Africa at Its Purest : In Nairobi, Ugliness and Beauty Collide

A lumbering black rhinoceros and her calf ambled along in the glow of an African dawn. A giraffe munched from the top of a thorn tree, and a herd of cape buffalo turned threatening stares on a red Toyota.

Doreen Shank and Hanne Laugesen, U.N. employees on their regular monthly game drive, smiled. “This is a beautiful place to be on a Sunday morning,” Laugesen sighed.

Not far away, in a tough place called Mathare Valley, tailor Samuel Muchiri patched the faded collar of a man’s shirt as he worked the pedals of his black Singer sewing machine on the seventh day of his seven-day week.

“There is work to be done every day,” he explained.

So began another Sunday in Nairobi.

In many ways, Nairobi is purest Africa, a collision of poverty and plenty, ugliness and beauty standing atop a mile-high inland plateau, 50 miles south of the Equator.

Most of the 1 million or so people here rise with the first light. The long rains have passed now, leaving a broad green landscape and the beginning of a damp, chilly winter.

At Jomo Kenyatta Airport, the British ambassador’s white Jaguar, a Kenyan chauffeur at the wheel, waited at curbside for the arrival of the morning’s sunrise flight from London.

Half a dozen wide-body jets from Europe capped their eight-hour flights with a pass over the Nairobi game park, giving bleary-eyed tourists a quick peek before the planes touched down in quick succession.

An hour later, a station wagon with luggage still piled in the back from the airport detoured into the game park, passing the sign that promised “two cheetah, three rhino, six hippo and 50 buffalo were seen in the park this morning.”

Within minutes the station wagon spotted the rhino. A woman’s face appeared in the window, amid her chattering children. Her accent was American.

“Is that a rhino or an elephant?” she asked a passer-by.

Few Kenyans have ever seen the Nairobi game park.

In Mathare Valley, cats living on the largess of strangers scampered across the corrugated metal roofs, waking any late sleepers in the mud-walled huts with their ear-ringing tympanies.

Eliud Ondondo, a tall, 42-year-old messenger, climbed the side of the steep footpath. He stepped carefully to avoid the stream of sewage that bisects the path, carried away by gravity.

Ondondo was bound for the Maranaotha Church and seven hours of Gospel preaching, testimonials, singing and prayer. After church, he would read his Bible by the skinny flame of a crude paraffin lamp.

“Sunday is the day I set all my mind to God,” Ondondo said. “It is the day he rested after working six days.”

Not so long ago Mathare was a lush valley on the edge of Nairobi, populated only by bushbucks and other assorted animals. Then thousands of people arrived in search of jobs.

The first cardboard shacks appeared, and a permanent settlement took root.

Several hundred thousand people live there today in small cubicles carved out of squat, ramshackle complexes, made of sticks and earth, that spill down both sides of the valley.

“Beggars on the street are rich men compared to those people,” said a Nairobi office worker. They are the poorest of Africa’s urban poor.

Mathare Valley is not a place many whites have seen. Crime is widespread, and the police are strangers. A few toilets serve hundreds of people, and one can see small boys and girls walk barefoot on top of garbage piles to relieve themselves.

But Mathare has a vibrant side as well.

In a Sunday morning ritual, men band together in groups of about 10 near the newsstand, investing a couple of shillings apiece to buy the day’s 20-cent newspaper. Then, standing in tight circles, they take turns reading it.

Along the crowded main paths on a recent Sunday, shopkeepers were selling mandazi, deep-fried rectangular doughnuts, and strong coffee or tea. Three men sat on upturned metal buckets, peeling potatoes, while a wood fire nearby brought two gallons of cooking oil quickly to a boil. The lunchtime trade likes fresh chips.

A young woman sat on a mat made of grain sacks, plastic shoes in bright colors piled around her bare feet. She was asking 25 shillings--$1.50--a pair.

Outside her one-room home, Jane Odhiambo began clipping every wisp of hair from the head of her 8-year-old daughter, Milka. Odhiambo explained that her husband is a tailor in a factory. “I am lucky to have these scissors,” she said.

Anna Mwanda, a 35-year-old mother of nine who lives next door, returned from the downtown markets shortly before noon. She bought 10 pounds of tomatoes and carried them back to Mathare on her back. Later, she said, she would spread them out on a mat and sell them, hoping to collect about $1 for the day’s efforts.

The taverns of Nairobi were already doing a brisk business that Sunday, serving warm beer and changaa, a clear alcohol of questionable legality and unquestionable power served straight up, thank you.

Changaa is distilled at the bottom of Mathare Valley, where half a dozen men, their pants legs rolled up, waded in a narrow running stream and breathed the sweet, rich odor of fermenting grain.

Judith Mwangi runs this rudimentary distillery: Her rowdy charges pour jugs of a maize soup into three 50-gallon drums suspended over blazing fires. The alcohol forms as steam, emerging through a rubber hose that snakes into metal cans floating in the cool stream.

“It’s better than your whiskey,” Mwangi said, urging a sample on a visitor. “You should try it.”

A few miles away, as the day warmed up, aging white Kenyans took their vivid memories of the old days to the storied Muthaiga Club. Once inside those pink walls, they poured the day’s first gin and tonic and looked at the familiar menu, English right down to the selection of desserts under the heading: “Puddings.”

On a Sunday back in 1982, the story goes, Beryl Markham, the British flier and longtime resident of Kenya who, in 1936, was the first person to fly east to west across across the Atlantic, was driving her old Mercedes-Benz for her regular lunch at the Muthaiga Club when she came upon a roadblock.

