Two Pieces from April’s Sunday Salon

The following stories were read by their authors at the previous Sunday Salon.

Dissecting Obama, by Neema Mawiyoo

Barack Obama began to exist for me the moment he was elected Senator of Illinois in November 2004 while I was a sophomore in university. I did not hear the news on television; it is one of the habits I have been careful not to carry with me to the Americas, a part of this culture I do not care to incorporate into my being because media addiction here – and it is an addiction for me – would be the end of my sense of safety in the world, in my own home and in my body. On this occasion it was an uncle in the Illinois area who told me the news via email.
I went online to Go-ogle, as was the purpose in this case, curious to find out precisely who Barack Obama was – how Kenyan blood found its way into the American Senate. After about 15 minutes worth of internet stalking, I decided that the 43 year-old man must possess within him all the bitterness, brokenness and certain confusion of every cross-cultural relationship I had ever desired; he was the very fruit of such a union. I was ashamed of his father – the Kenyan link – who it seemed had abandoned wife and son when the boy was two. Obama, therefore, could not know anything about Kenya and must – at best – feel nothing positive for the place, given the actions of that part of his family.
I recognized that by returning to Kenya, Obama’s father fulfilled the spoken or unspoken promise he had made to his people when he first left for the Americas. But returning after binding himself to a wife and child signaled to me that we as Kenyans had also lost a sister-in-law and a son and that today, in the son’s day of glory, we had lost our right to celebrate with him. Yet, if Obama’s father remained in the US, we in Kenya would likely have first lost a brother. The quandary is bothersome to me because I am, at present, a nomad. People on either shore often ask me, “will you come (go) back?” The answer would be simple even if defiant or proud, but I am not ready to be stuck anywhere.
There weren’t many people who stopped to question whether we had the right to (publicly) celebrate Obama’s election, as if we thought – for indeed we assumed – that his victory was ours also. In Nairobi, in Kenya, in the States, probably all around the world, wherever there was a Kenyan who paid attention to either Kenyan or American news, there was jubilation: this son of the soil had done good. The new senator had “overcome,” not just in this election but in everything that had ultimately led to this moment despite the fact that he was a black man, and one whose heritage only became “African-American” in himself. In my experience the two will not get you additional Brownie points: nobody knows where to place you and so Black and White America are wont to reject you.
—
In August 2006 I left Upstate New York’s humid summer for Nairobi’s increasingly uncertain but decidedly cooler climate. The month had been dreary for Nairobi: cold, cloudy, and moody, until the sun-blocking mass moved off and a different ailment altogether burned down from the sky.
One decidedly cool night I distracted my imagination with the news on television. The anchorwoman went on about whatever else had happened that day and took us to the scene of the spectacle to engage us in video and commentary of the particular drama. Finally they took me back to the studio, either Nation TV’s or KTN’s – my family’s network allegiances had seemingly shifted in my absence. At that moment it hardly mattered, every station was covering the same story: US Senator Barack Obama was coming to Kenya.
—
During the month I was in Nairobi I lived with my parents in their new home in the Karen-gata suburbs – the place between Karen and Langata. Karen, named after its former owner Karen Blixen of Out Of Africa fame, is a wealthy suburb, while Langata is more middle-class. The road into the city center from Karen and Langata passes through a section of Kibera, one of the continent’s largest slums. The road doesn’t really come into contact with the slum itself, but on the mornings that my mother and I left early enough, we would come upon droves of men and women coming up out of the valley crossing the road before us from left to right, making their way to work on foot, seemingly to Nairobi’s Industrial Area along “panya routes” (literally “rat routes.”)
I cannot say that I’ve ever been to Kibera, or had any desire to go, even when my high school was literally across the fence from another end of the slum. I once drove through a slum-like area in a bus (I’m not sure if it really was a slum or which one it could have been). It was an accident; I’d fallen asleep and missed my stop. There were people everywhere, the road was terrible and there were no sign-posts to be seen or recognized under the grime and dirt of the place. I knew it was not the opportune moment to get off to try and find a bus that went back the other way. I’d also broken one, if not both, of my two-inch heels that day – not the choice moment to be hobbling around looking lost. Another time, (also a nonevent in my books) I was with my father and we drove directly to one part of Kibera specifically to see a particular doctor whose clinic was just off the tarmac. The clinic was a simple but concrete structure. Those surrounding it were similarly simple, but may not have been as solid. There was nothing abnormal about the children who chattered close by. These ‘slum’ moments may well be ‘real’ although none looked like the images I see of Kibera on television: the famed “flying toilets,” the open sewers and square meter iron sheet homes, the children playing beside the former and the latter, and the flies resting, seemingly nesting, around their eyes. Yet the incessant reports on Kenyan television and aid solicitations televised in the Western world cannot come from nowhere even if they describe a part of my city so close to me and yet so far from my experience.
—
The anchorwoman on television announced that Barack Obama had extended his visit to a six day tour, longer than expected because he’d cancelled his Congo visit. She mentioned some of the places he was expected to visit, including Kogelo – his grandmother’s rural home – where he and his wife would also take an HIV test. He would visit Kibera, give a speech to students at the University of Nairobi, meet with the national leadership, possibly take some time out to go on safari…
