Bizarre times in Kenya

The Wild West Kenyan Style

I am the first to concede that I have a tendency to throw around bizarre a little too frequently, but I think two recent experiences in Kenya justifiably fit in to that category.
After having been filled with delight at receiving my Eritrea visa after having to only wait a week, I was feeling pretty chuffed when I found a minivan taxi a few streets from my hotel that would take me all the way to Maralal, the jumping off point to visit Lake Turkana - the Jade Lake, in the north of Kenya.

I rocked up the next morning at 6.30, and sadly it was not to be, there was a strike and none of the minibuses were running. I wandered about between the various companies for half an hour, and then finally jumped in to one that was going about half way to a town called Nyamahururu. A few of my fellow passengers were also headed for Maralal and they began to explain to me that there was an outlawed gang called the Munkiki Gang, who extorted the minivan drivers. They had threatened any driver who entered or left Nyamahurururu that day would have his windscreen broken and his minivan set on fire - finally it looked like I might find some real danger in Africa, and I might see some action. Driving out of Nairobi things started to get a little surreal, all along the side of the main double carriageway highway people were milling about watching the road as though there had been some kind of accident. We then approached a police road block which was only letting one lane of cars through, we passed through at a walking pace as the traffic was backed up. A kilometre or so beyond the roadblock we were directed through a gap in the barrier in the centre of the road on to the other carriageway. A truck filled with Kenyan police or military was parked by the side of the road. The two or so guys in the back were decked out in the full three quarter length green bullet proof vest, with a flap at the bottom hanging below there hips down to there knees making them look like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The truck entered the traffic before us, and the guy next to me seem relieved, "Good, they are providing an escort for us". I felt a little more comfortable with the whole scenario, but about ten kilometres later the truck pulled off the road, did a U-turn and left the traffic to itself. Nobody in the minivan said anything.
We continued our drive, but strangely the few stops we made to drop passengers off were always just before a town, or just after. We only picked up one other passengers, and then the driver requested that we draw the curtains. As we drove along the side of the road was filled with people walking along, most of whom tried to flag us down as we went past. I knew things were strange when a minivan driver has empty seats and doesn't stop to pick people up. Eventually we arrived in Nyamahururu, and the remaining five of us were dropped about two kilometres out of town in a petrol station. Three local guys were also heading to Maralal, so they took me under their wing and we headed in to town to find a lift. As we approached the centre of town, things got even more spooky, I suddenly felt like I was in the wild west. The main street was empty of traffic, but all along the side of the road people were milling around quietly gossiping amongst themselves in small groups, a few groups had taken up vantage points on second story balconies, one group had climbed a water tower. All of the shops were closed with shutters drawn, even the market was empty. The quiet was so out of place in an African town it created an air of expectancy blanketing the entire place. It felt as though any minute a tumble-weed would roll through town, and two men with six shooters would wander on to the set.
Suddenly the tension was broken when a motorbike carrying a pillion passenger slowly motoring though town hit something and ended up sideways, rider and passenger caught underneath. Both were unharmed and soon on their feet, but they were immediately encircled by a large group of people, who all began talking at once, seemingly relieved that something had finally happened, and nobody had been hurt. As the crowd continued milling a police truck, filled with police in riot gear, rolled through town, and parked just off the main street.

The other guys were approached by some touts who directed us towards a hotel in the back streets of town, to wait whilst they investigated possible transport options. We headed up stairs and in to what was a dingy bar, almost too dark to see, with a few barflys already knocking a few back at eleven in the morning. To continue the wild west theme, Ma Baker came over from a table to serve us while we waited.

Eventually we made in out of town in a taxi, and rather anticlimactically, about three kilometres out of town my fellow passengers said, we are fine now, once we reach here there is no trouble. It was strange to go back to the most dangerous thing being the general state of disrepair of the car and the way the driver choose to drive. We immediately had a puncture.

Archers' Rest

After giving up my quest to get to Lake Turkana the back way, I jumped on a matatu heading for the main road. Eight hours later, after driving through some incredible savannah backed by encircling mountains in every direction I rolled in to Archers' Rest - a small town on the main Ethiopia - Kenya road. The sun had already slipped behind the mountains and it was well beyond twilight and the silvery shadows created by the almost full moon meant everything took on an extra edge. The lack of electricity and hence streetlights magnified the effect - and every now and then random objects were caught in the light of a passing vehicle, a face illuminated by a mobile phone, or a candle blown in the wind creating strange moving shadows on the hastily thrown together wooden walls of the strip of shacks which was the main street.

