Dark Star Safari

9. Rift Valley Days

In the East African bush, apart from the ritual warnings of hungry armed shifta, no one seemed to worry much about crime. Cattle rustling, of course, was the exception, but that posed no risk to the sort of traveler I was — a dusty note-taking fugitive with a small bag, an evasive manner and no time constraints. I knew I was out of the bush and near an African town or city when the crime warnings were numerous and specific, and always illustrated by a grim story. Nothing was grimmer or more graphic than an African warning.

The nearer I got to Nairobi the worse the warnings. I was in Nanyuki when people told me of the many dangers. If you are involved in a car hijacking, surrender your car: a woman was killed, stabbed in the eye, by hijackers just last week. Hand over your wallet to robbers without hesitation: a man was slashed to death by muggers yesterday, literally disarmed, his limbs lopped off with pangas (machetes). Don’t be misled into thinking that crime happens only at night, I was cautioned: seven armed men robbed a perfume shop at midday on Kenyatta Avenue in Nairobi this week. But if you go out at night you will definitely be robbed, I was assured. ‘There is a one hundred percent chance of it. I am one hundred percent sure.’ Don’t resist, give them what they want and you will live.

I was still in cool green Nanyuki, lying in the morning shadow of 17,000-foot-high Batian Peak of Mount Kenya, graced with scoopings of snow, an ice field and — wonderful on the Equator — a number of visible glaciers.

A man of the Meru people said to me, ‘Spirits live there. The mountain is sacred to us. We go to the mountain to pray.’

But even Mount Kenya was being robbed. That same week, a deal was made by some politicians in the Kenyan government to sell off hundreds of square miles of protected land in the ancient forest of the mountainside to loggers and developers.

I traveled to Nairobi in an overcrowded Peugeot taxi, nine of us crushed into a five-seater, and so I spent the entire trip, two hours, in the arms of a man named Kamali. He was a professional guide. He had in his bag a new book about lions by a British author, Elizabeth Laird, with a handwritten dedication: To Kamali, who told me stories about lions I shall remember for the rest of my life.

‘Kamali’ was a nickname. It meant vervet monkey, a name he had been given by some people in the west of Kenya for his cleverness and good humor. He was knowledgeable about the north and the behavior of animals and the minutiae of conducting a safari.

Kenya had been put on the map by hunters, and by people who wrote about hunting. Hemingway’s name comes quickly to mind, and so does Karen Blixen’s; but much earlier there was the Tarzan-like figure of Colonel Patterson and his Man-Eaters of Tsavo. What all such books about Kenya have in common is an obsession with animals and a lazy sentimentality about servants and gun-bearers. No crime, no politics, no agents of virtue appear in these books. Hemingway’s Kenya might never have existed — at this distance in time it seems the private fantasy of a wealthy writer bent on proving his manhood, and the hunting safari one of the more offensive kinds of tourist one-upmanship.

‘There is no hunting anymore,’ Kamali said. ‘I’m so glad.’

I looked out the window for anything familiar. I had spent years in the late sixties going back and forth from Uganda to Kenya, but now I saw nothing that I recognized except signboards lettered with place names. It was clear to me on my way to Nairobi that the Kenya I had known was gone. I didn’t mind: perhaps the newness would make this trip all the more memorable.

Our overstuffed Peugeot was doing eighty. I said to Kamali, ‘Mind asking the driver to slow down?’

‘Pole-pole, bwana’ Kamali said, leaning forward.

Insulted by this suggestion, the man went faster and more recklessly. Because so many of the Kenyan roads were better than before, people drove faster and there were more fatal accidents. ‘MANY DEAD IN BUS PLUNGE HORROR’ is a standing headline in Kenya.

‘That was a mistake. I should have said nothing,’ Kamali said.

Police roadblocks — there were eight or ten on this road — did nothing to deter the man from speeding. He stopped. The car was in bad shape, obviously, and overcrowded. The policeman glared at us and cowed the driver but when he had detained us for a few minutes, he waved us on.

‘Look — the slums,’ Kamali said as we entered the outskirts of Nairobi. ‘They worry me the most.’

We were hardly past Thika, which had once been the countryside, written about in an amiable way as a rural idyll by Elspeth Huxley, who had grown up there. Now it was a congested maze of improvised houses and streets thick with lurking kids and traffic and an odor of decrepitude: sewage, garbage, open drains, the stink of citified Africa.

Going slowly, our car was surrounded by ragged children pleading for money and trying to insert their hands through the half-open windows.

‘Be careful when you see totos like this,’ Kamali said. ‘Sometimes they can take their own feces in their hand and put it on you, to make you give them something.’

Giving you shit in the most literal sense.

The traffic was being held up by a crowd of people rushing across the road, and by curious drivers, slowing down for a better look.

‘Look, see the thief,’ Kamali said.

It was a sight of old Africa, a naked man running alone down an embankment and splashing across a filthy creek, pursued by a mob.

‘They have taken his clothes. He is trying to get away in the dirty water of the river.’

But he was surrounded. There were people along both banks of the creek, holding sticks and boulders, laughing excitedly at the man who was so panicked he did not even think to cover his private parts, but just ran, his arms pumping, splashing in the disgusting mud.