I was impressed. People on “state visits” don’t usually volunteer or plan to go to Kibera or any slum for that matter, to see what urban poor looks like; let alone talk to it. They don’t think to speak to students and share whatever wisdom they have attained thus far, and if they did I do not remember the media thinking it a newsworthy event. Certainly no one to my knowledge, local or not, has thought to be publicly tested for HIV, asked their spouse to be part of the spectacle and let the whole world know about it – although Eric Wainaina and others have lent their notoriety to public HIV and AIDS awareness campaigns. But this leading by public example, this was something new. I wanted to go to the student lecture, even though I knew it would be as crowded as a political rally, which is the sort of thing my middle-class self would rather just watch on television than be a part of (people get trampled or robbed or worse in that mess!) It was particularly unthinkable because the first and last time I conceived of going to a rally was just after the last election which saw former President Moi leave office to be replaced by President Kibaki. It was momentous: every body was on the streets or at home watching the people on the streets. I watched it on television, enjoying the several great views afforded me by the able cameramen on the ground. Now, four years later and more than a little disheartened by the new government’s stock-still chatter, I’m glad I did not waste my energy going down there – although it might have been fun to actually be able to climb a tree in Uhuru Park, or on Kenyatta Avenue itself and not be the only one doing it or (more to the point) have anyone think I had lost my mind.
A lot of us in Nairobi observe politics and government from a distance. We have learned not to let it destabilize, disappoint or shock us, and we rest ever expectant. It sometimes takes on a rather ludicrous nature and is prone to fulfill the role that reality TV plays for America, sending us away in fits of laughter until we remember that these are the same people who have it within their mandate to facilitate our well-being. That said, our situation is far better than it was in 2002, which was an improvement from 1992 when we became a multi-party democracy. That period was arguably better than the insufferable existence we had before our independence in 1963. Where independence has become the starting point by which to measure our human experience as a nation-state, as slavery often is for African-Americans, it may be said that we are doing better. Yet even our improved state of being does not allow us to be romantic; hope that help will come from our leaders, even when they are elected leaders and frankly the best of those who have stood to represent us. We do not fantasize uselessly; we carry on with the daily things that need to be done.
Barack’s entry was a severe shock to our system. We have not really needed to have a bulwark for pleasant things; we have learned to be pleased with little, so our potential for euphoria remains largely untapped. The popular radio station was all about Obama, the presenters jazzed – elated, excited – by his impending visit. There were local and international news reporters all over the place, taking the pulse of the people. They noted how taxi drivers were intent on being at the airport when he emerged. In Western Kenya, the government mobilized to repair the road leading to and until his grandmother’s gate while the people of Kogelo made haste to finish painting the gate of The Senator Obama Secondary School.
—
“His people.” It occurred to me in the period after the announcement and throughout his time in Kenya, that his existence and particularly his prominence – because I am not so naïve as to think he is the only Luo-American alive (Kenyan American would imply that he had at one time been cognizant of his membership to the nation-state of Kenya, which I do not think is the case here) – but his prominence may well mark the beginning of the political death of the idea of the border in America, despite the fact that he has chosen to locate himself there. In Kenya, the state border has only existed for about a century. It continues to be a non-issue in the south, where the Maasai go about their nomadic existence in complete disregard of the Kenya-Tanzania border. In Western Kenya families are split by the border so that now two brothers are each members of parliament in two different governments. In the North Eastern and North Western corners the border masquerades as the divide between a peaceable territory and two war-torn lands. In reality it only masks the disorienting truth whispered in the winds that cross all of our lands, that trouble in Somalia is trouble in Macon, Georgia, is trouble in Eastleigh, Nairobi, and trouble in Jerusalem, Israel. While Obama does not necessarily see it this way, his visit in of itself and our reception of him has set a precedent that I think will eventually make it impossible for an American President to announce the death of five American troops without regard for the five, one, or hundred human beings of other citizenship who died with the five, as is the case now. Not everyone is family, indeed, as Obama notes in Dreams of My Father, but everyone is community.
—–
I worked on a poetry manuscript project in the summer of 2006 centered on the idea of home, with everything it means and has meant to me. I mused on what it would mean to be an African living in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world, what it would mean for ones children in that period before intergration happens. But I hardly paid adults born and raised in this in-between space any attention, nor did I really ever think about the political implications of a cross-national union as such because it did not seem to matter beyond the private realm.
A foundational notion in second-wave feminism is the politics inherent in the personal. Barack Obama’s personal journey, from his conception, development, and his current place of prominence in American politics provides a rather interesting set of possibilities in this light. While he holds to American citizenship and to a particularly American nationalism he has allowed himself, or perhaps been forced, to look beyond his border and into the third world in ways that many in his privelaged position will not. From that “dark” place, he has pulled to himself a family that is not only outside, but is in many ways placed in opposition to his own nation-state.
In speaking of immigrants, cultural theorist Stuart Hall asserts:
“So the moment of the rediscovery of a place, a past, of one’s roots, of one’s context, seems to me a necessary moment of enunciation. I do not think the margins could speak up without first grounding themselves somewhere.”
- Stuart Hall “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity.” [King 36]

