NAIROBI—It was all over. We were gathered on the patio of the national museum’s café , post-morteming in the shade, coffee cups shaking in our hands.

“By the time bodies start piling up, that’s just a detail.” — Ugandan journalist Kalundi Serumaga, speaking at the Kwani Litfest in Nairobi.

NAIROBI—It was all over. We were gathered on the patio of the national museum’s café , post-morteming in the shade, coffee cups shaking in our hands. Binyavanga Wainaina—the next Achebe, or maybe just a good talker—going on about where’s a razor to shave his dreadlocks off: “I just want to see the shape of my skull.”

(”Ah,” said David Kaiza, Kampala’s neurotic genius, “you’re going to scalp yourself before someone else does it for you.”)

Meanwhile, investigative journalist Parselelo Kantai was describing the 1000-shilling bribe he’d paid the cops who caught him smoking a cigarrette on the street at four in the morning last night, while Kalundi was grumbling about everything in a very analytic way—that all the intelligence in this country had been trained outside of it, that everything we’d been talking about throughout the litfest was probably irrelevant, that the waitress had passed him three times without bringing him a menu and it took a blond mzungu to get her attention. “Hey man,” I said, “you could have lifted your hand too.”

One by one they came in from the Nairobi winter sun and joined our huddle, just as they’d come to this city from all over Africa and beyond to discuss what had happened and what our role in it was, or could be, or should be (”We mustn’t take ourselves too seriously,” Wambui Mwangi, academic with an attitude, had warned from the beginning, which was something we constantly needed to be reminded of, although as Binyavanga said, “If what we say doesn’t matter then why does Robert Mugabe dedicate half the national budget to shutting us up?”). Nice view of fat trees and the Nairobi river from where we sat, too far away to see the street kids washing themselves in it or smell the putrescence that washed down from the dump a few dozen kilometres away…I’d seen dead bodies in that river after the violence had supposedly passed, which went back to Kalundi’s earlier point—”Why was everyone so surprised?”—but what were a few urban casualties compared, say, to what Ishmael Beah had seen, had created with his own hands in his own country’s civil war in the nineties. Yet here he was, the only one who didn’t look hungover, looking instead like a Benetton model and sounding like a monk, gentle as nirvana, as though he’d spent all his violence back in Freetown, amputated it like some deformed foot so that nothing was left but articulate grace, maybe that’s why his book has already sold more copies than the combined total of everyone else at the table.

“Conflict is a part of human nature, it’s inevitable,” he’d said at one point during the festival, when someone pointed out the parasitic need writers have for conflict. “What we can do is minimize the impact.” Maybe. He was walking proof of something, no doubt, but no one could say exactly what—least of all Aminatta Forna, the other writer from Sierra Leone, who came from the upper classes of an older generation and was precisely the kind of person child soldiers like Ishmael had been killing—”He never even mentioned rape in his book,” she’d noted quietly earlier in the week, though the two got along well enough throughout the week.

It can get a little morbid. Why are Africans so violent—the most popular question from outsiders, who sometimes even ask it aloud. No answers, only words. The problem with differentiated skin colour is it allows us to see things in black and white, to reduce a whole continent to a pigment. The human condition as zebra stripe. Take those goggles off and you get a different sense, like stepping back in time, back into the plagues and thirty-year wars of Europe, the conquest of South and North America, the latter seemingly well-adjusted now because, as Kalundi said, they were better at genocide. Now, it seems we’ve resorted to killing with kindness. The headquarters for this renovated enterprise are here in Nairobi, a UN complex as lush and vast as the garden of Eden; perhaps (I wonder) if instead of paying for boreholes and mosquito nets, we just stopped picking off their doctors and engineers and physicists and, yes, their writers too, we could relieve them of the burden of our charity. Then maybe they’d find the energy to relieve their own leaders from office.

And yet, the hangovers wear off, we realize we’re laughing now, that it isn’t so bad, the story never ends. A week-long literary festival culminated the night before with a cocktail party at the American ambassador’s mansion, and who didn’t have a good time? Strange choice of venue, true, but as Binyavanga had announced towards the end of the night, “We are living in a global terrain of ideas,” the whereabouts of your body matter less than the wandering of your mind. And yes, writers thrive on conflict, but it’s only one ingredient; look at what our very own Atwood and Ondaatje and Munro have come up with in its absence. Imagination can prosper in peacetime as well.

Listen to Ishmael tell his audience about a recent return trip he’d made to Sierra Leone. “I visited a tree near my home village that was used to kill prisoners during the war, with its bark all hacked up from machete cuts and blackened with blood,” he described. “But when I came back, I saw that the cuts had all healed. The tree was blooming green and beautiful, and people were resting in the shade of its leaves.”

And we’re off, into taxis toward separate planes, or simply to walk down the sidewalk to the next conversation, dispersing like ripples in a pond: Ishmael to Brooklyn, Kalundi and David to Kampala, Aminatta to London, Wambui to Toronto, Binyavanga to stick around…me, I’ll be in touch. Not from here though; this little note is moving on. For those who remain curious about the what-nexts of east Africa and beyond, stay tuned for my replacement, Glenna Gordon, in whose clever hands the story will continue to unfold.

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Posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 11:16 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.