The crowd surged towards him, swinging sticks, and then the traffic began to move.

‘They will kill him,’ Kamali said.

Once, even in my memory of it, Nairobi had been a quiet market town of low shop houses and long verandas, two main streets and auction halls, where farmers came to sell their harvest of coffee or tea. It was overnight by train to the coast — because of the danger of bilharzia tainting freshwater lakes and rivers, Mombasa-by-the-sea was the only safe place to swim. In the opposite direction it was overnight by train to Kampala. The Ugandan line through the highlands was bordered by farms.

The White Highlands had been aptly named: Indians and Africans were forbidden to raise cash crops by the British colonial government. Indians were shopkeepers, Africans were farm laborers, or else just lived in villages and worked the land. The few tourists who visited were timid sightseers or just as timid hunters, taken in hand by white guides and brought within range of wild game. Apart from that Kenya worked on the old colonial system of landowners and businessmen being squeezed by greedy politicians, and the rest of the population were little more than drudges and whipped serfs.

Little had changed after independence. Jomo Kenyatta’s face hung in a framed portrait in every shop where Queen Elizabeth’s had been. Some schools were built, some streets renamed. But educated people are a liability in a dictatorship: all the schools were underfunded, few of them succeeded. A great deal of foreign money was given to the government and most of it ended up in the pockets of politicians, some of whom were assassinated. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the fatness of corrupt African politicians.

Just after Christmas 1963, on my way to Nyasaland to be a Peace Corps teacher, I saw Jomo Kenyatta on Kenyan television. Slightly drunk, corpulent and looking jovial, he slurringly wished everyone a Happy New Year. I walked down a shady road to the Nairobi library. Two Englishwomen were at the checkout desk, stamping library cards. At the Anglican church, an Englishwoman was polishing the brasses. Stories of scandals and steamy romances among the white settlers circulated. I took this for provincial boasting, the way Englishmen in rural places habitually gloated about how drunk they had been the night before at the pub. For such drinkers there was nothing to talk about except drunkenness.

I suspected even then that I was looking at a British colony that had hardly changed in 100 years. Nairobi had been modeled on an English county town, but with so much cheap labor available it ran more smoothly.

Kenya did not explode at independence. It did not even change much at first, and it was only superficially modernized. It merely got bigger, messier, poorer, more squatters in the country, more slums in the city. More schools, too, but inferior ones that could not alter the social structure, because power was in the hands of a small number of businessmen and politicians. That remained the case. Jomo Kenyatta died in 1978 and Daniel arap Moi became president. We used to joke about his saying, ‘L’état c’est Moi’ — but the expression accurately described his rule. Thirty years later, Moi was still president, and a terrible president at that.

The Nairobi I entered in that overcrowded taxi, at the end of my long road trip from Ethiopia, was a somewhat recognizable version of the small market town I had seen almost forty years before. It was still at heart a provincial town, with the same people in charge, but it was huge and dangerous and ugly.

The worst part of Nairobi — everyone said so — was the district where I arrived: the bus and taxi depot. That neighborhood was old-fashioned in that way, the floating world of travelers arriving and departing, mobbed with jostling youths and hucksters and stall-holders, people selling drinks and trays of food and bunches of sunglasses. Prime pickpocket territory, for it was so crowded, so crammed with urchins, snatching and begging, as well as with the blind, the leprous, the maimed. I was reminded again that medieval cities were all like this. African cities recapitulate the sort of street life that has vanished from European cities — a motley liveliness that lends color and vitality to old folk-tales and much of early English literature. An obvious example was Dickens’s London, an improvised city, populated by hangers-on, hustlers and newly arrived bumpkins — like Nairobi today.

Visitors to Kenya en route to game parks are whisked from the airport to the hotel and seldom see the desperation of Nairobi, which is not the dark side, or a patch of urban blight, but the mood of the place itself.

My idea was to walk fast and look busy, and not dress like a soldier or a tourist — no khakis, no camera, no short pants, no wallet, no valuables, just a cheap watch and loose change, for it was a rapacious and hungry and scavenging society. I left all my valuables padlocked in my bag. Women worked or cruised as prostitutes, but men and boys just stood around in very large groups, nothing to do, yakking among themselves or else staring at passersby as though to assess what article worn by that person was worth snatching. On the busiest intersections street kids twitched, hunger in their skinny faces, and seized upon strangers, obvious travelers, single women, old folks and foreigners, and followed them, threatening and pleading.

Even the wild birds were at it. Marabou storks, big untidy long-legged birds with dirty feathers and large muck-slobbered beaks, perched in the trees on the main roads where people sold food. The food sellers made such a mess that the storks had given up scavenging in the game parks where the pickings were uncertain, and had become permanent residents, hovering constantly, unafraid of humans, like the so-called beggar bears at the fringes of American forests, which raided garbage cans and trash barrels.

Kites and hawks swooped down and made off with students’ lunches, and what they dropped the rats ate. Bold mangy rats scuttled in Nairobi’s gutters and drains.

Deforestation, dramatic in Kenya, was also a result of scavenging. Hearing an account of my trip through the desert, a diplomat said to me, ‘Right, it hasn’t rained in the north for three years. Whose fault is that? They cut down the trees for fuel, they sold them to loggers, they destroyed the watershed. And they’re still doing it.’