There were a lot of people wandering about, a large bus had just arrived, and a the back of a big truck was filled with road workers heading back to camp. I had been befriended by a fellow passenger on the minivan and he suggested we go and get something to drink and check out the accommodation options whilst the driver decided if he was to go on to Isiolo or stay the night. We crossed the road and immediately I noticed that there were an awful lot of soldiers wandering about, and all of them were carrying automatic weapons, slung across their shoulders, in one hand pointing them to the ground, or in both hands in front of their chests. We wandered in to a bar which was a few tables in a row outdoors, and four or five small enclosed sitting areas in a row. Every customer, and there would have been about fifty, was a soldier, every one was in uniform - in differing degrees of battle preparedness, and every one of them was carrying a gun, most had a few beers in front of them as well. As I sat down there was a big explosion from outside but nobody else but me seemed in the slightest perturbed. My friend explained that sometimes some soldiers had a little too much to drink, which made me feel even more uncomfortable. We had a drink and then sauntered back out on to the street and I felt the bizarreness of the place wash over me.

Slipping in to gentle inertia

I remember studying inertia in physics in high school, and I always identified with the idea of it being a little more difficult to get a body at rest moving, than is otherwise so. When I rolled in to the northern Kenyan town of Maralal late one evening I thought I would only be there a day or two, as I was hoping I would be able to hitch a lift further north to the fabled Jade Lake - Lake Turkana.On my way up to Maralal I had passed through a few tribal areas - northern Kenya is dominated by various groups of pastoral semi nomadic peoples. The people are easy to spot because of their colourful outfits - especially the women who are usually adorned in some very colourful jewellery. There is a lot of tension between different groups, usually involving endless rounds of one group accusing the other of stealing cattle belonging to other groups. Every once in a while the Government gets involved, which seems to make matters only worse, because each group says the Government is only on the side of the opposing group, so they have to go and steal the cattle back. The inflow of cheap automatic weapons during the nineties means that many shepherds walk around with AK47's slung over their shoulders and confrontations became far more deadly. Combine this with an unstable neighbourhood - the area is surrounded by Sudan and Somalia, and there is always trouble a brewing. Whilst I was in Maralal two young shepherd boys had their throats slit (allegedly by Somalis), a local guy was shot and killed, and there were riots in the neighbouring town. Needless to say I didn't see any of this - I was relatively safe seeing I had no cows to steal !!!Before I knew it days had drifted in to each other, and I had a routine, which consisted of passing the time between meals and sleep, going. I would get up early to watch the sun rise over the surrounding hills as I strolled along the main road out of town, checking to see if any new transport had arrived the night before. I would then return to the hotel and the water would have been heated. Receiving my bucket of hot water I would bathe using my hand as a ladle - surprisingly refreshing and effective in the cold chill of the morning. I would then wander to the market and get down my chai and chapati breakfast, before wandering over to some tourism touts I had befriended to chat with them for a while over the state of the world. The touts were very friendly fellows who refused to let the non existence of any means of transport stop them from continually renewing there promise of a truck arriving tomorrow based on information they had received from some secret source. I would then head back to my room to read for a few hours to bring me up to lunch time. Lunch really was the highlight of the day - I discovered the great Kenyan dish of KK - (kidogo kidogo or little little) a pile heaped high of everything from the kitchen, normally including pilau, beans, lentils, potatoes, all topped with a large chapati and a cup of chai, for the wonderful price of fifty cents. The only way to recover from the excitement of lunch was an afternoon nap, which was followed by an evening stroll. Dinner soon followed and by around 8 or 9 I felt as though I had accomplished enough to turn in for the day. Somehow this rolled on for almost a week, and I became a fixture in the town, local kids stopped calling out Mzungu !! to me and instead just said hi. Local merchants even started charging me local prices as people saw the stinginess of my ways are started believing I really didn't have a lot of money and hadn't chosen to spend all these days in town as a holiday. I spent six days in Maralal, and the only time I got near to any transport was when a battered old truck rolled in to town and the touts came hunting me down in my room. We legged it to where the truck was parked and finally found the driver. The touts asked him how much to take me to the Lake, and when he answered even they got up and walked away. It appeared that the driver had been blinded by the shimmer of gold that surrounded me as a mzungu and had asked six times the going rate, or around $100. Glancing at his truck as we walked away I wondered to myself if his truck was even worth that much !!After a false start one day, the following I eventually threw my hat in, the touts counselled me against it, there was definitely a truck coming the next day, but I had lost hope of proceeding further, and rumour had it that it would be much easier from Marsabit the town further north on the highway. Somehow I found myself in a minivan rolling out of town, fighting as hard as I could against inertia and moving again. As if to demonstrate the principle to me in real life, after spending the whole day in the minibus slowly building up speed, the next day I found myself sitting on the top of a truck rushing through the northern arid lands of Kenya, with the wind in my hair and the sun on my face. Reaching Marsabit in a day I found that rumour was wrong and that I could likely spend another week in Marsabit waiting for a truck to Lake Turkana. I decided to cut my losses and continue further north. The next morning I flagged down a truck heading north and jumped on board. The truck was filled with same large rolls of material, so the truck boys, the two other passengers and myself found ourselves sitting on top of the cabin, as the driver flew along the unpaved road towards the Ethiopian border. By two o'clock that afternoon I was in Ethiopia, tired, covered in dust and dazed by so much movement in so little time !!

