. 

Fit bastards. You will notice the woman in the yellow T-shirt who was also a Capoeirista, but in terrible shape. Yet there she was doing these crazy somersaults and twisting every which way. I was aghast, it has been years since I could be flexible enough to fold a fist! 

Capoeira on the streets just outside the huge and madly expensive Printemps. It was right about this moment when I decided that I indeed need to get my lazy self fit. 

Lazy blogger after an afternoon feeling badly dressed compared to sleek Parisians, decides to spend scarce funds to purchase pimp suit. 

Lazy blogger hanging about Paris playing at being a tourist while worrying about his dissertation the whole time… 

Kenyan soldiers, part of the 14th Army, with a seized Japanese flag, after their capture of Seikpyu, 18 February 1945. A lot of Kenyans who are abroad imagine that they are the pioneers in their family when their grandpa’s might ‘have been there and done that’.
 

Jonana Mungai of the Kings African Rifles, writing home. Burma,
January 1945.

 

On the road to Kalewa to face the Japanese army in January 1945 

My Granpa Went to Burma and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

Have you ever wondered why the British have so much concern for Africa and Africans that they would launch commissions of inquiry into the continent’s troubles? Well so have I, which is why an upcoming Oral History conference on ‘changing memories of World War Two’ offered me a glimpse into the heart of British charity. This is the advertisement for the conference:

A range of presentations from across Europe, Asia, Oceania, and Latin and North America will address the War’s consequences and legacy in the memories of participants and for successive generations. These presentations are organized into two major themes which reflect the ways in which the War continues in many countries to play a part in historical consciousness and everyday life. ‘Remembering, forgetting and silences’ explores individual memories in relation to dominant discourses, identity, myth and intergenerational transmission. The second of the two themes, ‘Using memories of war’, includes reminiscence as a therapeutic intervention and the ways in which the media has shaped recollections of the War.

That is right. Africa and Africans were somehow not a part of that war’s consequences and legacies. Yet the King’s African Rifles suffered many thousands of dead and maimed in the Burma, Abyssinia and Somalia campaigns. Then there were the taxes and other privations that Africans had to suffer as their colonial rulers fought a total war. This is not a rant to demand ‘inclusion’, a term that I detest with every cell in my body, it is to note that even as the British establishment crows about 2005 being the ‘Year of Africa’, they nevertheless maintain boundaries between the native and the master in their national myths. There is plenty of print and conferencing available when you die of hunger, HIV or just plain old atrocity, but not when you take a bullet for King Georgie. The thanks must flow in one direction only: Africans must kneel before the British in gratitude at Blair’s Commission and Bob Geldof’s pronouncements. But they, oh no, they will not acknowledge that at the hour of their greatest weakness, some darkies stepped in and did a job.

Pity is the worst thing in the world. When you are pitied and helped out of pity, your life is often taken off your hands. Pity degrades and kills everything it touches. And that is what we have become, a pitied people who come on hands and knees begging for more pity, nay actually, it is worse than that, we now demand pity as a human right!

I have fired off a deceptively ‘calm’ email to the organisers and hope that they will fall for the trap before I launch some brimstone their way.

Having said all that, I am embarrassed at how poor my education in history was in Kenya. I did not for example know that almost every Kamba male who was not handicapped was recruited into WW1 service; or that so many died and suffered (45,000 officially and 200,000 unofficially); or that many campaigns were won through the tenacity and courage of African soldiers. They may have been fighting in an absurd war given that they were the colonised fighting to keep others from being colonised, but courage should be acknowledged and applauded wherever it rears its head. The recruitment of the King’s African rifles who numbered over 120,000 in WW2 brought many people from incredibly diverse backgrounds together. They took to speaking English, Lingala, and Swahili as common languages, creating the templates for the nationalist politics that followed and led to the formation of the continent’s governments. The salaries they were paid sparked an economic boom after the war and tied a large proportion of the people to the cash economy. The war also radically changed the colonial notions of the African person. After the high fatality rate of WW1, recruiters had a tough time trying to attract Africans to join up. Few now know that the colour bar was dropped in 1939 to enable readier military recruitment.