After making some choice robbery notes in my diary I went to buy the Nairobi paper, so that I could read it over a cup of coffee and do the crossword. The news was that a German film crew on location had lost all their cameras and sound equipment in a theft from their hotel in Nyeri.

‘Dar is better,’ an Indian named Shah told me. ‘Indian women wear gold bangles there. Not here.’

Women confident enough to walk down the street wearing jewelry was one test of an African city’s safety.

Shah told me that his father had come to Kenya in the 1940s, looking for work. He became a dealer in second-hand goods, buying from the white Kenyans, selling to the Africans. ‘He bought anything.’ In the 1950s, with the Emergency and the terror of the Mau-Mau, white Kenyans started to sell their farms and move out — many went to South Africa. The senior Mr Shah bought their furniture and their family silver, picture frames, leather Gladstone bags and crystal inkpots, ‘anything old.’ The second-hand dealer of the 1950s and 1960s had, without realizing it, started a profitable antiques business, and this his son inherited. His son needed the business, for it was impossible to go back to India.

‘There is no one left, we have nothing there, even the family house is gone,’ the younger Mr Shah said. ‘I have no family in India. I don’t even go there. My brother is in Australia. I would like to go, but my shop is full of inventory.’

He worried for his children, who were terrified of the Nairobi streets.

Shah said, ‘My boy is sixteen. He is home all the time — afraid to go out. He has not been out alone at all. He has no idea how to shop — to buy the simplest things. He says, “Dad, let’s get some shoes,” when he wants shoes. But you see, he must learn how to get out from under the umbrella. For him it is like house arrest.’

A similar term was used by another Indian in Nairobi, but he was a recent arrival. He had been in Kenya for six years, running a restaurant.

He said to me, ‘I am alone here. My family is in India. If they were here they would not be able to go out. I go to India once a year. I am here to work. I don’t speak Swahili. Why should I keep my family here in a house prison?’

Because of all the stories of mayhem in Nairobi I seldom went out after dark. Instead of doing my note-taking in the morning, I wrote my notes at night in my hotel room. On the nights when I had caught up and had time on my hands I continued my erotic story of the man about to have a big birthday and his recalling the steamy relationship with the older German woman. The setting was Sicily in the early sixties, a decaying palazzo — auto-erotic writing counted as escapist entertainment, perhaps, but it was preferable to being robbed.

Even the wariest people were robbed. In September 1998, after the US Embassy bombing in Nairobi, three of the FBI men who had come to sift evidence were traveling down Kenyatta Avenue, one of the main streets. Their car collided with a taxi. They got out to examine the damage and were quickly surrounded by the usual Nairobi crowd of urchins, idlers, the homeless, the scavengers, the opportunists.

Without their realizing it, the FBI men were relieved of their wallets and pistols. Slapping their pockets, very angry at the theft, they faced a laughing mob, and the newspapers the next day mocked them for their stupidity.

Cynicism had been rare and unwelcome at the time of independence, but even my oldest, most idealistic African friends in Kenya were cynical. One praised the opposition leader, Mwai Kibaki.

‘He is unusual in Kenya in that he has gotten to where he is by being reasonable,’ my friend said. ‘He is one of the very few politicians in Kenya who do not see killing people as necessary for political power.’

A student of one of my African friends said to me, ‘You think it’s just poor people who turn to crime, but no, many of the people I graduated from university with are still looking for work. There is no work. So they become thieves. Boys with good degrees! One boy who graduated with a business degree was involved in a car hijacking. Another tried to rob a wealthy Asian man — he was caught and is now in jail.’

‘Is this what we call white-collar crime?’ I asked.

‘No. It is guns and robbery. Many of the robberies are committed by well-educated people.’

‘Most of the people in this country have nothing,’ another African friend said to me.

‘How are things going to improve?’

‘Some people say the next election might make things better,’ he said. ‘Donor countries tell us that if all state-owned utilities and industries are turned over to the private sector it will be the answer.’ He smiled at me. ‘But it isn’t the answer.’

‘So what is the answer?’ I asked.

He smiled. ‘Maybe no answer.’

Maybe no answer. The whites, teachers and diplomats and agents of virtue, at dinner parties had pretty much the same things on their minds as their counterparts had in the 1960s. They discussed relief projects and scholarships and agricultural schemes, refugee camps, emergency food programs, technical assistance. They were newcomers. They did not realize that for forty years people had been saying the same things, and the result after four decades was a lower standard of living, a higher rate of illiteracy, overpopulation, and much more disease.

Foreigners working on development schemes did not stay long, so they never discovered the full extent of their failure. Africans saw them come and go, which is why the Africans were so fatalistic. Maybe no answer, as my friend said with a smile.

Kenya’s reputation was so bad that some foreigners treated it as a throwback, satirizing it as a cannibal kingdom. Around the time I was in Kenya, the mayor of Toronto was offered a trip to Mombasa, a chance for him to speak to the Association of National Olympic Committees of Africa, to solicit support for Toronto as an Olympic venue in 2008. He turned it down.

The Canadian mayor explained, ‘What the hell would I want to go to a place like Mombasa for? I just see myself in a pot of boiling water with all these natives dancing around me.’

