One afternoon I meet with Peter, the young footballer I last saw with his overmatched squad getting chased off the pitch in Naivasha. We’ve sent each other periodic updates these past few months, his terse emails charting the anxious path most Kenyans follow in their rootless lives. He’d lost his job in Naivasha – despite a contract with a team in the country’s National Division, he worked as a laborer five days a week – but rather than returning to his home in Kitale, he packed his bags for Nairobi. There he found some space with a cousin living in Eastlands – the poor counterpart to Nairobi’s tony Westlands area – where he again joined the hunt for work. He’d had and lost a job; he was briefly ill, but was now fortunately on the mend. In his last email, he passed along his friend’s phone number:
am still pushing life here in Nairobi,unfortunelty my phone ceased i have diverted to my friends number. his able to get me any time u arrive in Nairobi.i hope to see you soon have a good day,my friendsname is kings
When I meet him downtown, a slight figure in a loose-fitting jersey and a crisp pair of jeans, he clasps my hand and hugs me twice, in the Kenyan manner. His friend – stocky, bald, slightly nervous – smiles cautiously and walks a few steps behind us. They take me back to their place in Eastlands, a half-hour walk that will spare us the horrors of Nairobi traffic. The cars and buses and dusty matatus are backed up for miles down Tom Mboya, exhaust billowing and tires spinning in the mud. The rains have been heavy these past few days; there are wide brown puddles in the buckled tarmac, women stepping cautiously in their open-toed shoes. The guys take me down muddy side-streets, dirt roads lined with wooden dukas and clucking roosters and pantless kids chirping “How are you? How are you?” from the doors of their tin-roofed homes. Men sell pots and pans and corrugated sheets and piles of rusty scrap metal on the street. They stoop in the mud, hammering, banging, sawing: a raw, cacophonous soundtrack, an aria of sorrow. Gruff guys in worn sports jackets set up shine boxes on the side of the road, squatting on a thin patch of grass surrounded by gravel and trash and sludge.
We pass rows of government housing, poured-concrete barracks with colorful shirts and church dresses flapping on the lines outside. Peter explains that these are choice apartments, largely subsidized and available for under Ksh1,500 – about twenty-three US bucks – a month. They’re painted bright orange and blue and decorated with advertisements for Dimbo vegetable oil and Crown pens. We pass burning piles of garbage and old men lying on the ground with their crutches beside them, begging for change. Everywhere there’s smoke, rags, plastic bags full of vegetable scraps, empty bottles, animal bones, excrement. Crying kids, screeching kids, kids with mud and snot and porridge crusted to their smiling faces.
We tramp down a few narrow, muddy alleys close to their apartment. Women recline on blankets, selling tomatoes and potatoes and yellow blocks of vegetable fat for cooking. Some heat pots of chai they sell for Ksh10 a mug, or tend to unnamable porridges and stews spooned out into tin bowls. The air is musty, heavy with the smell of rain and trash; rivers of filthy water flow down the streets. This is home: Blue Estate, so named because the walls and roofs of these narrow tin shacks are painted a bright, optimistic shade that mimics a cloudless sky. Kings swings a heavy metal door open and welcomes me into his pad, a single room about the size of my old college dorm, hemmed in by walls of corrugated tin. Another cousin, Joseph, is sitting on the edge of his bed, buttoning a crisp white dress shirt.
“Welcome to the ghetto,” he says with a laugh, then points to the wall, where the words “Ghettoh life” have been scrawled with black marker. Beneath them, optimistically, is written another message: “Sportsmen never give up.” There’s a single bed and a beat-up couch and a couple of laundry lines criss-crossing the room. Peter clears some space for me on the sofa, and we sit and talk about football and work and his girlfriend in the Ukraine.
