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.
