How to prepare for a Kenyan election

As very few of you likely know, Kenya is having elections at the end of the year. Everything, from the presidency to the divisional councils, is up for grabs. Kenya is a very poltically conscious country, and this week it's been impossible not to hear about the campaigns.

The big national story, which has gotten some airtime internationally on the BBC and CNN, is the Mungiki killings near Nairobi. The Mungiki are a secret organization with the raison d'etre of promoting radical Kikuyu nationalism and female circumcision. Although banned by the government, they claim (dubiously, most people say) to have a membership in the hundreds of thousands. Usually they spend their time strong-arming minibus drivers into paying protection money and conducting mass circumcisions, but around election time their portfolio expands. In a country where voting goes along ethnic lines, the ability to suppress the voting by minority groups is beneficial; consequently, the Mungiki are sometimes stirred into action to kill some non-Kikuyus and intimidate others into staying home from the polls. It's also alleged that the Mungiki have been hired by some leaders to assassinate rival politicians. When six bodies turned up beheaded around Nairobi last week, the blame immediately fell on the Mungiki. The resulting investigation has resulted in two former MPs being arrested for their connections to the group, and two current MPs are being questioned. The Mungiki have vowed to assert themselves more in the coming months, and have announced some sort of rally for next weekend, though one might question why a secret organization would stage a mass rally.

Speaking of mass rallies, the big news in Dol Dol this week is President Mwai Kibaki's vist to town this coming Tuesday. This will be the first presidential visit to Dol Dol. Everyone I know in town is dashing between meetings to prepare for the event; Kibaki will be greeted by a whole day's worth of Maasai dancing, singing and theater prepared by the community groups. The local government has been making its own preparations. The last few days, tractors and huge trucks carrying fresh dirt have rolled into town, ready to repair and grade the cracked, rutted roads for the VIPs' arrival. This has actually embittered many local residents, who are pretty hostile to this government to begin with.

If Kibaki comes with a political present, he might get into the Maasai's good graces, however. The exact nature of this present is the subject of much speculation. A few have suggested it might be the deed to some of the white-0wned land bordering on the group ranch. The more popular prediction, however, is the promotion of Mukogodo from division to district (akin, in a sense, to promoting something from a municipality to a county). This would give the Maasai their own district, which is something they greatly desire, as they make up just 10% of Laikipia District's population and are dominated politically by the Kikuyu and other sedentary groups. As a district, the area would get more funds, more schools, electricity, communication and transport links, and prestige. As much as the locals think it will happen, though, it seems terribly implausible to me. Laikipia is a relatively small district, but it has about 330,000 people; Mukogodo, by contrast, has about 20,000. Dol Dol, the only real town in the division, has about 1,500 people and is only linked to the rest of Kenya by a tortuous, 45km road that takes over an hour to drive and is sometimes impassable in the rainy season. Still, the people in Dol Dol hope.

At the very least, the visit has already made village life more interesting. On Tuesday, I was in a store talking to some friends when a police officer came in and asked me what I was doing in town, whether my documents were in order, and how long I was planning to stay in Dol Dol. I took this as the routine questioning of foreigners in a town that sees very few, and though it was much more forward and tactless than I've come to expect to from Keynans, I didn't think much of it. However, the rumor quickly spread around town that I had been questioned because of police suspicion that I was there to spy on the president. I swear to you, God and the Mukogodo Divisional Police Officer that I'm not a spy, but so long as I'm not locked up on Tuesday, I'll post here about the presidential visit next week or the week after.

Kenya and the Other

So I've seen Dol Dol, and what a place to have seen. If God made Dol Dol, he started with the same blueprints he used in Arizona but took a break after laying out the climate and topography to drink a six-pack or two. When He got back, He got to work on the flora and fauna and the results were understandably strange: the cacti grow 35 feet tall, the locusts are neon blue and 8 inches long, and the deer and jackrabbits of Arizona have been replaced by zebras, gazelles, giraffes, camels (all of which I've seen in the last week) and elephants (which I have not seen, but which chased my friend's minibus yesterday). The town itself isn't much: a few schools, government offices, butcheries, and a row of stores. The Maasai themselves, many wearing their traditional red clothing and elaborate jewelry, provide the town's color. You'll see them in town shopping or on the hills outside town with their herds of cows and goats.