Growing up, I was always taken with the bronze three-man statue on Kenyatta Avenue – can you picture it? The guy with a stick is a carrier, in the middle is a KAR rifleman flanked by an Arab rifleman. They appeared so strong and firm, which I suppose is the whole point of the thing. And the stories from the wars are gripping. Kenyan and Tanzanian beef for example fed the million men on the allied side stationed in the Middle East. Then here comes the King’s Africans Rifles, who when they were not putting down rebellious types on home soil, found time to ship to Burma and face down Japan’s crack troops – called the white tigers – in the ‘valley of death’. Then there are characters like Color-Sergeant Kumani of the 1st Battalion, King’s African Rifles who on October 7, 1914 won the Distinguished Conduct Medal in a battle at Gazi for his bravery ‘in leading his company in a charge after all his officers had been shot down, and drawing off the enemy’. Why did he do it? Why did he run into enemy fire when his white officers fell?

My late grandfather was a medical officer during World War 2 and I remember him being called daktari by everyone in Wida, Kiambu. I wonder what he experienced in Burma. What he felt travelling so far, treating gaping wounds and doses of the clap, losing friends to an early death for a cause that was not theirs. He was such a bunch of contradictions: charismatic, kind to me, brutal to those he did not like, clever, seductive, funny… He was a full person, but I regret that I was too young to talk to him about the things that I have since learned about his time ‘over there’. Beyond these personal asides, I am as always struck by the power of learning history. And have developed a conviction that to be ignorant about history is to be an intellectual cripple: driven only by the demands of the present and yet unable to understand from whence they come, and therefore ultimately meeting the future unarmed and more naked than need be.

Maybe I am wrong and my high school history education was superior. But I was too sleepy to care during those hellish afternoon double lessons with this teacher we called Rook. He would stand in front of the class like a peacock, chin up, hands on hips, and would authoritatively repeat the textbook on your desk to a letter. The moment I set eyes on him, a wave of sleep would overcome me. I always thought he should have come with one of those ‘do not operate machinery after ingestion’ warning signs. Yes, perhaps it was all Rooks’ fault.

The Weekend I spent in the Queen’s Compound at Windsor

By the time sixty University of London postgraduates finished squeezing into buses rented to ferry them on a two-day retreat, I sensed significant events were in the offing. The prospect of guesting at a former game lodge on the grounds of Windsor Castle had frankly excited me, but I was trying to keep it bottled up by adopting a weary I-have-seen-this-type-of-thing attitude.

In the hour that it took to drive from London to Berkshire, I had abandoned all efforts at being cool and was experiencing an expectant glow. Cumberland Lodge, set in the tranquil landscape of Great Park (formerly known as the ‘King’s woodland at Windsor’), is a massive brown brick mansion surrounded by gardens in which nature’s untidy ways have been quietly subdued. After checking in, we were immediately ushered into a lecture on the history of the lodge.

Later, upon a brief investigation, I discovered that the Duke of Cumberland was better known as Butcher Bill in Scotland on account of his enthusiastic embrace of murder. Somewhat understandably given the English penchant for keeping up polite facades, the 30-minute talk on the lodge’s history had failed to mention this little fact. The woman who had made the presentation got rather thin-lipped when hours later, in a burst of drunken inspiration, I joined an otherwise dignified Swede postgraduate in accosting her and loudly demanding that they change the name of the place to Butcher Bill’s lodge. The whole business got slightly more annoying for this dear lady when we decided to chase the deer peacefully lurking about, thus breaking the air of royal tranquillity if only briefly. They could be killed, but only by the royals and so their being scared by a commoner, especially an African one, appeared to her, I suppose, highly inappropriate. Remembering these incidents now, I can supply no strong argument in my defence except to suggest that they were a childishly expressed desire to dig below the surface.