Germans still vacationed in Mombasa and Malindi, where Kenyan hotel managers routinely spoke German; tourists had never ceased to go on safaris; game viewing was popular, bird-watchers went to Lake Baringo and saw more birds in two days than they were likely to see in an entire lifetime back home. Despite the elephant killing and the smuggling of ivory and the poaching of lions and leopards for their claws and skins, there were still quite a few animals in Kenya’s game parks. These high populations of game were due partly to the earlier policies of the ubiquitous Richard Leakey who advocated that park rangers shoot poachers on sight.

Tourist Kenya — predictable, programmed, day-trippers kitted out in safari garb, gaping from Land-Rovers — did not interest me. Tourists yawned at the animals and the animals yawned back. And the Kenya of big-game hunters and the sentimental memoirists from Hemingway and Isak Dinesen to the mythomaniacs of the present day such as I Dreamed of Africa’s Kuki Gallmann just made me laugh. If the self-important romanticizing of Out of Africa was at one end of the shelf, the other end was crowded with safari books such as Ilka Chase’s Elephants Arrive at Half-Past Five. You would think from the writing that Kenya was just farms and devoted servants and the high-priced rooms at Gallman’s luxury safari camp. Of the even more expensive rooms at the Mount Kenya Safari Club outside Nanyuki, one guest commented in a travel magazine afterwards, that they were ‘So luxurious you forget you’re in the wilderness,’ oblivious of the fact that Nanyuki is not in the wilderness.

The orbit of big-game viewing and beer drinking on the coast was a world apart from the life of Kenya. Even when I lived and worked in Africa, I regarded safari people as fantasists, heading into the tamest bush in zebra striped minibuses, with hampers of gourmet food. Nor did these credulous people take the slightest interest in the schools where I taught. Now and then a news item noted that a famous person had come to Uganda or Kenya to hunt. In the late sixties, one of Nixon’s cabinet members, Maurice Stans, visited Uganda with a high-powered rifle, in search of the shy and elusive bongo, a large-boned antelope, which was hunted with dogs. It was the stag-at-bay method: the dogs pursued the bongo, and when it was trapped, its head down and trying to gore the mutts, he was shot through the brain or the heart. Stans bagged one or two. Now there are no bongos left in Uganda. Though Maurice Stans is dead his species is not in the least endangered, while the poor bongo has just about been eliminated in the rest of Africa.

‘Kenya is much more than animals,’ an African said to me one night at a Nairobi party. He introduced himself as Wahome Mutahi, and went on, ‘I would say that the small things that people do here are more significant than any animal.’

Wahome had been a political prisoner. ‘I was tortured, too,’ he said, smiling. ‘My story is too long to tell here.’ I made a point of seeing him the next day.

One of the many African ex-prisoners I met on my trip, Wahome was a journalist and novelist, widely read in East Africa. He had an oblique manner and a self-mocking smile, always speaking of himself and Kenya’s contradictions with amused wonderment. His writing style was the same — understated and bravely ironical. In his fifties when I met him, he had been young enough at independence to witness every folly and false promise. He was a real endangered specimen — an intelligent homegrown opponent of the brutal regime, who still lived and worked in his native land.

‘There is less debate, less intellectual activity than you saw in your time,’ he said over lunch at the New Stanley Hotel.

I had stayed at the New Stanley Hotel thirty-eight years before, when it was new, and the white hunters drank at the Long Bar inside and the tourists fussed at the Thorn Tree Café out front. At that time the predators had been in the bush; now they were in the Nairobi streets and in the Kenyan government.

‘There was a coup attempt in ’82, which failed,’ Wahome went on. ‘After that there was a clampdown on intellectual activity. I was arrested in August 1986 — and jailed.’

‘You were charged — you got a trial?’

‘I was charged with neglecting to report a felony. So I was guilty of sedition. They said that my crime was that I knew people who were publishing seditious material — that is, material critical of the government.’

‘Was that true?’

‘No, I didn’t know anyone. I was just a journalist on The Nation, just writing.’

‘But you confessed?’

‘Yes’ — he smiled — ‘but it wasn’t simple.’ He put his knife and fork down and leaned forward. ‘The Special Branch came to my house at night, looking for me. I was at a bar at the time. When I was told of the visit I disappeared for a few days. They found me some days later at my office at The Nation, at about ten on a Sunday morning, and they took me to Nyayo House to interrogate me.’

Nyayo is a nice word. It means ‘footsteps’ in Swahili. On his becoming president in 1978, Daniel arap Moi had said he would walk in Jomo Kenyatta’s footsteps. Nyayo became a byword for tradition and respect. Nyayo House was an office building for the police, respectable-looking above ground and barbaric in the basement, for down there was the interrogation center, the cells and, as Wahome found out, the torture chambers.

‘I was held there for thirty days, but the first days were the worst. They interrogated me in Nyayo. They said, “We’re not holding you for an ordinary crime. We know you’re in an organized movement.”

‘I said, “If you have evidence against me, take me to court.”

‘That made them very angry. They stopped talking to me. They stripped me naked and beat me — three men with pieces of wood. They demanded that I confess. Then they stood me in my cell and sprayed me with water. My cell was about the size of a mattress. They soaked me — water was everywhere. Then they locked the door and left me.’

