Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat.
—Binyavanga Wainaina, “How to Write About Africa“

Nairobi—Someone was banging drums at the entrance to Kosovo. War drums? Impossible to say. Closer investigation revealed only that the noise came from a dilapidated “community hall.”

Unfortunately, two assassins were blocking the entrance. They were disguised as four-year-old boys (never underestimate these people) lying on their stomachs in order to peer through the gap beneath an ill-fitting door, utterly transfixed by the goings-on inside.

The only other spy hole was a small broken window, six feet off the ground. Frantic disembodied heads bobbed in and out of the window frame, black faces contorted under the influence of whatever demons such antics were meant to invoke. There was only one explanation: this, in the local parlance, was dancing.

My companion for this exotic mission, a wiry youth with leather knuckles and a shaved head, grew up in a similar neighborhood. Ojo was strangely unperturbed by the drums. Earlier, he’d explained that many of Nairobi’s slums took international nicknames, in light of which it seemed a shame our assignment hadn’t led to California, say, or even Burma. But at least we weren’t in Mogadishu.

Kosovo. Every good journalist knows you haven’t seen Africa till you’ve visited a slum, and this one fit the bill; on top of being cramped and filthy, Kosovo is an infamous stronghold of Nairobi’s most notorious criminal organization, the Mungiki. Be afraid! But not too afraid — the police kindly shot thirty of them in June, not far from where we stood.

Thirty fewer bad guys (or thereabouts — exact tallies were stymied when many of the bodies wound up in grassy fields instead of the morgue). Things ought to be safer now. Why, look there: A tour bus, disgorging a herd of khaki’d Europeans. Bring on the Mungiki. These tourists came armed with high calibre automatic digicams, shooting every Kosovar in sight.

Leaving the Eurovoyeurs behind, we set forth, past countless hawkers’ stalls jammed together in the mud. The biggest among them might have held a queen-size bed, but how would you get it inside?

Perhaps the danger wasn’t over: A truck, almost too wide for the pitted track, rumbled onto the road and parked in front of us. Impossible not to notice the bloodstains on the driver’s white overalls as he got out and pulled — good lord — half a carcass from the cab. Rumours of cannibalism sprang to mind, until I saw the hooves. Heaving his cargo brazenly over one shoulder, he entered a dark little hut (the “butcher’s,” if you believed the sign), rubbing the meat against the door in the process and leaving a dark red smear.

Note taken. We turned off the road onto a debris-strewn footpath. Kosovo sprawled across both sides of the valley below, a labyrinth of grey-brown huts bisected by a black stream at the bottom. The view disappeared as we descended, our trail narrowing and branching out like a tree root. Squat homes built at drunken angles pressed in all around.

No signs yet of witchcraft, though people did seem conspicuously cheerful and productive. What’s with all the food, I wondered. Weren’t slum-dwellers supposed to be starving, despondent? Yet bananas hung in several doorways, pots of stew simmered over cook fires, and neighbours chatted amiably from their doorsteps. The smells of fresh cooking mingled with wafts of the gastronomical aftermath, which dribbled down channels worn into the dirt.

Beheading seemed imminent. A child could have macheted us from his doorstep, so narrow were the lanes. There were, in fact, children everywhere. I eyed them cautiously, not buying their “how are you” trick for a minute.

Aside from those three words, apparently bequeathed at birth, locals of all ages spoke Swahili. Best to let Ojo do the talking. He chatted comfortably (too comfortably?) with ancients and infants alike as we went. “This one wants you to greet him,” he told me at one point, referring to a twentysomething man dressed in weathered jeans and a threadbare collared shirt. A handshake ensued, which in these parts necessarily included a long round of “habari” this and “nzuri” that — surely — pagan incantations invented to hypnotize foreigners.

We carried on down the hill. Mary, a grim-faced lady approaching fifty, accosted us near the bottom. She told us about her son Samuel. “The police came and shot him while he lay sick in bed,” she said, Ojo translating. Mary’s eyes burned but her voice was quiet and monotonous. “He was in grade seven.”

At last, we emerged from the maze into the relatively open space by the river. Then little more than a sluggish puddle, it is notoriously flood-prone during the rainy season, so the banks were kept clear of everything but garbage.

This was the putrid shore where police kicked dozens of people to the ground in June, shooting whoever struggled; where dozens more were marched into the current at gunpoint, dredging it by hand in search of weapons the police could use as evidence against them; not far from where homes were ransacked while young men were led around the corner and executed on suspicion of criminal behaviour.

Four weeks later, there I stood, contemplating the sensation of sinking beneath a black sea of injustice, all the way to the bottom of Kosovo. The air was humid, palpable and overripe.

We crossed a rotting footbridge and went up the other side.

Arno Kopecky in Nairobi
Photos 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)

Tags: international, kenya

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