Nairobi—Not long ago, the bosses of the newspaper I work for in Nairobi – The Daily Nation – urged its editors and journalists to avoid mentioning the tribal origins of their subjects. A federal election is underway in Kenya, and the purveyors of public discourse want their readers to vote as Kenyans rather than Luos, or Kambas, or Kisiis. It’s a tall order. There are over forty tribes of long standing in this country, and everybody belongs to one of them – speaks its language, tells its jokes, votes for its leader. This has been the case for much longer than Kenya has been a country. It isn’t immediately obvious to those of us used to the American version of tribal culture. For one thing, the only reservations in Kenya are for wild animals; and the fact that virtually everyone here belongs to a First Nation makes tribalism the rule instead of the exception. Except for the odd urban Masaai, no one sticks out.

This is arguably the biggest point of divergence in the colonial experience of Africa versus that of the Americas: In the end, the Africans got their continent back. (more…)

Nairobi—The Dandora Municipal Dumping Site is a heap of world-class toxicity festering on the east edge of Nairobi. Formerly a rock quarry, it became the city’s domestic, medical, and industrial waste basket in 1973; it filled up by the late eighties and has been overflowing ever since, these days at the rate of 2,000 tonnes of unfiltered garbage a day.

The only checks on its growth are the fires that convert a small portion into acrid smoke, and the legions who scavenge off it for a living. About a million people live within sight or smell of the dump site. They have formed a separate economy based on recycling other people’s garbage. The dark irony is that the source of their livelihoods is poisoning them to death. (more…)

Nairobi—Everyone was waiting for the Americans. Dead Prez, the New York hip hop duo, had touched down in Nairobi twelve hours ago for a brief tour of the motherland. They had a noon appointment at Ukoo Flani’s courtyard-in-the-slum.

Friends, rappers, and rastas started filtering in well before that, and by late morning the compound had taken on a fairground atmosphere. Three girls with magnificent posture set up a jewellery stand beneath Haile Selassie’s watchful gaze, while a troupe of devout Rastafarians hung T-shirts in the bougainvillea. “Give t’anks,” said their leader, Joseph, when I bought one, tapping his heart with his fist.

By two o’clock, about fifty of us were milling about as best we could in the limited space, but still no Prez. I met Ngulu, a photographer from Capetown who had been backpacking around the continent for the last couple months. We talked about the relative merits of African slums. “Kenyans are lucky,” she said. “Most of them have families with land in the country. But South Africans have nowhere to go. Mandela let the whites keep everything.” (more…)

“Until all Africans stand and speak as free beings, equal in the eyes of all men…the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight.”
—Haile Selassie, 1963 address to the United Nations

Nairobi—Six graffiti portraits gaze in on the yard: Malcolm X, Haile Selassie, Bob Marley, Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, and Dedan Kimathi, the 1950s freedom fighter who is Kenya’s version of Che Guevara.

“That guy could swim under crocodiles, man,” Kamau is saying. “He was invisible, everywhere at once. Government troops ambushed in the south — Kimathi. Later the same day, another battle five hundred kilometres away — Kimathi!”

Kamau’s own weapon of choice, as he likes to say, is a microphone. Twenty-nine years old with a fang-like chipped front tooth and chin-length dreadlocks, he’s part of the hip hop trio Kalamashaka, whose lyrics express a world view shaped by life in the ghetto. Kalamashaka, in turn, forms part of Ukoo Flani Mau Mau (“Another Mau Mau Clan”), a well known artists’ collective in the Nairobi slum of Dandora. We’re standing in their headquarters, an open-air compound sheltered by the broad canopy of an acacia, talking about the faces on the walls.

“We were going to paint Marcus Garvey too,” Kamau says, “but we ran out of room.” (more…)

English became more than a language: it was the language, and all others had to bow before it in deference.
—Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind

Nairobi—As reminders of British colonialism go, my new apartment is hard to beat. Norfolk Towers: stiff, upright furniture, heavy green-and-gold curtains, lacquered coffee tables, manicured gardens, and a sparkling outdoor pool, protected from Nairobi by a high wall and a dozen armed guards. You would never suspect what a terrible crime occurred here just three years ago.

Twice a week, my Swahili tutor, Sam, swings by for an hour of mumbo jumbo. Those were in fact two of the first words he taught me; in the original language and spelling, mambo means “how are things,” and jambo is “what’s up.” Not quite the stuff of poetry, but a little more expressive than English speakers make them out to be. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)