But let me return to Cumberland and how he came by that sobriquet – we were after all his guests in some fashion. It bears getting into some (irrelevant) detail for though in certain quarters Cumberland was known as Butcher Bill, he was also referred to as Stinking Bill and Sweet Bill. He even had a flower named after him. Whence the discrepancy in names, why would he boast of a mansion in the King’s Woodland, and how to explain the presence of Africans (joined with the Scots in feeling the colonial boot) in this residence so many years after his (in)famous acts? You must admit that these are mysteries, perhaps useless ones to understand, but they are interesting nevertheless.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, Cumberland, after suffering a defeat at the hands of the French as the commander of an Anglo-Dutch-Hanoverian alliance known as the Pragmatic army, was recalled to England to put the threatening Scots in their place. Charles Edward Stuart, called the Young Pretender by those ill-disposed toward him, grandson of the deposed king James II, had invaded England. After several engagements, with the Highlanders at his command using guerrilla tactics, matters came to a head in the Battle of Culloden where Cumberland’s army inflicted a crashing defeat and killed at least a thousand brave Scots. The Young Pretender eventually settled in France after having unsuccessfully tried to raise another effort against the English and used feminine disguises to escape the Royal Army. But that is a story for another occasion. Suffice it to say that Cumberland had carried the day.

After the battle, when our noble duke was asked for orders, he reputedly wrote, ‘No quarter’, on the back of a playing card. You can easily imagine the airiness of the gesture as Billy took in a game of cribbage with a brandy and a cigar in hand. What followed was the cold-blooded murder of all the Scottish survivors, many who had left the field wounded and hidden in peasant huts. He remained in Scotland for three months, captured three thousand prisoners and executed just over a hundred of them. His actions were met with great acclaim in England where he was given a generous pension and a flower named after him to mark his success. This blossom is known as the Sweet William in England, but in Scotland is called the Stinking Billy.

Knowing these details, consider the raison d’être of Cumberland Lodge given these two hundred and fifty years later: ‘to encourage an interchange of thought between students, especially those from the University of London and from the Commonwealth…to encourage the investigation and discussion of the nature of Man and Society’. As I return to the unimportant events that transpired on my weekend stay, consider what role time and intention play in transforming the violent and domineering into the charitable and democratic.

In the interest of honesty, I must report that on our first night at the lodge, students, who perhaps should have known better, stole a bottle of wine from the kitchens seeing that the bar would be closed by 11pm and that there was a strict injunction against providing your own liquor. Word is that they were acting out of a drunken desire for adventure. One of them, a sweet tempered and once removed conspirator in the wine lift, was dispatched to procure a corkscrew from a youngish bartender who seemed to have the eye for her. Unfortunately, the fellow turned out to be less horny and more principled on matters of theft, which I admit threw me. He steadfastly refused to yield the corkscrew and insisted on knowing why she needed it. Feeling that the game was up, this young lady came running to her compatriots in a panic at the dire consequences of robbery on the Queen’s own grounds.

Now this created a dilemma for the guilty parties who will remain unnamed for the moment. While this young woman had been a cheerful member of the planning group, she had not, in a manner of speaking, put her fingers in the cookie jar. If anything, she had been assigned the less morally compromised task of procuring the corkscrew. Being English, and thus possibly clued into the dire punishments that attend petty thefts in the land of Queens and dungeons, she was bubbling over with fear and trepidation. But, as she assured us, chin awobble and in quivering tones, she would take this on the chin without giving up the guiltier parties.

This of course was received not so much with relief, but with the faint beginnings of panic as we sensed that her nerves did not seem strong enough to withstand steady interrogation. And from the look of things, what I suspect was the faint memory of Butcher Bill in his former home, it was clear that the interrogation would prove to be brutal in the extreme.

I tried assuring her that it was an insignificant prank that would amount to nothing, not believing myself as I considered her tear-swollen features. I attempted summoning what I imagined was a rousing speech, deriding the bartender and suggesting that he would not, and indeed could not, take the matter any further on account of its pettiness and the lack of fingerprint proof. After all, I concluded, they did not even know a bottle had been stolen yet.

