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Date: May 5, 2004
Lake Malawi is about eight kilometers below the starboard
bow of my airplane. Malawi and Mozambique inch past even though
one hour in an airplane is two weeks on a bike. The land is brown,
scrubby and flat with invisible paved roads and dirt paths that
spread hundreds of meters wide through and around mud pits. We enter
Tanzania and soon, looming in the distance, the snow-capped volcanic
cone of Mt. Kilimanjaro peeps through the angelic clouds. “I
can see everything from here,” I think. “Just as well,
my knees are two against one for climbing Kilimanjaro.”
I have been traveling for 45 hours, including 21
hours in the Johannesburg airport. I slept on a bench, using my
camera as a pillow. Hundreds of Africans were sprawled across the
floors and benches: all the Europeans went to the hotels. Compared
to a wet sleeping bag in freezing temperatures or a hostel with
the noise of drunken brawls echoing off the cement walls, I had
luxurious accommodations. I have been reading my “Crowded
Planet” book to pass the time and pinpoint a bed in Nairobi.
“‘Nairobbery’ is now regarded as the most dangerous
city in Africa…. The largest slum in Africa…. Rising
anti-American feeling….” In 1998, Osama Bin Laden bombed
the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya killing 224 and seriously wounding
over 4500. (President Clinton was two for one in favor of adultery
over punishing Bin Laden.) My Adam’s apple catches in my throat
with the familiar thought, “What was I thinking?”
The plane swoops past Mt. Meru, Kilmanjaro’s
neighbor, and begins descending. My passport is scrutinized and
stamped with a frown. My bike is waived through customs with contempt,
nevermind the New Zealand microbes and plant matter (I had to wash
and sterilize my bike entering Australia and New Zealand). The ATM
accepts my card and I find a charming and over-priced cab driver.
In record time I have pitched camp and am sitting by a fire among
nappy travelers: a couple who drove a truck across Russia in the
winter; a medical student who brags about giving birth to two mango
fly larva from his own stomach; a woman doing her doctorate thesis
on the consequences of education on traditional pastoralists; and
three Germans who have bicycled through the sandy tracks of the
Sahara and past the stone-throwing Ethiopians. I’m relieved
to be rid of the lustful, drunken and drugged backpackers that plague
South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
I spend the first day assembling, cleaning, painting
and fixing my bicycle and on the second day I fell ready to risk
venturing into Nairobi. I invite myself to the market with Dan,
an American, figuring he will run interference. We venture down
constipated roads. “Might is right” rules the road again.
Only a critical mass of pedestrians can interrupt the traffic or,
more likely, pedestrians must wait for the cars to jam before crossing.
I tiptoe down a tightrope of cement, mud on one side, ragging traffic
on the other. A bus blows a contrail of black exhaust, flapping
my clothes. It silhouettes Dan, just a meter ahead, and makes my
vision swim, lungs gag, and boogers blacken. The buildings are classic
Third-World cement block with a bit of flair and occasioned by a
mirrored skyscraper bringing squares of sky down to earth. The dilapidated
bottoms are held together by the glue of posters and the paint of
gauche adverts. I feel caught in an American ghetto: my stomach
knots from the Pavlovian fear that comes from a gang of black fellows
-- “African Americans” -- knocking the wind out of me
in the schoolyards of Milwaukee. Racisms exists in America but it
is a two way street. Kenyans not only look different -- lanky bodies
ending in bulbous hands and feet, topped by jellybean heads with
features so round the African sunlight cascades off them like water
-- they act differently -- their body language is relaxed, open,
their smiles flashy and eyes cheery, fleshy women bat their eyes
(whitemen are en vogue) and men shake my hand, “Welcome, friend.”
The poor are clothed in the usual tattered t-shirts and sandals
and dusted in gray. Men with money wear a suit, and women with money
wear modern clothes or a kitenge, an African sari.
We enter the market and are swarmed by a hundred
vendors, or is it one vendor? with a hundred arms like Shiva, tearing
me in every direction. I ask for the price of some sandals made
from old tires, seatbelts and rope. The vendor says 35 dollars.
I furrow my brow and he flips over the sandal, “Michelin Tires,”
he justifies.
“No, thanks.
“How much you want to pay?”
“Nothing. Just looking.”
Another vendor jumps on this opening, “Looking
is free. Come, I want to show you my art. I am African Picasso.”
(I would meet three more African Picassos today.)
“I don’t want anything.”
Any response gives them a weak link to chink, but
I haggle for fun. Meanwhile, Dan is being swept downstream.
“Why not?”
“I don’t have much money.”
“Don’t worry; you will go to America
and get more.”
“I need my money now.”
“What do you need your money for?”
“Food.”
A hand shoves some rainbow-colored Maasai jewelry
through the mob. “You like? Almost free.”
“Can I eat that?” My response baffles
them and they produce a variety of objects: necklaces with bone
carvings of lions and elephants, gazelle bookmarks, ebony or rosewood
statues, ceremonial masks, ceramic plates. I keep repeating, “Can
I eat that?”
“What do you eat?” the ringleader
asks.
“Same as you.”
“Tell me.”
“Bananas.”
Everyone echoes, “Bananas.”
“Bananas only cost three shillings.”
“I eat many bananas.”
“How many?” He is searching for
a weakness.