As you'd expect in a small town, everyone here is friendly. I've been meeting with a lot of the youth groups, and one took me out to their projects in the countryside. Out there they slaughtered a goat (I took pictures) and roasted it for me. Here, they slaughter animals through strangulation so that they can preserve the blood for drinking. Ah, but I digress. I'm picking up some Maa, but a lot of people speak English. The English here is oddly colored by development discourse. If you want to organize people to go to a pub, you "mobilize them". A local chief, whom we incidentally ran into while he was wearing army fatigues and carrying an M-16 through the forest is limited in his English to "What are your recommendations?", "field study", and "testable hypothesis." Strange place.

The youth groups I've been working with have called the area "The Other", as in "There's Kenya, and then there's The Other." The Other starts where the paved road ends, where the electrical lines stop, where the cell network dies, and where the government loses interest. That's a few miles outside Nanyuki.

My house is an example of that government neglect. It's part of a fenced compound built by the government 20 years, just outside town. The compound contains a huge granary and the houses designed to house the granary workers. The problem? The Maasai don't grow any grain and don't consume much either. The granary, which is easily the biggest building in town, has sat empty for two decades, and the houses have long ago been sold to private citizens. The result is that I'm living relatively well for Dol Dol: a squat toilet, a camp stove, two bedrooms, a living room, two gas lamps and running water once a week. Still, things are funny in The Other.

I'm back in Kenya (Nanyuki, in this case) for the weekend to meet with my boss, shower, shave, check the internet and drink something cold. I'll keep you posted.

My 21st birthday and an empty death threat

I always thought I'd celebrate my 21st birthday at Wildflower's. It's a dreary place, but it's Pennington's only bar. Instead, I got a death threat from a white rancher, which is an altogether more memorable experience. It might even make me an honorary Maasai. Whites might represent 1% of Laikipia's population, but they cause the lion's share of the area's problems. They own huge tracts of the best land, expropriated long ago from the Maasai, and they keep the indigenous population from using it. The Maasai have staged protests, land invasions, and filed suit against the ranchers. My dispute, though, wasn't so high-minded.

Four of us were celebrating my birthday at the Sportman's Arms pub, when an sixty-ish white rancher introduced himself and asked if Viv, the other intern, was my wife. Finding out she wasn't, he cut between us, turned his back to me, and started talking to her. Apparently, he was talking about how the rape of Maasai women by the British military was an understandable and forgiveable phenomenon. As he got handsier and handsier and she looked more and more distressed, I decided to engage him in a little manly conversation to diffuse the situation. I am not a fighter, and as you'll see my usual tactic of gentle humor might not be well-suited for Kenya. I tapped him on the shoulder and asked him what he kept on the ranch. I grunted knowingly as he said, "Cattle, goats, sheep..." but I raised an eyebrow as he leaned in and said, "and between you and me, 22 women." This is where the trouble began.

He turned his back to me again and resumed his pursuit of Viv, but I tapped him on the shoulder and joked "Viv's my friend, I know her pretty well. She's picky. I just don't think she's gonna be number 23." The conversation between us continued on, and soon Solomon came over and started arguing with him in Swahili. The rancher switched back to English and said, "I love women, but I crush men." As he said this, he bent his index finger, crushing tiny, hypothetical men between the second and third knuckle. "I'll shoot and kill you and you," he said, pointing at me, then Solomon. Solomon yelled that we should leave, and stormed out down the the stairs. Without a Maasai to pick on, the rancher lost interest and joined another table, where he was laughing and backslapping his friends a moment later. Apparently this is pretty typical behavior for the ranchers,
and the threats are always empty (so don't worry, parental unit). It's easy to understand why they're universally loathed in these parts, though.