In Wahome’s novel, Three Days on the Cross, just such a scene is described. The accused prisoner, Chipota, is beaten until he is bloody, then a hose ‘like a cannon’ is turned on him with such force it knocks the wind out of him. He turns away from it. The hose is aimed at the ceiling, the walls, and the cell is flooded. The door had a raised floor frame, so that water could not flow out. Chipota realizes that the cell was specifically designed to be used for this diabolical water torture.

Wahome said, ‘They left me. I couldn’t tell day from night. I was still naked, and really cold, standing in the water, in the darkness. The water was dripping on me from the ceiling. I don’t know how much time passed — maybe twelve or fifteen hours.

‘The door suddenly opened and a man said, “Una kitu ya kuambia wazee?” “Have you anything to tell the elders?” ’

The elders (wazee, plural of mzee) was another nice word for the torturers.

‘I said no. They left me again for a long time and then the door opened. The same question — Una kitu…? — and I said no.

‘I came to a situation where I was living in a nightmare. I had nightmares all the time — dreaming of flying and cycling, but always crash-landing. Dreams about food, but torture dreams. I hallucinated. I saw food on the patches of the floor. I saw a sausage through the wall and tried to break through the cement to get it.’

Such nightmares occur in the novel based on his experience. The worst ones in the book are of rape and beatings and violent crash-landings, but the nightmares are preferable to the reality of imprisonment. Wahome wrote of Chipota, ‘Then a flash of light and he woke up from the nightmare to realize that he was still within the walls of the cell … He wished he could go back to the nightmare.’

Craving to be returned to the nightmare was exactly how he had felt, he told me. He was desolated to wake from a bad dream to see himself ankle deep in water and shivering, pissing and shitting in the water, not able either to stand or sit.

I said, ‘Where did the Kenyans learn this torture technique?’

‘Maybe from Romania. They were friendly to us then.’

‘What about your family? Did they know where you were?’

‘They had no idea. I was thirty-five at the time, with two young children. They didn’t know I was in the middle of Nairobi, in a dark torture cell at Nyayo House. After five or six days I got to recognize daytime from the noise above me.’

‘Weren’t you tempted to confess?’ I asked.

Again he smiled the crooked smile and said, ‘Before I was arrested I had been amazed by all the people who had confessed to crimes. I had no idea why they said they were guilty — I knew they weren’t but they said they were. Now I knew. I was in the dark, in water. My feet were rotting. I was on the point of breakdown. I thought of suicide. When a week passed they must have thought I was dying, because they put me in a dry cell.’

But the interrogation continued. He was blindfolded and taken to the twenty-second floor of Nyayo House and locked in a room with his interrogator, always the same man, always the same questions: ‘When did you join MwaKenya?’ MwaKenya was an underground movement opposing the government. ‘Who recruited you?’ ‘What books have you read?’

He denied being a member of any underground movement. When he said he had read Mother, by Maxim Gorky, the interrogator (‘He was very moody’) screamed, ‘That’s a recruitment manual!’

This went on for an hour or so, and then he was returned to his cell in the basement. But he knew he was weakening, on the point of breakdown, and he still felt suicidal. It was not limbo, he assured me, but ‘a hell of suspense.’

He said that his happiest time was when he was given a chance to wash the prisoners’ dinner plates. ‘That was my highest moment. There was a mirror in the room. I looked at my face. The washing took no more than five or ten minutes, but I loved it. I was doing something. That was great.’

Wahome realized that the suspense was weakening him and that he preferred to serve a specific sentence than suffer not knowing when his confinement would end.

He said, ‘I told them this. They gave me three options — various crimes I could confess to. I chose the third — sedition, the sentence was the shortest. So they photographed me.’

He paused in this awful story and shook his head, remembering a detail — a Kafkaesque moment in a Kafka-like story.

‘I was smiling when they took my picture,’ he said, flashing me the same smile. ‘I was happy.’

He was taken to court in the evening, so as not to attract attention. His family still had no idea where he was. He had no lawyer. He was in handcuffs, in the dock.

‘The prosecuting attorney was Bernard Chunga,’ Wahome said. ‘You might see his name in the paper. He was rewarded. He spoke as though he knew my crime.

‘ “The accused is an intelligent man. He knew a crime was being committed and he chose not to report the offense to the lawful authority” — blah-blah-blah. The judge, H. H. Buch, was a Muhindi’ — an Indian. ‘The whole trial took about seven minutes. But I was happy! I was given fifteen months. It was something definite — not torture anymore.’

He said that this sort of arrest was very common in Kenya into the early 1990s. Altogether, he was in three prisons, all of them in rural areas, places where there were nearby villages, and wild game, the colorful Kenya of the tourist trade and postcard pictures of smiling highly ornamented tribespeople.

He was in solitary confinement most of the time, denied paper and pencils. He found a copy of The Rainbow, by D. H. Lawrence, and read it ten or twelve times. ‘Funnily enough, I can’t remember a thing about it!’ He found another book, Spanish Made Easy In the short period in the exercise yard he taught the others some Spanish, but the guards suspected they were being whispered about, and the book was confiscated. He spent the time daydreaming. He contracted malaria and seemed to suffer a weekly attack of fever.