The country was in the midst of a coup d’etat that morning, but Markham couldn’t be bothered. She bored through the roadblock, ignoring the soldiers’ gunfire, and emerged unscathed.

Asked about it later, she was said to have responded simply: “I always go to the club for lunch on Sundays.”

Down the road from the club, Muktilal Shah, a 60-year-old Nairobi auctioneer, emerged from the Wanza House Temple, blinking in the sunlight after a five-hour wedding ceremony attended by about 800 Hindus.

Asians, many Kenya-born with ancestors in India and Pakistan, are the largest ethnic group in Nairobi, besides Africans, and they dominate the economic life of the city, working as accountants, attorneys, physicians and shop owners.

“I’ve seen Sundays everywhere, in Canada and in America, too,” Shah said, as women in bright red and blue saris chatted behind him. “But Sunday in Nairobi is always a special holiday.”

On Sunday afternoons, the country’s roadways are lined with neatly dressed Kenyans out for a stroll, often with their children in tow. Sometimes they are off to visit friends. But often they are walking to escape their small, dark apartments.

Soccer fans were boarding buses for the stadium on a recent Sunday afternoon, the well-to-do were driving to golf courses and squash courts, and those who felt lucky ended up at the Nairobi race course.

Post time was 2:15. Joe Diver hasn’t missed many opening races since he came to Kenya in 1938, and he was plenty early for that day’s race. A white-haired, blue-eyed, red-faced 72-year-old, he was dressed in a worn black suit, skinny black tie and black wing-tips.

Diver is a retired jockey, having ridden five Kenya Derby winners during a 40-year career. He stands 4-feet-11, “with my socks on,” he said.

He’s at the track every Sunday, except when it closes in August and he hunts for a poker game. “If I can’t find a good poker game, I’ll tell you, August passes by mighty slow,” he said.

Diver spent most of Sunday afternoon passing out tips on the races, never asking a shilling in return. His favorite horse that Sunday was Strong Box.

“Ninapenda Strong Box-- tatu, “ he said for the benefit of the Swahili speakers who sought his counsel. “I like Strong Box--in the third,” he told the others.

Diver himself doesn’t do much betting. “Sometimes I don’t bet at all,” he said. “But if I wasn’t here, where would I be? There’s not much else to do on a Sunday. Is there?”

Diver’s friend George Henstrdge, 79 years old and retired from the Kenya Coffee Board, is also a track regular.

“I don’t win anything, but I don’t lose enough to commit suicide,” Henstrdge said. “Most days, I know I’d be better off going to church.”

Strong Box won the third race by a length.

By late afternoon, Nairobi shifted to a more relaxed pace. Willie Gathu went for a haircut in Kamukunju Park, in the shadow of downtown. “Twice a month, always on Sunday, you can find me here,” said Gathu, 45, who drives a truck for a tobacco company during the week.

Gathu’s favorite barber is Peter Wandua, who wears a white coat and uses the same hand-operated clippers for shaves and haircuts.

A few yards from Wandua’s open barber shop, under a towering jacaranda tree, the Rev. Peter Eshiabia, known to his flock simply as mwalimu, or teacher, was preaching the Gospel.

Eshiabia, with a pointed beard, bloodshot eyes and no front teeth, was busy ordering the demons out of potential new church members.

A young woman with a small child in her arms told the red-robed minister that she believes something is wrong with her because she has no desire to marry.

“I am confused,” she told Eshiabia, as the congregation formed a circle around them. “I’m not settled with one man. Where I come from, I am sure they have bewitched me,” she said.

Eshiabia’s assistant held a drum against the woman’s head and banged it loudly twice as the congregation chanted “Riswa! Riswa!”-- ordering the demons out of her body.

After welcoming half a dozen new members in similar fashion, the Kenya Independent Church heard its benediction as the sun set on Nairobi.

Near the Muthaiga Club, in a wealthy suburb populated by ambassadors and high-ranking Kenyans, Leonard Muasa was about to go off duty after a day of false alarms.

Muasa oversees one of the crews hired by one of Nairobi’s private security agencies. For a tidy fee, those agencies outfit homes with “panic buttons” that summon Muasa or one of the other truckloads of bat-wielding security guards, day or night.

The security agencies have plenty of vehicles, unlike Nairobi’s police force, which rarely responds to emergency calls unless the victim agrees to drive to the station and pick up the investigating officers.

“We get a lot of false alarms on Sundays because people get drunk and mistake our panic button for the light switch,” Muasa said.

Most of Nairobi falls asleep early, even before the departing tourists pile into taxis and tour-group vans for the airport, an oasis of burning lights 30 minutes from downtown.

“Is today Sunday? It really is a blur,” said Bob Steiner, a salesman from suburban Chicago as he checked in for Pan Am’s midnight flight to West Germany.

Steiner and his wife, Phyllis, were concluding an eight-day trip to Kenya, in which they managed to see five far-flung game parks.

They had spent Sunday on two game drives in a park 300 miles west of Nairobi, returned here and topped off their vacation with dinner at the Carnivore Restaurant, joining “every departing tourist in town,” Phyllis said, for such specials as roast zebra, impala and wildebeest.

“I’m very impressed by this country,” Bob Steiner said. “This is one of the best vacations we’ve ever had. We’re going home with the idea that we absolutely must come back here.”

But he added that he was surprised and appalled by the gap between the haves and the have-nots in Africa.

“It really disturbs you,” he said.

The Steiners’ plane took off on time, leaving the dark plains of Kenya behind. And another day in Africa had already begun.