NAIROBI

At about 1660 metres above the sea, my first thoughts on Nairobi are that it is a city, in Robert Browning’s words ‘crowded with culture’. This largely owing to the daily busloads of rustics and aliens- charming in the independence heydays but now almost menacing to town planners and slum upgrading committees. It is an intricate tangle of concrete, lives and aspirations.

It has none of the indolent charm of Mombasa, or the boisterous ease of the Lake side. Its pace of life is cruelly relentless and there’s a mechanical thoughtlessness to it that is part of its innate draw. Just as Caesar’s Rome, it is ‘a mad man’s dream’, and just like London in the sixties, it is a happening place, the city with some swing. And in its own fluttering way is to me as ‘eternal’ as Borges’s Buenos Aires.
But as with every city, there are many things not to like…with Nairobi more than most. It is a city always awake and so it has no dreamers. No Meryon walks here and life is all the more colourless for it.  Every city that has a soul needs an artist who dies hungry on its streets for the sake of his art. A visionary, to capture its spiritual structure, or a poet to give it a conscience. And there are the usual hazards of an existence in the bloodiest century. A disintegration of romantic African notions of communal living equals a society in urgent need of a tune-up, community wise. From my bed at night once, I could hear distant gunshots like hazy memories of a bad Hollywood production. Distant sirens, distant music,distant madness.

For a first timer, it can be a cold and impersonal handshake, yet Nairobi never quite lets you alone. You are always in the middle of something here; running battles between police and hawkers, student protest, muck, mud, mafia…every struggle in the wind. You don’t come here to get away but to throw yourself into something. In Nairobi you are both at the edge of the world and at its centre. Away from it, walking in streets other than its own, your mental footsteps never change.  Reticence is in its own way a mark of every son of soil.

Nevertheless, something starts in you in Nairobi. And what I do love about it is its wildly intoxicating sense of upward mobility. Everyone who comes here is chasing the sun, and Nairobi is their imaginary friend. Everything…everyone matters. Over four million souls inhabit this city, circling each other looking for a connection, money…meaning. Like a living, brittle experiment.  You must look out for the scrawny street boy sniffing glue and extorting motorists along Tom Mboya for he is tomorrow’s violent car jacker. The Kibera kid in a dilapidated school will sooner live behind mortgaged walls and every on-campus small-time will graduate to be a big-money demagogue on the national stage. Vertical heights…it’s the message the city subliminally channels. You can be, not better, but more. You can always be more, always have more. For every moral code is a wad of cash that can afford you a guiltless conscience.

A walk through the city is a walk through life; reflections, ironies, contrast and paradox. In a Nairobi minute, a whole scenery changes. At the chemist, across the street, up a muddy footpath or on the wrong corner turn you meet a different destiny than the last.  Across Parklands watching the lives and sights of the bourgeoisie- opulent patios and lemon green lawns or through the crummy alleys of Eastland, the roads spotted with tarmac, it’s impossible not to feel the divorce from the fairytale. In the town centre, Asians come to the entrance of their shops and stare out suspiciously into the world.  The pavements crowded with the very youthful who believe in anything and nothing.The west side, where the wine is expensive and the cars imported is the playground of the deliciously rich, living off family crime or profits of a protestant work ethic of prior generations lost on posterity. . .littered with trendy clubs, haunts of the young and restless, high-end dress shops and exotic restaurants patronised by well-to-do non –Kenyans. The liquor is never cheap  and always hard to pronounce. In Buruburu, the devil winks at orgies. The money’s illicit and so are the women. No, Nairobi’s night life is not for the faint-hearted. The west despises the east and the east resents the west, well within their rights. Discrimination against the rich is the most socially accepted form of discrimination.

Much like Athens, where  every old Greek looked to, Nairobi is fast becoming the pilgrimage site for many wild hearts and lost souls; Somali refugees escaping hostilities back home building a nest in Eastleigh, small time crooks seeking to make it bigger and badder and provincials seeking the city of lights. And each wants Nairobi’s story to be told side by side with theirs.
At 101, Nairobi is a young a young girl with an old heart who has walked in the sun too long and never fallen in love; survived a fire, war, bombing and every other  kind of death. Born of mud and swamp from its epic days as Masai grazing land, no less triumphant then dotted with Manyattas, and peopled with their birthright, it now has marble aspirations.

Now, pondering its founding…there’s nothing romantic or especially distinct about it. A colonial port, one among thousands established on the continent. But its hopes and aspirations perhaps a tad flattering to itself, are as towering as any other.
Nairobi’s story never ends, and since stories grow with time no doubt this one will. And now mine can’t be told without it.

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