On his release, he went home and back to his job on the newspaper. ‘I didn’t hate my captors. I thought, They should feel ashamed.’ He was not alone in his experience, or even in his book. Many Kenyans have been imprisoned on trumped-up charges, many have written similar accounts of detention and torture. Books such as Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Detained had helped prepare him; Darkness at Noon, which Wahome read later, he loved for its accuracy in detailing the particularities of prison life.

‘I went on writing. The government wanted to break me. I wanted to prove they were wrong. Prison was a sort of baptism for me, but for others I knew it was horrible. They never recovered. They were traumatized. Even now they are broken. But I wanted to survive. It was difficult. When I got out my friends were afraid of me.’

‘But those policemen and interrogators must still be around,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ Wahome said. That ironic smile again. ‘A few years ago I was sitting on a bus. I looked across the aisle and saw the man who had interrogated me. “Who recruited you?” Him! When he saw me he pretended to be asleep.’

‘Weren’t you angry?’

‘No. I was scared. I was paranoid. I got off the bus.’

The torturer, homeward bound, jogging along on the city bus with the other commuters, became for me one of the enduring images of urban Kenya.

Wahome Mutahi, whom I saw as a hero, not a victim, became my friend, my rafiki. Walking around Nairobi he talked about the past and his family, he showed me the good bookstores and coffee shops, the streets to avoid, what remained of the old market town. We looked at what was left of the US Embassy which had been bombed in 1998 — most of the area, near the railway station, was still wrecked. Wahome advised me on buying the things I would need for my onward journey to western Kenya and the Ugandan border. In one bookstore I bought him a copy of The Mosquito Coast and he bought me his prison book. He inscribed his To Bwana Theroux, and we said kwaheri and promised to stay in touch.

A few days later, reading The Nation, I saw the name of the man who had prosecuted Wahome after his confession under torture. Chief Justice Bernard Chunga, now dispensing sanctimony, ‘appealed to organizations caring for juveniles to ensure that they handled them in accordance with international standards.’

High-mindedness was a theme in Kenyan speeches that month, because the US ambassador, Mr Carson, had delivered a stern warning in a pep talk to Kenyan businessmen that Kenya was in danger of losing its preferential trade status. To help feeble African economies, the US Congress had passed the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which provides a visa system for these countries to ship goods to the United States without having to observe quotas. The charitable idea was intended to encourage local industries, but all it did was encourage local criminality. In Kenya this by-pass had become a huge moneymaking scam. After paying some backhanders to high-ranking Kenyans, Chinese and Indian manufacturers were labeling their goods ‘Made in Kenya,’ and transshipping them to the States through Kenya.

‘The signs are not positive,’ Ambassador Carson said, referring to the textile scams. He went on to say that unless Kenya curbed corruption, respected the rule of law and human rights, and pursued sound economic policies, this preferential deal would end. The diplomat’s scolding and finger-wagging was quite different from the patronizing noises about negritude Kenyans had heard from past ambassadors. But this was a different Kenya, a different Nairobi, crime-ridden and corrupt. I did not long for the past, I longed for the hinterland again, the simpler happier bush.

It was easy enough to leave Nairobi. Rail service to Kampala had been suspended, but there were plenty of buses to the border. They left in the early morning from the neighborhood that was associated with danger — especially dangerous in the pre-dawn darkness when the buses left. I was warned, ‘Take a taxi.’ I followed the advice, took a taxi three blocks with a driver named Bildad, who went on warning me, filling me with dread, until just before the bus left.

We set off in darkness and at sun-up we were traveling through the Great Rift Valley, among smallholdings. The valley that had once been a vast green empty and curved expanse, deepening to the northwest, with yellow flat-topped forests of thorn trees and beneath them antelope or bush buck nibbling grass, was now overgrazed and deforested and filled with mobs of idle people and masses of ugly huts.

Longonot Crater, a dark burned out volcano, was a reminder that the whole of the Rift Valley was a series of fault lines, stretching in an irregular rent from the Dead Sea to the Shire River valley in Mozambique. The Rift was created by an intense epoch of vulcanism that had torn open the heart of Africa with massive eruptions and lava flows. One controversial theory held that the two different climate zones created by the Rift Valley had influenced human evolution: the tropical forests to the west had become a home for apes, while hominids had had to adapt to the openness of the eastern savannah. Certainly the oldest hominid fossils in the world had been found in this eastern portion of the Rift.

Mount Lengai in Rwanda was still erupting and displacing villagers. Kilimanjaro was dormant, and so were the Mountains of the Moon in Uganda and the twenty-mile-wide caldera which was the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. Some of the titanic cracks opened by the eruptions had filled with water and become Lake Victoria, Lake Tanzania, Lake Malawi. Most of what was visible as landscape — the high Mau Escarpment just to the west of Longonot, for example — was the result of those early volcanoes and the plate shift.