Having strengthened her backbone enough to reduce the tears into sniffles, I decided to investigate how much information the other side had. Approaching the bartender and his elderly, ladylike assistant – who had earlier refused to serve me drinks because of my inability to accompany the request with a ‘please’. After some friendly banter, it emerged that they suspected our young woman and a companion of stealing a bottle of wine and hiding it under the staircase. Punishment was going to levelled at the whole group by closing the bar a full hour early. Now this was serious stuff given the carefully laid plan to binge drink during that crucial hour. They were determined, like the former owner of the house, to giving no quarter. It came to me in a flash that the downstairs – the servants – in such a home would never ever forgive the transgressions of the upstairs if they had the power to exact punishment. These two had been thrown a bone, a reason to gnaw on it and they were not going to let go.

A well considered discussion now got underway as I dug deep, trying to find a sober set of ideas. With surprising ease, out came a rant on man’s innate corruption and the temptations that, alas, are too often the pitfalls of badly raised youth. Joined in an outraged chorus by the not-so-horny bartender and the please lady, it soon became clear THAT THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH THE YOUNG PEOPLE OF TODAY. ‘But surely, if we are in a crisis here in England on account of declining moral standards, what are we the decent people who have worked hard and lived honestly to do about it all?’ I demanded to know in the midst of this moral love-fest.

I had actually started to feel stabs of great anger against youth crime and a steady sympathy for these two good souls found in their peaceful lair by insidious wine thieves. But I still had a job to do. ‘Are we to depend on collective punishment; on the idea that the sins of the few can be visited on the many; is the message of the New Testament to be disregarded?’ I asked brightly. This was now too much for Mr. Principle and Lady Please; the African was right and deserved a free pint. And then several more. To my credit, I tried refusing these offers suggesting that somewhere in my foggy, largely conscience-free mind, there remained a hint of guilt. But what the hell, I was not going to refuse another pint of London Pride with so much riding on it.

(c) MMK

A Quick Note From An African in Paris

I have just returned to London from a long weekend in Paris. Ah, Paris – all the clichés are true: the waiters are abrupt, the women sophisticated and the city is pathetically beautiful. There was such a relaxed atmosphere, which was especially noticeable among Africans when compared to their London or even New York counterparts. But then there were many who looked like they had bleached their skins, leaving them with blotchy – albeit it relaxed – faces and super dark elbows. It was a strange juxtaposition: the sense of home many of them exuded and the depths of self-doubt implied by a bleached visage. As for the hair styles… I can now say that Paris should be a UN-level International Emergency on the same level as Iraq and Darfur. If you really want to make a Bill Gates Sized fortune, start a hair salon in Paris. I usually cannot identify a weave if it was whipped into my face, but on the streets of Paris it was a choice between noticing the Arc de Triomphe or the reddish, tangled bushes many sisters were walking beneath. The weaves called attention to themselves, looking like a cross between the Medusa’s snakes and a small wet poodle lying atop a head. I worried that a cigarette butt would be flicked too high, sparking an immediate conflagration, an agonizing death and a flood of lawsuits against the Chinese manufacturers of hair pieces.

Folks in Paris are friendly though, engaged with what is going on around them. They do not hunch their shoulders and look into the middle distance like their Anglo counterparts. And though the place takes bureaucratic procedure to heights that Stalin’s Russia would have quaked at, it is all so smooth and well thought out. At least that was my touristy impression. As for being a tourist, this time in Paris, I was unabashed about it. There is something of consuming another culture that I find quite surreal as an African whose country is usually on the receiving end. It was like being in a shop with peoples’ lives on sale. Everything felt available, subject to the whims expressed through my credit card. Of course I knew that the truth is different: Paris is a city interested first in itself and not the outsider. But still that sense of ownership persisted as a tiny, intense feeling of power. I liked it. And so in a bid to capture the European tourist’s perpetual desire to capture an ‘authentic’ African on film, I tried to do the same by seeking out stereotypical beret wearing, red wine drinking, Marxist spouting French men and their clad-in-black female counterparts. I found very few and actually felt surrounded at all times by people who were from everywhere except Paris. More later. I have two stories of women that I saw: one at the Gare du Nord train station, waiting, I thought, for an inconsiderate lover and the other walking toward the Louvre museum holding a bunch of tulips with the cocksure step of a happy lover. Coming up later …