One gets the definite sense from Dreams of My Father that for much of his life, Obama’s sense of self and therefore his direction was not securely rooted; he did not know himself, was haunted constantly by imaginations of who he was and who he was supposed to be. Only when he leaves Nairobi that first time does he seem ‘together,’ despite the many more things he does not yet understand. Only at that point is he able to place himself squarely in America; at that moment it becomes for him a sure rock.
—–
Upon his visit to Kenya in August 2006 however, the question that Kenyan’s everywhere wanted answered, whether or not they or he knew it, was this – again to paraphrase Hall: “Do they have to be trapped in the place from which they begin to speak?” [King 36] Could he only speak for America? Could he also speak for Kenya, fight for Kenya, stand for Kenya? If we seem desperate, it is only because those among us better qualified to run our patch of land, resource and humanity have realized that doing so is more arduous a task than running the extended family – which the potential candidate is likely already weary of doing. There is no glory in it if one were actually working.

—–

While I lived in Tanzania, my family became friends with a Rwandese family that lived down the street and round the corner from us. It was really my brother and then I who became close friends with the children in that family. They had more restrictions about leaving their house than we did, they were more than we were, and they had satellite TV, which has never been a possibility in my house on very nearly moral grounds. So it was my brother and I who often made the trip to their house. Then it turned out that about four feet of our fences were shared; the fence itself a seven-foot concrete wall topped off with electric fencing. Fortunately for us, some of the concrete blocks in that section of our wall provided hand and footholds. Also, our water pump happened to be placed there, and its two-foot high iron sheet roof provided additional support as we made our regular climb up over the wall and under the electric fence. My mother was often worried that we would try to go over or come back when the fence was live, and gave precautionary instructions to our watchman to safeguard against that eventuality, but she always worried, and we never really, well, I never really absorbed the danger we were in to check the fence for myself whenever I went across. By that time, their house had become an extension of ours, and ours of theirs so that they also, sometimes sneaked across to our house when with and without their parents knowledge. Both our parents grew closer because of our insolence, but always they communicated through us, and when they visited each other, drove around to their house, or my parents would walk the fifteen to twenty minute leisurely walk round from our gate to theirs. They’ve moved back to Rwanda, my family has moved back to Kenya. My brother has gone to visit them in Rwanda, and I remain in telephone contact with the brother and sister who are now in college and graduate school in Rhode Island. I expect we will see each other before too long. The hedges of our individual homes – our countries – are rotting and wearing away. We now call out to our neighbors who used to be months away for us. These days they hear us a second later than we spoke, tomorrow they may hear our thoughts before the words have left our mouths. We speak now of a global village, but Barack Obama’s presence, and the many lower profile lives that live alongside his tell us that we are really living in a global household. Stuart Hall’s gentle unassuming, yet probing language haunts me. “Do they have to be trapped…” in the bedrooms, suites, closets or hallways we have assigned for them?

Neema Mawiyoo is a poet, songstress, and assistant editor with Kwani?