The town of Naivasha looked quiet enough, pretty and purple with its jacarandas in bloom and a thickness of petals on its streets. Like many places in Kenya Naivasha had a murky past and a just as murky present. Everyone in Nairobi knew the story of Father Kaiser, a Catholic priest from Minnesota, who had served in a church near Naivasha. He had been a missionary in Kenya for more than thirty years and, alarmed by growing ethnic and tribal hatred, he began to collect information on specific acts of violence, which he suspected were politically inspired. No one else was keeping a record — not the police and certainly not the government which denied the accusations, denied even that AIDS was a problem in Kenya. Father Kaiser, now scorned as a scaremonger but in fact a serious threat to the government’s credibility, had a growing file on the subject of rape and murder

Knowing that the police would be indifferent, because a politician was involved, two young girls came to Father Kaiser in great distress and reported that they had been raped by a government minister. The minister was well known, a member of the ruling party, KANU — Kenyatta’s party, Moi’s party, the party that had ruled Kenya for forty years; still in power.

Father Kaiser went to various high officials and raised the matter of the rapes as well as details of some of the other crimes. He was at first rebuffed, and then came under pressure to cease in his publicizing of the facts. When he kept at it, he was denied a work permit and told to leave the country Still he resisted, calling attention to the high crime rate and especially the government denials. In August 2000, Father Kaiser’s corpse was found by the side of the road. He had been murdered. As I was passing the scene of the crime the murderer still had not been found, though the man accused of rape was still sitting in his ministerial chair, in Moi’s cabinet.

‘Kenya has a stable government,’ an agent from a prestigious London-based safari company insisted when, inquiring about game viewing, I raised my doubts about security. She denied the government was corrupt and unreliable, and warned me, not of crime but of her company’s safari prices. ‘I must tell you we are incredibly high-end — we tailor each safari to the client, designing the safaris to the clients’ comfort and interests.’

‘Authoritarian’ is not the same as ‘stable,’ but anyway the safari client is mainly interested in big game, not politics. It is possible, using helicopters and armed guards and tight security, to assure a client’s safety in Kenya. And the client must not stray from the narrow itinerary.

I mentioned to a white Kenyan that I had traveled south by road, from the Ethiopian border to Marsabit and Isiolo. He was a tough man who had traveled throughout Kenya. He had one of the most powerful Land-Rovers I had ever seen — the newest model, with a BMW engine. He had never taken that road.

He said, ‘No one goes on that road.’

The shallow and corrosive soda lakes near Naivasha and Nakuru were justifiably famous for their flamingos. Lesser flamingos flocked to Lake Nakuru, the greater flamingo to Lake Natron. I could see big pink patches on Lake Elmenteita, thousands of the birds. They were feeding in the shallows of the lake, heads down, swinging their graceful necks, feeding by dragging their beaks through the lake, sluicing the water, straining the food.

Tourists would see only those lovely birds and know nothing of Father Kaiser or the dark forces in Kenya that had undone him.

We stopped at Nakuru for food and drink, for the revolting toilets. Nakuru had grown from a small market town with an agreeable climate to an enormous unplanned settlement of tin-roofed huts, with a newer community of the sort of tidy high-priced houses that have only just started to appear within commuting distance to Nairobi. ‘Middle management,’ I was told: Africans who had jobs with banks and insurance companies and car dealerships and import — export firms and foreign charities and donors. Old sun-faded signs were still visible on some shop facades of defunct colonial-era general stores, advertising patent medicine and cattle feed, and across one wall, U-Like-Me Porridge Oats.

Hawkers — coastal people mostly, Africans in skullcaps and galabiehs — were pushing trays of sunglasses and cheap watches at the circulating passengers. Improvised stalls were offering ice cream and fruit, hot dogs and fried chicken.

Half the bus passengers were African, little families that looked Ugandan; the other half were Indian, bigger families in the back and boisterous because they were in a group — carping men, silent women, squawking little girls and boorish boys with baseball caps on backwards. The African woman seated in front of me was reading Wayne Dyer’s Your Sacred Self, the chapter entitled, ‘Making the Decision to be Free.’

In an earlier time — the sixties, say: years I could verify — a drive to Nakuru and Kericho and Kisumu, where we were headed, would have been a spin in the countryside. Narrow roads, almost no traffic, Africans on bikes, cattle grazing on hillsides, now and then a farmhouse, the occasional herd of antelope. A green and empty land under a big sky. Places that had been little towns and truck stops were now large sprawling settlements; the sparsely inhabited bush had become populous and visibly nasty.

That was the way of the world, but it seemed an African peculiarity that whenever a town or city grew bigger it got uglier, messier, more dangerous, an effect of bad planning, underfunding and theft. And a feature of every settlement was the sight of African men standing under trees, congregated in the shade. They were not waiting for buses, they were just killing time, because they had no jobs. They must have had gardens — most people did — but the farm work of planting and hoeing was presumably done by their womenfolk. In Kenya, whenever I saw a well-formed tree near a village or town, I saw men under it, doing nothing, looking phlegmatic and abstracted.

Even the most prosperous towns in this part of Kenya had the bright signboards and relief agencies, the offices and supply depots — people doling out advice and food and condoms. The merchandise of the gang of virtue. This was true in Kericho, its large leafy tea estates softening its green hills and valleys. Maybe such places attracted missionaries and agents of virtue because they were so pleasant to live in? Maybe communications were better here than in the remote bush? Whenever I saw a town that looked tidy and habitable I saw the evidence of foreign charities — Oxfam, Project Hope, the Hunger Project, Food for Africa, SOS Children’s Villages, Caritas, many others, with saintly names and a new white Land-Rover or Land Cruiser parked in front.

