In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.
—Ryszard Kapuscinski

Nairobi—Looking at Africa from afar — the only view most of us have — is like gazing at a switchboard of fifty-three lights winking endlessly on and off. A bright spot appears in South Africa when Nelson Mandela emerges from prison, while another light signals the return of rain to Ethiopia; elsewhere, darker events run their course and night falls in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia. The Congo, having burned its fuse decades ago, seems permanently saddled with Joseph Conrad’s epithet, but soon a new glimmer appears to the west: Liberia’s Charles Taylor has wound up in the Hague. Blood diamonds are replaced by the Iron Lady, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who in 2006 becomes the country’s president and Africa’s first Big Woman. With peace comes electricity, both flooding the war-ravaged capital for the first time in fifteen years. At last! The streetlights are on in Monrovia.

Look closer, of course, and the metaphor disintegrates. With its thousands of tribes, clans, languages, ancient rivalries, and recent alliances, Africa is simply too diverse to be made sense of at a glance. The Cartesian tactic of dividing it into fifty-three observable parts is hardly any better — take Kenya, the country I’ve just flown into, for example: ninety-four new political parties have formed over the last year in anticipation of a December election, bringing the total to 139. And counting. Most reflect a tribal base, prompting the chair of Kenya’s Human Rights Commission, Makau Matua, to ask in a recent op-ed: “How do we turn an incoherent collection of ethnic communities into a single nation?” The question was rhetorical. President Mwai Kibaki himself is unable to decide which party he belongs to.

In this, one of Africa’s most stable countries, just about half the population lives on a dollar a day or less. Flying into the capital, one passes serenely over undeveloped parkland until, with startling abruptness, the verdant savannah gives way to the tenements and concrete shacks that mark Nairobi’s edge; most of the city ahead, meanwhile, stays hidden beneath a cloud of yellow smoke: fires, for cooking, for clearing space, for getting rid of garbage, are everywhere. It seems there’s one in every yard. Yet a new law went into effect just last week making it illegal to smoke cigarettes in public — anywhere in public, not just in restaurants and bars. A $30 fine for transgressors is somehow equated with the option of up to six months in prison for those who can’t afford it, but on the upside, perhaps the victims will be allowed to smoke in their cells. That this new law is clearly unenforceable is beside the point — how did it even come to be inked? A million people and more live in slums characterized by ‘flying toilets,’ the plastic bags in which residents must defecate for lack of a sewer system; one in ten city dwellers is HIV positive; hospital care and university alike are prohibitively expensive…to what lawmaker does it occur that circumstances like these are best alleviated by an anti-smoking campaign?

And yet — the smiles on peoples’ faces here betray an enduring grace that won’t lie down or quit. For all its inadequacies, the present regime is the closest thing Kenya has had to responsible democracy since its birth in 1963, and life is getting better. President Kibaki has made primary school free for all Kenyans; drugs to treat malaria are free now as well, as are HIV tests, and the antiretroviral drugs on which so much of the population relies are gradually becoming affordable. Not only have the drugs become cheaper, but the people are getting richer — 300,000 of them have risen above the poverty line since the turn of the century. Women are respected and hold positions of power, albeit not so many as men. Corruption is as rife as ever, but journalists can now report it with impunity; when they do, it’s the ministers who lose their jobs. The upcoming election is already riotous, but at least it’s transparent — and anyway, if the political scene here resembles a schoolyard melee, at bottom whose doesn’t? Give them another hundred years and enough food to eat, and they’ll learn how to apply the makeup.

Meanwhile, for those of us on the outside looking in, maybe it’s best to avoid big pictures and start small instead. To just go for an afternoon drive in a city like Nairobi, veering through traffic in a painted matatu bus; to meander down avenues that pass beneath the green shade of acacias and baobabs, only to emerge before a forest of corrugated roofs simmering in the sun. The squalor of a slum; the ripeness of the mangos, bananas, and passion fruit sold in a thousand stalls; the black skin and the white, white teeth bared in laughter and anguish alike.

Photo by Chris Ojow

Related articles in The Walrus:
Stars Above Africa (Dec./Jan. 2007)
The Conspiracy Against Africa (Nov. 2006)
Re AIDS/Africa (Jan. 2006)
More articles

Tags: international, kenya

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Posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 2:36 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.