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The Expat’s Lament, by Arno Kopecky

I’ve been in Africa for nine months, and I still haven’t seen a lion. I haven’t seen a hippo, nor a cheetah, nor a leopard, or even an alligator, though I did almost hit a zebra driving back from Naivasha one time. I’m told there’s many Kenyans who haven’t seen any of these animals either, so there’s no need to feel ashamed, but it still feels a bit ridiculous. I’m not a Kenyan; I traveled seven thousand, three hundred and sixty-two miles to get this far, so what’s stopping me from going a couple hundred more to visit the Mara?
I’ll blame it on National Geographic. Growing up in North America, we were fed so many goddamn images of the African plains that we knew more about the life stories of the Serengheti than we did about the tribulations of our own bears and bison, our cougars and eagles and wolves. You know, they really knew how to make those animals seem like people. Like the young cheetah mother who hadn’t been able to feed her eight kids in over a week, her man had literally run off months ago and now she had to take care of the family herself, she was getting skinny, kinda strung-out looking, and if this went on much longer she’d be too tired to hunt at all…you could practically hear the landlord banging on the door for his rent money. But my favorite scene was the one with the alligator lurking in the river, that bastard, while ten million wildebeest gather at the banks, trying to decide who’s gonna cross first. That one was a real thriller, we’d be squirming on the sofa watching those poor ignoramuses dip their toes in the river’s edge a feet away from the jaws of death, screaming at the tv screen, “don’t go there don’t do it… He’s right THERE” I liked to imagine the elders hanging back in the herd, saying to themselves “ man these kids have it easy, crocs ain’t half as big as they were in our day.”
So that whole safari thing? My attitude, my miserable attitude, was something like: ‘I’ve already seen the movie, why bother going to the set?
But really – nine months in Africa, and not a single lion. How am I going to explain that one back home?
Then again, Nairobi pretty much is my home now. I’m starting to become that dreaded thing – the EXPATRIATE. I might even be one already. I don’t know how long a person has to live somewhere before the term applies, but it seems to me the gestation period of a human being is about right. And I’m not sure I like it.
You see, when Africans go live abroad, you become something much cooler, you join something called the diaspora. You become part of a group that is a bit rebellious, a bit romantic, and almost always rich and well-educated. You might not be able to vote, but you can testify before Congress and convince them to back the rebel army you’ve organized in that neighboring country. You become one of the lost tribes of Israel, suffering nobly until that day when you can return to your beloved homeland.
But Canada doesn’t have any “diaspora.” No western country does. Instead, we become expatriates, shady characters with bad hair and poor hygiene, sunburnt, alcoholic gremlins whose only company is each other and maybe a prostitute half our age who smiles charmingly while we complain about the locals. It’s very depressing.
But take a look at that word…expatriate. Ex…Patriot. Sounds like it originally meant someone who used to be proud of their country, but no longer is. That does not apply to me! Not that I’ve ever been all that proud to be a Canadian – more like, just lucky. Most of the Kenyans I know, at least the ones who weren’t born in a slum, felt the same way until Christmas. But now I’m starting to see signs of embarrassment; a lot of my friends feel ashamed that this beautiful country teeming with invisible lions has gone to the dogs, slipped into violence just like the low-brow neighbors. It’s as though Kenya farted and the world smelled it. So in a way, the term expatriate applies more to the people born on Kenyan soil than myself or any other outsider.
Which is a terrible shame, because despite whatever it was that just happened a few months ago, there’s far more to love than to hate about this country. Besides, what country hasn’t behaved badly at some point in its history? Take Canada, a country where the colonialists truly won, rather than clearing out in humiliation after a century or two. We wiped out eighty percent of the original inhabitants of North America; the ones who survived, we took their children from their parents and forced them into missionary schools, where we would wash their mouths out with soap if we caught them speaking their own language; and if we caught them again, well, it wasn’t unheard of to drive a nail through a schoolchild’s tongue. We humiliated our aboriginals in every imaginable way, for generations, all in the name of “civilization,” and we didn’t even let them vote in what had become our country until 1960. If you come to Canada today, you can visit the shanty-towns where they live – we call them reservations – and you will see the results of more than a century of systematic assimilation – run-away drug abuse, spouse abuse, child abuse, illiteracy, unemployment….in the end, all we really taught them was how to destroy themselves.
What this means is that, for the Canadian aboriginal, tribe is something to be proud of, something to nurture and breathe life into and resuscitate QUICKLY before it dies, like so many have died before it…and nothing protects a tribe more than the language it speaks. The only people who speak Cree, or Haida, or Saalish these days are old now; their languages are winking out of existence, whole libraries of human reference just gone, just like that. And that is the ultimate death, because there’s no one left who can honor its memory.