Lydia attributed Solomon's anger to his Maasai-ness. This is part of what seems like Kenya's favorite game: attributing fairly typical human behavior to certain tribal groups. For instance, you'll hear "Maasai men are protective of women," or "The Kikuyu like to earn money." There's also a game Kenyans play where they attribute rather fantastic attributes to certain groups. I've heard, "All Luos drive Hummers" and "Germans eat people [watch out, Mar!]." The truth, though, is that the exact same situation could have, and has, happened in Montreal- maybe without the racial overtones.

Anyway, my birthday improved greatly from there, with healthy quantities of Tusker and meat consumed and an unhealthy amount of dancing. I'd love to keep you abreast of the Nanyuki club scene, but alas I'm leaving for Dol Dol tomorrow, and will be out of touch with the world for a week or two. As it turns out, there's a Yale Ph.D candidate in Dol Dol now who's working on the same issues I'm tackling in my internship paper. I take this as a sign of divine blessing for my endeavor, and thus I do not fear the white rancher.

Moving Upcountry

Nairobi has come and gone. We arrived Monday night, and by Wednesday we were leaving the city behind us. This is no great loss. Sprawling and disjointed, Nairobi is a weird place. In the area we stayed, Upper Hill, rotting wooden food stalls share space with large walled villas on half-acre plots which are cast in perpetual shade by new 20-story office towers being erected in the neighborhood. Downtown, there are two parallel streets, 100 yards apart, leading the National Museum. One is bounded by a big leafy park and a row of thick shade trees. The other is lined with maybe 100 unlicensed auto mechanics, and the noxious air there is filled with welding sparks and the gravel road and sidewalk are sodden with motor oil.

For their part, Nairobians seem preoccupied with the same things North American urbanites are: traffic and crime. They complain bitterly about the congestion caused by the sprawling new middle class suburbs- of course, the city of millions has been expanding ever since it was founded as a supply depot just a century ago, but until recently the new arrivals were too poor to crowed the streets with their Renaults and Land Cruisers. However, if traffic is getting worse, I'm happy to say that crime is getting better. Only a few years ago, Nairobians were afraid to carry a purse or pull out a cell phone anywhere in public; once can safely do both simultaneously. What was the city's elegant solution? As someone put it, "The police now, they shoot robbers. Even if you just steal a cell phone, they kill you."

Well, goodbye to all that. We rode up to Nanyuki in the back of the organization's 20-year old Land Rover, a four-hire ride through Kenya's agricultural heartland. We passed palm groves, field of sisal and pineapple plantations, all laid out on soil so red that it would make Georgians hang their heads in shame. It reminded me a little of western Ecuador, but it was poorer: the rows of children walking home from school along the highway were barefoot, and the ploughing was done by animals, not machines. At some point, shortly after being mobbed by two-dozen banana vendors in Kiganjo, we climbed a ridge and emerged in a completely different landscape: the Laikipia plateau, my new home. The throngs of matatus (minibusses) and pedestrians slackened off in this sparse landscape, but with its gentle rises, thick grasslands and shade trees, it's not difficult to see what attracted white settlers 100 years ago: it is comfortingly familiar. Unlike the malarial land to the south with its banana trees and rice paddies, here the settlers could enjoy a gentler climate and expansive plains to keep their cattle. They even imported trout from England to stock Laikipia's streams.

Rising (just a little) from this landscape is Nanyuki. Nanyuki is home to 40,000 people- mostly Kikuyu migrants- but it can feel much smaller. Pretty much everything is located along the highway or one of a handful of cross streets. The tallest building is five stories. Three banks, innumerable bars, a few restaurants, a handful of small hotels, a row of craftsmen's kiosks, a second-hand clothes market, two men selling shoes on the sidewalk, two Indian-owned dry goods stores, three cripples begging, a cyber cafe, 125 cell phone shops, a dozen street children and a vegetable store: this is Nanyuki's commercial life. I do genuinely like Nanyuki, though, for its lack of pretensions. Here, unlike Nairobi, there is no one dressed like a corporal in the King's African Rifles using white-gloved hands to open the door of cars arriving at the Hilton, nor are there Indian businessmen bustling around in Armani suits, talking on their Razrs.