As this was a coffee-growing area, any one of these vehicles could have belonged to the satirical figure of Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby and her African Project. She had said, ‘We hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha.’

Mine is not a complaint, merely an observation, because hearing horror stories about uneducated starving Africans, most Americans or Europeans become indignant and say, Why doesn’t someone do something about it? But much was apparently being done — more than I had ever imagined. Since the Kenyan government cared so little about the well-being of its people, concerns such as health and education had been taken up by sympathetic foreigners. The charities were well established. Between the Bata Shoes retail store and the local Indian shop, you would find the office of World Vision or Save the Children — ‘Blurred Vision’ and ‘Shave the Children’ to the cynics. These organizations had grown out of disaster relief agencies but had become national institutions, permanent fixtures of welfare and services.

I wondered — seriously wondered — why this was all a foreign effort, why Africans were not involved in helping themselves. And also, since I had been a volunteer teacher myself, why, after forty years, had so little progress been made?

An entire library of worthy books describes at best the uselessness, at worst the serious harm, brought about by aid agencies. Some of the books are personal accounts, others are scientific and scholarly. The findings are the same.

‘Aid is not help’ and ‘aid does not work’ are two of the conclusions reached by Graham Hancock in his The Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige and Corruption of the International Aid Business (1989), a well-researched account of wasted money. Much of Hancock’s scorn is reserved for the dubious activities of the World Bank. ‘Aid projects are an end in themselves,’ Michael Maren writes in The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity (1997). One of Maren’s targets is the charity Save the Children, which he sees as a monumental boondoggle. Both writers report from experience, having spent many years in Third World countries on aid projects.

While these writers are kinder to volunteers in disaster relief than to highly paid bureaucrats in institutional charities, both of them also assert that all aid is self-serving, large-scale famines are welcomed as a ‘growth opportunity’ and the advertising to stimulate donations for charities is little more than ‘hunger porn.’

‘Here is a rule of thumb that you can safely apply wherever you may wander in the Third World,’ Mr Hancock writes. ‘If a project is funded by foreigners it will typically also be designed by foreigners and implemented by foreigners using foreign equipment procured in foreign markets.’

As proof of that rule of thumb, the most salutary and least cited book about development in Africa is an Italian study, Guidelines for the Application of Labor-Intensive Technologies (1994), revolutionary in its simplicity, advocating the use ofAfrican labor to solve African problems. After describing the many social and economic advantages of employing people themselves, working with their hands, to build dams, roads, sewer systems and watercourses, the authors, Sergio Polizzotti and Daniele Fanciullacci, discuss constraints imposed by the donors. Donors specify that purchases of machinery have to be made in the donor country, or bids restricted to firms in the donor country, or that a time limit is placed on the scheme, which ‘encourages the tendency towards large contracts and heavy spending on equipment.’

Labor-intensive projects are few in Africa because so much donor aid is self-interested.

Passing enormous smooth boulders, as big as three-story houses, we came to Kisumu. Kisumu was a port on the Winam Gulf of Lake Victoria, a rail head, a ferry port. But the train was defunct and the ferry was so irregular and in such bad repair that it was useless. I had thought I might stay here a few days and take a ferry to Uganda, but that was out of the question.

Kisumu was now just a bus stop. In its market there were the usual children hawking boxes of tea and containers of milk, women roasting ears of corn, and people selling huge heaps of old shoes and second-hand clothes. Even Africans did not find the second-hand clothes at such markets expensive. Most of them used to belong to you, they are the old dresses and T-shirts and shorts and neckties and ragged sweaters and blankets you put in a box and handed in at the church for collection — the Salvation Army, the Blankets for Africa, or whatever. You thought they would be doled out to needy people — but no, they are sorted into bundles: socks, shoes, slacks, blouses, skirts, T-shirts, sweaters, and so forth. These bundles are sold cheaply to market traders, who become the distributors, stacking them on their stalls and reselling them.

When my own clothes got ragged I too bought clothes in the market. It was my way of not looking like a tourist or a soldier. And I got fond of my second-hand shirts, one of which was bright red and lettered Top Notch Plumbing.

I spent the day in Kisumu, just walking around because I had been cramped in the bus seat. I walked to the old jetty, where there was no ferry, and the railway station, where there was no train. I noted that the market was full of charity merchandise: nothing made in Kenya, no textiles, only a few clay pots.

Leaving Kisumu on the afternoon bus to the border, I saw a booming Kenyan industry: just outside town, shop after shop of wood-workers, all of them making coffins — the freshly cut raw wood, reddish in the dampness, the men sawing it and nailing the long boxes, everyone hard at work. And the finished coffins were stacked or standing upright, lots of them. This was the busiest local industry I had seen in the whole of Kenya: the coffin-makers and their lugubrious product, a perfect image for a country that seemed terminally ill.

I made a note of those coffins, and sketched pictures of their shapes and sizes. But I also noted that, sitting in these buses watching Africa go by, getting off whenever I liked, I was traveling happily, in a state of great contentment, following the honks of the geese — on this particular day, the Egyptian goose, Alopochen aegyptiaca, prettily named but wild geese all the same.