I’ve heard some Kenyans argue that their own tribal languages should be suppressed; that Luo and Kikuyu and all the rest should be replaced by Kiswahili the way they did it in Tanzania. Then we would have a unified Kenya, a peaceful homogenous unit, just like the Brits always wanted.
Is that really necessary? Let’s put it into perspective. Sure, some seriously bad shit has gone down in this country, but it could have been a whole lot worse. Just take a look at my own ancestors, who, despite the Bolshevik rumors Tony Mochama’s been publishing, are in fact German. You call Ruto a warlord? Try Hitler! You guys have a long ways to go before you can talk about genocide – my grandparents invented the concept. And it will never make sense. The same people who brought the world Mozart, Faust and Einstein, the printing press and Pippy Longstockings, also brought in… Auschwitz? I mean maybe we should have seen it coming when the Brothers Grimm starting writing children’s stories like Hansel and Gretel that involved stuffing kids into ovens…but that’s the thing. No matter how many times we’re confronted with human monstrosity, it always comes as a shock.
Nine months in Nairobi and not a single lion! But I have seen plenty of predators…for a while there, this whole country turned into one big safari, only better cuz there weren’t any tourists. The hordes of wildebeest were replaced by a quarter million refugees, sprinting for dear life from one end of the Rift Valley to the other, with human hyenas growling and snapping at their heels. I went to see for myself and the colour of my skin, always a factor in this part of the world, gave me several dozen get-out-of-jail-free cards. I could go wherever I wanted, stick my microphone and camera into the faces of murderers with absolute impunity. The same went for their victims of course; in January, I saw my first dead bodies. It wasn’t all that enlightening. One lay on a dirt road, while a few more were in the maize field beside it, just a few kilometers off the highway in Burnt Forest. But there wasn’t any forest, it was just the corpses that were burnt, burnt beyond all recognition, twisted and charred and chewed to pieces by dogs. I smelled them before I saw them. It reminded me of nyama choma and I had to stop eating meat for a while; but a week later I started craving it again. I stayed vegetarian for another month, out of principle I guess, but finally I caved and I’m a carnivore once again. People get used to things.
January was a depressing month. Hate was everywhere, and it got inside me, too, there were days when I hated this whole damn looting, rioting, burning, child-killing, machete-loving country; friends would call from home and ask, “why are Africans so violent?” And I would protest, I’d say high-minded things about how Europeans were slaughtering each other in the millions during the second world war, hell look at what happened in Serbia a decade ago, look at the Middle East today…it’s humans who are violent, not Africans. But really, I was trying to persuade myself, trying to shut up that voice in my head that kept whispering murderers, murderers, murderers.
But even a hostage learns to love his captors. After all, there was something endearing about the way those police took to their tear gas like a child to a blanket, that whole routine – mobilize, shout, wave your machetes and banners, spot the riot police, turn around, run away and keep shouting over your shoulder. Over and over again. One afternoon I found myself sprinting from a fizzing canister in Kibera, and the guy running beside me said “that isn’t normal tear gas, man, they imported that shit from South Africa. Just when we were getting used to the old stuff!” He was laughing as he said it, and I realized that none of this really meant anything to anyone anymore. Every country on earth had sent its camera crews, and all we were doing now was making a movie, shooting the same scene from as many different angles as possible.
Then finally, February 28th: Raila and Kibaki shook hands. Kenya went back to normal. Two weeks later, I was walking to work in the morning and saw a dead body under the bridge at Museum Hill. It was lying in the Nairobi river, no longer a he, just an It. Face up, the features all smashed in, brown water flowing over the legs and waist…there weren’t any cops around, no police flagging, just a body lying in a stream as though taking a nap. When I returned a few hours later, the body was gone and where it had been there were now four guys standing naked in the water, happily washing their clothes. Out of sight, out of mind.
Is that what will happen when I get back to Canada, back to “normal?” Will Kenya just vanish from my mind? It’s possible; but meanwhile …
Nine months into Nairobi and I still haven’t seen a lion! Although I have been hunted by quite a few lionesses…there is no lack of professional pussycats stalking the streets and clubs of Nairobi, and like leopards they come out to hunt at night. They can pounce when you least expect it, which is the first lesson they teach us in that How To Survive Africa course they make all westerners take before letting us on the continent: Always know your escape routes, especially at the club.
We’re taught to treat all Africans as if they have AIDS, and malaria too, and some super-strain of tuberculosis just to be on the safe side, all of which are collectively mutating and about to go airborne, forming a killer uber-virus that only Will Smith, the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is immune to…and on that day, we sad and sorry expatriates will hastily pack our bags and race to the UN compound in Gigiri where we’ll wait for the helicopters to come and rescue us, the best-fed IDP camp in the country. And the real tragedy? We won’t even be able to pass the time by dancing, because none of us ever learned how.

Arno Kopecky is a Canadian travel writer and journalist based in Nairobi; he is an editor at Kwani?