Sunday, NOVEMBER 4 2007
Nairobi: Hard city
Nairobi glitters for only a wealthy few
By GWENDOLYN DRISCOLL
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
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TO OUR READERS: This is part of a series called “My Town” in which Register contributors will take you beyond the traditional tourist stops in places they’ve lived. We hope to visit some exotic and off-the-beaten-track places in the series, which will run about once a month.
– Gary A. Warner, Orange County Register Travel Editor
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I did not have a farm in Africa, like Karen Blixen. Rather, I lived in a small furnished flat, with a red crushed velvet sofa and a crimson flower-shaped lampshade that cast a bordello-like glow when the light was switched on.
It was my first apartment in a decidedly middle-class area of Nairobi, Kenya's capital. It was gray and concrete and faced a dilapidated pool that no one used, Africans being inherently modest people.
The management dubbed it "Gemima Court," but a friend of mine nicknamed it "Little Tehran" for its ugliness. When the police raided the building and rounded up several Rwandan genocide suspects hiding there, the Nairobi press corps dubbed it "Genocidaire Court."
It was home, however, for my first three years in what would be an eight-year life in Africa - the longest I have ever lived anywhere.
There are a lot of high-end hotels and nice shopping opportunities in Nairobi. There is a museum, the national park, some nearby destinations to see wild animals. But that is the reality for the .1 percent of the population who can afford those things. It's not the majority experience. Or my experience.
My experience was the mix of Africans, Asians and Europeans who coexisted together in that ugly apartment complex at the end of a ravaged and potholed dirt road. It was a small version of the city itself.
Nairobi is a sprawling and frenetic place mostly unknown to the tourists who shuttle through it as quickly as possible on their way to the luxury safari camps of the Masai Mara.
For good reason. Nairobi's genteel "Out of Africa" age is long gone. Today the city is dangerous enough to have inspired the moniker "Nairobbery." Home invasions are common, even in the wealthy neighborhoods of 10-foot walls and electric fencing. Last year, UC Irvine Professor Ngugi wa Thiong'o and his wife, Njeeri, were beaten by thugs inside the city's most prestigious hotel, the Norfolk.
The city is not particularly beautiful, filled with endlessly expanding cement-block flats thrown up to meet the pressing growth of Nairobi's estimated 3 million people.
But it is the kind of place that improves with the knowing, not just of the decent restaurants and craft shops that exist there to service the middle and upper classes, but the mix of people you meet.
Kenya's 40 ethnic groups collide on the streets in pursuit of work, housing and opportunity. Thousands of tribesmen from Uganda, Tanzania, Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, Eritrea, Ethiopia and the rest of Africa are here, too.
It is a logistical base for the United Nations, and for relief and church groups from all over the world. A large and somewhat unfairly reviled Asian population runs the service industry, responsible in large part for keeping the economy running as well as for the red-velvet tack in my apartment.
Spend a day on the streets and you will see a Masai tribesman in his gorgeous traditional robes, a Somali clan leader with a beard dyed red with henna and a white cotton galabia, an Asian memsab in a flowing iridescent sari, a German backpacker in sandals and socks pulled up to the knee.
You can attend an art event (
www.kenya.africancolours.net), a cricket or soccer match, a disco or a smoky African nightclub filled with trance-like lingala, the music of Congo, or the exuberant Swahili rap for which Kenya is becoming famous.
A 30-minute drive from downtown takes you to the famous knuckled ridges of the Ngong Hills, or up through the cool, green-tea plantations of Limuru to the edge of the Great Rift Valley, with its volcano-flecked thousand-mile view.
You can sample wildebeest, crocodile and other wild game at the city's infamous Carnivore restaurant (
www.carnivore.co.ke), a tourist favorite.
Or partake of some of the best Indian food outside the subcontinent in high-end establishments like Haandi (
www.haandi-restaurants.com). (For the stronger- stomached, equally good fast food can be found in Diamond Plaza, the city's Little India.)
There are Italian, Korean, Chinese and Thai restaurants in the bustling suburb of Westlands. Gourmets can dine on tournedos of gazelle at Alan Bobbe's poodle-theme French bistro in the city center, while the best pizza I have ever tasted hailed - weirdly - from the South African fast- food franchise Pizza Inn.
Equally delicious, and less sampled by outsiders, is simple, hearty Kenyan fare: grilled meat served with spicy salsa, corn cobs roasted over charcoal braziers, chopped collard and kale paired with glutinous, satisfying maize meal, or green banana stewed in beef broth and cilantro. Each food corresponds to a tribe. All can be found served in roadside kiosks and cafes with a bottle of sweet soda and soft-spoken Kenyan courtesy.
This last point is the most important. Kenya is a place of appalling poverty, disease and misrule - Transparency Interna tional ranked it 129 out of 145 countries in the world on an index of corruption. There is no sugarcoating Kibera, Nairobi's - and the continent's - largest slum.
But the gentleness of Nairobi's people, their ability to remain outraged by their plight, their willingness to welcome visitors of all shapes and stripes to their potholed and pockmarked - but bustling and striving city - is what keeps my thoughts fixed there. Like the apartment complex in which I spent my first years, it is a gritty crossroads of worlds and cultures that still lingers in the mind much like Africa's apocryphal red dust that, legend says, cannot be shaken off.
Contact the writer: (714) 796-7722 or
gdriscoll@ocregister.com
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Nairobi: Hard city -
11-04-2007, 03:48 AM
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