Modern meets traditional

Lamu, a small island off the north of the Kenyan coast, was one of a handful of Arab/Persian trading ports, operating from the 1400's - first by Arabs, then the Portuguese, and then the Omanis until the take over by the Brits in the late 1830's. The Arabs liked to build their cities off the mainland for the protection it afforded them, and used the ports to ship ivory, precious metals and eventually hundreds of thousand of slaves from the interior. The Arabs and Persians mixed with the locals, Bantu, to create what is today called Swahili culture - Swahili means of the coast from the Arabic sahil. With their religion firmly based in Islam - with a few local twists, the people, language and culture is a mix of Bantu, Arabic, Persian and Indian influences. Interestingly, Swahili the language became the lingua franca for most of East and Central Africa because of the large trade caravans bringing goods to the coast. The colonisers adopted it and developed a Romanised script - which has now replaced the original Arabic one, and it is still spoken today by people as far west as Rwanda.

Its history has a major influence on the layout of the place - the town is built on a narrow strip of the coast facing the channel to the mainland, with building concentrated on the waterfront and then for a short distance back away from the water up the hill. Most of the buildings are several storey high, square, whitewashed buildings, split by wandering, narrow lanes - their width restricting even modern transport to the ever reliable donkey - there are around 3000 wandering about. A number of the older buildings have ornately decorated, carved wooden doors, with detailed inscriptions in Arabic. The cooling sea breeze blows off the aqua marine channel almost every afternoon, moving on the heat of the day. Whilst the population remains predominately black (or Bantu) there are a larger number than on the mainland of very Arabic looking locals, and many women - both light skinned and dark get about in the full veils - only their eyes are visible. Like on the mainland the traders are mainly of Indian descent and they too are predominantly Muslim. There are a number of mosques littered about the town. Add to all this the whales of the call to prayer echoing out across the town, and you can almost imagine yourself in a coastal town in the Mahgreb.

The melange of cultures, and the ready availability of sea food has created a gastronomic culture of its own. In the evening the streets are filled with the smell of street food - mainly goat shish-kebabs roasting on charcoal fires, and a number of small, dingy cafes come alive serving all kinds of delicacies from sea food pilau to sweet green and yellow dahls, all washed down with chai and a chapati.

One evening as I was buying some mendazi - small pakora like balls of fried heaven, I stood next to a fully veiled women - dressed completely in black, with only her eyes showing. I heard her talking and turned around to see her lifting her veil to pop a mendazi in her mouth. The lifting of the veil revealed a mobile phone earpiece, and microphone. For some reason I was completely astonished by the idea that she was chatting away on a mobile phone. Whilst the town does kind of create a lost in time atmosphere, I guess it had never occurred to me that somebody who was forced to (or chose to) dress in such a conservative and old fashioned way would be exploiting the wonders of modern technology.

Maybe Nokia is fuelling a secret revolution, going on under the burka,that nobody knows about !!

I'm out - Nairobi impressions

The Kenyan capital of Nairobi, formerly dubbed Nairoberry has a reputation as Africa's second most dangerous city (after Joburg) The reputation was well earned, stories of muggings, violent crime and hijackings were what kept the pulse of every ex pat and Holy Planet reading tourist racing. However since the post election violence in early 2008 the police have cleaned up the streets, to use that dirty euphemism, however the reputation remains. It is one of those cities were even locals think that it is dangerous, which generally indicates there is some danger lurking about.

On my first morning in town I was having breakfast in a cafe, after having sat down at a table with some locals I had to return to the counter to collect a spoon. I left my bag attached to the seat, walked the three metres to the counter, collected my spoon and returned to the table. The woman sitting opposite me at the table immediately warned me "Never leave your bag like that. Sometimes even if you just look away someone will come and take it". Considering that the place was filled with men in suits, and a few elderly women whom I imagined to be beyond too much swift movement, I wondered whether the reputation rather than reality influenced the way people felt.