Anyone who travels these days to a developing country seems obligated to write something about the collision between the modern world and the traditional one. If I were inclined to follow suit, a small city or a big country town like Nanyuki would be the perfect setting for such a vignette. I could tell about the Maasai tribesman who bicycled down the street in full regalia, carrying a traditional staff, and then entered the Safaricom store, perhaps to buy more minutes for his cell phone. I could tell you about the radio statio that plays traditional songs of the Luo people interspersed with the best of Jason Mraz. I could tell you that in an unmarked, unelectrified hamlet in the midst of a pineapple grove about 10 miles south of the equator, the only commercial enterprise is Thriller's Exquisite Luxurious Fish 'n Chips Pub. Not only that, but if I were a great thinker like Tom Friedman, I could tie these vignettes together to build a theory explaining the future of the global economy and the political order. But I'm not, and I won't. Instead, I'll tell you about a haunted hotel.

Our first night in Nanyuki, we stayed in Simba's Lodge, located on the outskirts of town near the orphanage. It is a big walled compound containing a series of cement buildings. Upon check-in, we were greeted by a half-dozen workers, fressed in faded tuxedos and frayed, gold bow ties, who escorted us to our room, the only one of 30 to be occupied that night. Again at dinner, we were alone in a dining room that could fit 100, and seven or eight workers, dressed again in tuxes, watched us eat. I decided the place was creepy. Then, sometime before dawn, I awoke to a faint but haunting noise that I could not place. I sat up in bed, my pulse spiking and a knot forming in my stomach. It was only after a few moments' concentration that I deciphered the noise was the muzzein's call to prayer being broadcasted to Nanyuki's Muslims. I fell back to a peaceful sleep and later ate breakfast in the again empty dining room, where a TV had now been turned on to an African soap opera in which one protagoinst had AIDS and another attacked a rival in love with a machete. This was all a refreshing departure from the night before, but we still changed to a different place for the weekend.

What about work, you say? Right now the organization's staff is scattered around the world (New York, Ghana, Dol Dol) so I've only been partially briefed on what's going on, but I'll probably be leaving for Dol Dol on Sunday. Before then, I have to buy my supplies to take there. I also have to find rubber boots for the afternoon thunder storms that you can see rolling off Mt. Kenya from 15 miles away and which turn Nanyuki's dirt sidewalks and sidestreets into muddy bogs.

You can tell a woman is a regular in Nanyuki, I'm told, if she can walk in the mud with heels on. I'm still searching for the male equivalent.

An introduction and a primer in Maa

What does ol-ashumpai mean? Nothing, really.

There are something like 50 languages spoken in Kenya, and to my great fortune, the Maasai and Samburu I'll be working with speak one of the most difficult: Maa. It's highly tonal, and Maa-English translation dictionaries come with elaborate diagrams of the mouth, nose and throat with arrows and suggestions for how to make Maa noises. Good transliterations of Maa sentences are fascinating-looking things with backwards "c's", horizontal lines bisecting words at a time and accents sprouting at improbable angles from improbable letters

"Ol-ashumpai" is a bad transliteration for the Maa phrase for a white person. The real transliteration requires symbols that my computer can't make and yours can't read. I just wanted to avoid titling this blog some Kenya-related pun, like "Kenya Dig It?". So in that regard, this is success.

As a tangent, the Maasai used to have a much more colorful term for white colonists: "iloridaa enjekat" which translates as "those who confine their farts"- a derogatory reference to the pants-centric sartorial choices of British soldiers. Cole, I think the Maasai are your natural support bloc should you run another campaign based on your opposition to pants.

All of this linguistic dabbling is just a distraction. As much as I like travelling, I hate preparing for it. Drawing up lists, packing, making hotel reservations- who needs it? Far better to try to wrap your tongue, throat and nose around "karbobo naainyala endaa". True, lots of things need to be done before I leave on Sunday, but I can immediately think of dozens of situations in which I'll need to tell a Maasai "It is squirrels that have destroyed the food" in his native tongue. Of course, that could be the mefloquine talking. Mefloquine speaks Maa.