“Three.”
“That is only ten shillings, maximum.”
“I will be here for seven months.”
He scribbles arithmetic on his hand, then nods, “Twenty-seven
hundred. This is a lot.” He confers to the group in Swahili.
Someone produces a golden picture of lions, a collage of plant material.
“Can I eat this?”
A school of ivory smiles appear in a sea of ebony.
“Yes, you can eat this.”
The mob is motionless as the wait for the hook to
sink. “What is it?” I ask.
“A banana painting -- made from banana.”
They crowd echoes gleefully, “Bananas.”
The African market is unique because it is a run
as a co-op. It is frustrating because the prices are fixed and salesman
-- usually drunk with bloodshot eyes and stale breath -- follow
us from stall to stall claiming to be the artist or the brother,
son or grandson of the artist. They earn an additional commission
above the fixed rate. It is most economically for the buyer and
most profitable for the artisan to buy directly from the source.
Dan suggests we go in search of the artists. We hail a matatu, a
minivan, and the driver, like a magician passing one deck of cards
through another, transports us to the next market.
I show interest in an ebony statue of an elephant
and vendors, as if the statues are coming alive, appear out of the
nooks each with an elephant in hand.
“Do you know how much this is?”
“No.”
“Do you want to know?”
“No.”
“Two-hundred.”
I should be quiet but I can’t help commenting,
“This is muzungu [foreigner] price. I am mwafrika -- African
people.” I show them the freckles on my arm. “You see?
Little bit African.”
“I can see you have spent much time in
African sun. I will give you local price.”
“I don’t want anything.”
I repeat and rephrase.
They are undeterred. “One-fifty.”
I use reverse psychology to make my point. “I’ll
give you three-hundred.”
She smiles, thinking she has met a charitable foreigner.
“I think it might be worth more. Will
you take five-hundred?”
She is bewildered and hesitates. Another man accepts
the offer, “Five.”
“Do I hear six? I have six from the man
in the back. Do I hear seven?”
“Seven.”
“Eight.”
“One-thousand.”
All are laughing but one enterprising youth who says,
“Just give me everything you have.”
My best offer comes from a young beauty with her
hair woven into a bowl-shape on the top of her head: two-hundred
shillings for an ebony elephant with and a homemade “chicken
dinner”.
Dan bought a lot of gifts, including a pink, soapstone
chess set with a Maasai tribal motif at a good price from a real
artist. Most are poor craftsmen. I sat with one family that was
mass-producing identical sculptures of stick figures with jellybean
heads embracing or, if you desired, more erotic poses, “The
African Kama Sutra.” I was surprised to see mundane materials,
such as, markers, shoe polish and food dye, used in the construction.
I was expecting traditional materials, like crushed berries and
goat’s blood. It is rush hour and the office workers are knocking
their heads together trying to board the matatus all at once. Night
is falling so Dan hires a cab and we zoom straight downtown into
a traffic jam. University students are blocking the main roads,
protesting a student being critically injured in a hit and run accident.
We are stuck in traffic for ages. Desperadoes, possibly university
students run amok, materialize out of the vapors of the sewers and
head towards our cab. A second after we roll up the windows and
lock the doors, they are pounding on the windows and rattling the
handles. Discouraged, one pulls a shim or knife and pries the trim
off Dan’s window and runs away. We are stuck there for eons.
“Surely,” I think, “they will bring their friends,
break the windows and put knives to our throats. Do I have enough
money to pacify them? What if the cabdriver tosses us on the street
to protect himself?” The building alcoves are hidden in shadows.
There are no people and nowhere to run.
The university students have caused a chaotic chain
reaction. Nairobi breeds chaos, for instance: arsons burned the
records in the city hall to destroy evidence of monies owed for
such reasons corporations refuse to invest businesses. The electric
company switches the power on and off, threatening to strike, perhaps
causing streetlights to stop working and students to be run over.
A rat stampeded through the kitchen of the restaurant at my lodge.
The cook said, “I killed two yesterday.” He mimed clubbing
them. I imagine guts splattering into my ugali and spinach -- disease
is rampant. The recent rains have drowned fifteen people in Nairobi
(New Zealand is the second wettest place on earth and nobody ever
drowned) and driven a nest of ants into my shoe one day and underneath
my tent the next: they gnawed several holes in the bottom and I
had to trek Nairobi’s streets to find tape to repair the damage.
With a belch, the traffic begins moving and we surge
past Uhuru Highway and my knowledge of the city. “You were
supposed to turn right.” Is our cabbie going to drive us into
the ghetto so he can rob us himself? “No, it is this way.”
We become lost in the suburbs for several more eons.
Finally, Dan insists, “I have the map. Just do what I tell
you.” Dan directs us down a dark road. The driver swerves
around the potholes and through one puddle that nearly swamps us.
We are stuck, perched between puddles that stretch from the wall
to the ominous hedge, den of thieves. Eternity ticks past as the
driver mumbles in Swahili and contemplates -- I am sure -- throwing
us out of the cab. I squirm in my seat. Suddenly he guns the car
and we are plowing through a foot of muddy water. “Pole, pole.
Hakuna matata. [Slowly, slowly. No worries.]” As a friend
told me, my guardian angles are well-trained. Our cab surfaces safely
near our campsite and I survive to die another day.
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