It’s Our Turn to Eat. Michela Wrong

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       4 Mucking out the Augean Stables

      ‘The shocking rot of Nairobi's main market was exposed yesterday when it was revealed that 6,000 rats were killed in last week's cleanup exercise – and an equal number made good their escape. Wakulima Market, through which a majority of Nairobi's three million residents get their food, had not been cleaned for thirty years. So filthy was it that traders who have been at the market daily for decades were shocked to see that below the muck they have been wading through, there was tarmac. More than 750 tonnes of garbage was removed and more than seventy tonnes of fecal waste sucked out of the horror toilets.’

      East African Standard, 4 January 2005

      In his youth, John had written a Kafkaesque short story about a man who wakes one morning to discover a giant pile of manure has been dumped outside his house. Puzzled, he sets out to establish where it came from and, more importantly, how to shift it. Oddly prescient, the story was a harbinger of John's future task.

      Rather than a pile of manure, corruption in Kenya resembled one of the giant rubbish dumps that form over the decades in Nairobi's slums. Below the top layer of garbage, picked over by goats, marabou storks and families of professional scavengers, lies another layer of detritus. And another. With the passage of time the layers, weighed down from above, become stacked like the pastry sheets of a mille-feuille, a historical record no archaeologist wants to explore. Each stratum has a slightly different consistency – the garbage trucks brought mostly plastics and cardboard that week, perhaps, less household waste and more factory refuse – but it all smells identical, letting off vast methane sighs as it settles and shifts, composting down to something approaching soil. The sharp stink of chicken droppings, the cabbagy reek of vegetable rot, the dull grey stench of human effluvia blend with the smoke from charcoal fires and the haze of burning diesel to form a pungent aroma – ‘Essence of Slum’, a parfumier might call it – that clings to shoes and permeates the hair.

      As Kenya has modernised, so its sleaze has mutated, a new layer of graft shaped to match each layer of economic restructuring and political reconfiguration. ‘In Kenya, corruption doesn't go away with reform, it just migrates,’ says Wachira Maina, a constitutional lawyer and analyst. But under all the layers, at the base of the giant mound, lies the same solid bedrock: Kenyans' dislocated notion of themselves. The various forms of graft cannot be separated from the people's vision of existence as a merciless contest, in which only ethnic preference offers hope of survival.

      If, in the West, it is impossible to use the word ‘tribe’ without raising eyebrows, in Kenya much of what takes place becomes incomprehensible if you try stripping ethnicity from the equation. ‘A word will stay around as long as there is work for it to do,’ said Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe of this taboo noun,³ and in Kenya, just as in so many African states, ‘tribe’ is still on active duty. Ask a Kenyan bluntly what tribe he is and he may, briefly, ruffle up and take offence. But the outrage dissolves immediately upon contact with daily life. ‘Typical Mukamba, useless with money,’ a friend mutters when a newspaper vendor fumbles his change. Another, arriving late at a café, explains: ‘I had to straighten up the car because the askari was giving me a hard time. Best not to mess with these Maasai.’ And when another is fined for parking illegally, he explains: ‘I begged with the policeman, but he wouldn't let me off. He was a Kalenjin.’

      Any Kenyan can reel off the tags and stereotypes, which capture the categorisation of the country's society. Hard-nosed and thrusting, the Kikuyu are easily identified by their habit of mixing up their ‘r’s and their ‘L’s, the cause of much hilarity amongst their compatriots. When an official warns you, ‘There may be a ploblem,’ a member of civil society denounces ‘ligged erections’ or an urchin tries to sell you a week-old ‘rabradol’ puppy, you know you are dealing with either a Kikuyu or his Meru or Embu cousin. Their entrepreneurialism has won them control of the matatu trade, and they run most of the capital's kiosks, restaurants and hotels. A Luo, on the other hand, is all show and no substance. His date will be wined and dined, but she'll pick up the tab at the end of the evening. Born with huge egos, the flashiest of dress sense and the gift of the gab, the Luo excel in academia and the media. Luhyas are said to lack ambition, excelling as lowly shamba boys, watchmen and cooks. Stumpy, loyal, happy to take orders, Kambas are natural office clerks, soldiers and domestic servants; but watch out for potions, freak accidents and charms under the bed – these are the spell-casters of Kenya. Enticing and provocative, their women dress in eye-wateringly bright colours and often work as barmaids. In contrast, the cold, remote Kalenjin care more about their cows than about their homes. Macho and undomesticated, the proud Samburu and Maasai make for perfect recruits to the ranks of watchmen, wildlife rangers and security guards. And so on …

      When they speak in this way, Kenyans show, at least, a refreshing honesty. Public discourse is far more hypocritical. In matters ethnic, newspaper and radio station bosses adopt a policy of strict self-censorship. Telling themselves they must play their part in the forging of a young nation state, editors have for decades carefully removed all ethnic identifiers from articles and broadcasts. But it doesn't take long to work out what is really going on, or why one VIP is throwing the taunt СКАЧАТЬ