I subsequently started chatting to the guy sitting next to me about Nairobi and life in general. Nairobi is filled with matatus, the ubiquitous Toyota Hiace, which are used as share taxis, usually crammed full with 18 people, plus the driver and the bus boy. Some of them have been done up, new paintwork, images of the suffering Christ or invocations to Allah plastered on all the panels, plush (imitation) velvet interiors - one even had a big, flat screen TV in the back so the passengers could watch music videos as they had their ear drums blasted out. However, most are in a rather parlous state, bald tyres are standard, brakes are optional, and a driving licence and road rules mere urban myths that rear their ugly heads from time to time. As the number of matatus is high, and the fares quite low, the competition for passengers is frantic, a potential passenger is constantly in danger of being yanked from the street in to the waiting matatu, or being flattened by a speeding matatu, using the footpath as a road in an attempt to get ahead of the others and claim any potential passengers. Every day the news contains at least one story about a matatu crash, usually involving the loss of life. The guy in the café explained to me that in the society brimming with corruption that is Kenya the matatus are all owned by the police, so the police rarely worry about stopping the matatus for violations, they would only be eating in to their own profits !!

Despite the black cloud of fear that seems to hang over Nairobi, I actually found it quite a pleasant place. It's main streets are wide and tree lined, its altitude makes it quite cool, the streets are clean and there is a large park in the middle of town. Kenyans are used to foreigners, yet they are still more than happy to stop and have a chat and assist you in any way they can. I wandered in to an internet café and
after having trouble connecting my laptop I was assisted by a technician. When I returned to the same place later in the evening, the same technician recognised me, greeted me like an old friend and made sure that everything was working fine. About an hour later the technician reappeared and said "I am out", which apparently means "I am going" in Kenyan English. He was knocking off at the end of his shift and came and said goodbye to his new friend. The warm heart of Africa indeed.

Jaffas in the aisles

Every country I have been to so far in Africa has the phenomena of the mini-cinema. Across the continent from little shacks that a decent gust of wind would blow over to large, public halls there are little cinemas or movie houses shocking the latest in Hollywood blockbusters, a small selection of Bollywood hits, classic shoot'em up action movies like Rocky, Rambo or anything with Chuck Norris or Jean Claude Van Damme, some Chinese or Hong Kong martial arts epics of very dubious quality and sometimes European football. They are usually easy to spot because they have hand painted pictures of gun totting action heroes or suave male leads all over the front entrance.

Inside they range from a small TV with the volume turned up to full distortion, surrounded by a few chairs, to a huge screen, the full stereo system and rows of seats. The daily schedule is usually put up out the front on a blackboard, but a few I have seen look like the schedule hasn't changed since last century. Some buildings are purpose built but most are simple shacks, the walls covered in old plastic sacks to try and keep the light out.

After spending a whole day in a minibus in Kenya, I rolled in to Archer's Rest, what could be only described as a frontier town. The frontier here is between the paved road and the corrugated, potholed rock strewn, dusty nightmare that stretches another thousand kilometres to the border with Ethiopia and is sometimes optimistically called a road. However, it also sees to be the frontier between lawful Kenya and the Wild West like country of the tribal pastoral lands of the north, a region surrounded by unstable neighbours - Somalia to the east, Sudan to the west and Ethiopia to the north, and filled with cheap guns - every shepherd carries an AK47, cattle thieves, violence and revenge. The night before two young shepherd boys had their throats slit by Somali cattle rustlers, and the whole town was talking about it. The settlement is filled with soldiers, who all wander about with automatic weapons slung over their shoulder. The bar I walked through had ten tables all filled with soldiers, in various states of undress, each with a weapon in one hand and beer or whisky in the other. The soldiers have an unenviable jobs, supposedly providing protection to the people, they are often required to take cattle from one group who have allegedly stolen them and return them to their original owners. Theft is so prevalent, and military intervention so apparently capricious that neither those they are sent to protect nor the enemy respect the Kenyan military, and out of the constant fear of attack the soldiers never put down their guns - I saw a few take them to the toilet, As we were drinking we heard a few gunshots ring out in the distance and the local guy who had befriended me on the bus explained that sometimes some soldiers got a little drunk and let a few rounds off. Needless to say I went to bed fairly early that night. The Chinese, who are there to build the road -the modern equivalent of the goldfields, roll in to town in their huge dump trucks every evening to complete the Wild West picture.

As I was sauntering through town looking for dinner I stumbled across the local cinema, easily spotted by the groups of kids surrounding the squat, square building, peering in through the gaps in the walls to catch a glimpse of a Hong Kong martial arts fight 'em action thriller. The doorman let me peer inside, and as my eyes adjusted to the dim light inside it was like looking back through time. I imagined this is what the picture houses in rural Australia, in which my father used to describe he rolled jaffas down the aisles during the Saturday evening pictures, looked like. There were three columns of seats, arranged in rows of around twenty, filled to the brim with locals who seemed to be more entertained by what was going on in the audience than any of the action on the screen. I didn't see anyone making out or holding hands, but then I wonder if even that was allowed in socially conservative post war Australia. The movie came to an end, the house lights came up, and people had that same wistful look of wishing the fantasy could have distracted them from their mundane lives a little longer as they filed out the door.

Whilst the past may well be a foreign country, sometimes a foreign country is the past.