“I want to show you,” he says, pulling a pile of yellowed Polaroids from a manila envelope tucked under the cushions. For the next ten minutes we look through the pictures, Peter watching my face with a faint, anxious smile. He shows me his girlfriend, standing demurely in a yard in Kitale, her hair elaborately knotted and wrapped around her head. “She’s very pretty,” I say. He glows. He shows me pictures of his mother – a stocky, no-nonsense woman with a look of frank disapproval etched onto her face. He shows me brothers and uncles gathered around a tractor, cousins in graduation gowns, sisters and friends dancing at a party. He shows me his different football squads through the years: a village team in knock-off England kits, a secondary-school squad in bright yellows and greens. There’s a picture of a younger Peter in front of a school building, a silhouette oddly cut out beside him.
“Was that your ex-girlfriend?” I ask. He laughs and blushes and rocks forward, holding his knees.
He shows me more pictures of his girlfriend from Kitale. They’ve been together for four years, though she’s spent the last two in the Ukraine, pursuing a medical degree. It will be another five years before she returns to Kenya. Peter smiles wearily and sighs and says that he will wait, because he loves her. The others nod appreciatively. I ask Kings if he has a girlfriend, and he erupts in laughter.
“No no no,” he says. “No no no no no.”
I reach over and shake his stomach and say that he’ll never find a girlfriend like that. This sends the whole room into hysterics. We sit back and settle into a weighty silence, broken by the shrieks and cries of kids playing in the yard outside. Joseph neatly folds a few button-down shirts and stacks them on the bed. He works as a security guard at a local cornmeal factory; his shift starts in a few hours. He’s been working there for just over a month, hoping to get hired on a full-time basis, but he isn’t optimistic: because it’s cheaper to hire short-term labor, the company’s notorious for laying off workers every few months. Still, he’s the only one of the three with a job right now, and it’s up to him to make up the bulk of the rent: Ksh2,000, or about thirty US bucks, a month.
Peter gets up and fills a pot with water from a five-liter jerry can. He turns on the portable gas heater and sets the pot atop it, crouching to chop tomatoes and greens on the coffee table. When the water begins to boil, Kings adds the cornmeal, stirring slowly as the ugali thickens. Joseph spoons some vegetable fat into the pan, and Peter adds the vegetables. When everything is ready they set the ugali in the middle of the table like a birthday cake, sprinkling some salt on top. Joseph spoons out four bowls of tomatoes and sikuma wiki and we begin to eat hungrily, the guys shoveling with their fingers, me throwing back forkfuls. Afterward Joseph squats on the ground and fills a basin with water and a bit of cleaning fluid, washing the bowls with his hand.
I ask about their hopes for the upcoming election. Peter, a Kikuyu, plans to cross tribal lines and vote for ODM candidate Raila Odinga. Raila, he explains, is a sportsman: he goes to all the games when the Harambee Stars – the national team – play at Kasarani.
“Kibaki, he only likes golf,” he says, wrinkling his nose.
Peter suspects that a Raila presidency will do a lot for footballers in Kenya, starting with a boost in salary. He talks about the Kenyans playing in Europe – one at Italian powerhouse Parma, one at the French team Auxerre – and the others who have left to play in Uganda and Tanzania.
“There is a boy from Kitale,” he says “he plays in Tanzania and drives a car.” We all marvel at his good fortune. Peter hopes his own fortunes might soon improve: he’s been practicing with Mathare, which this weekend finished the season in second place, and hopes to get signed in January. The top teams like Tusker FC can pay Ksh19,000 – $300 – or more per month. It’s a figure Peter struggles to get his mind around. I tease him about the change in lifestyle we’ll be seeing a few months down the line – the flashy clothes, the pretty girls at nightclubs. He laughs and blushes and shakes his head, though he’d be happy to test the waters of the good life. Until then, he’s sticking with his modest hopes. He sits back on the sofa and looks up at the scribblings on the wall.
“At least, when there are a few of us, it is easier,” he says, and the others agree.
We head back into town, taking a detour through a vast complex of concrete bungalows – government-subsidized housing for railway workers. Peter points to the new marketplace being built nearby, about the size of a football pitch. For months the government has been pushing its vigorous campaign to get hawkers off the streets – election-year pandering, as Peter sees it – planning to relocate them to permanent stalls in the market. We watch a few bulldozers push piles of rubble around. Peter shakes his head. He doubts it will accomplish much: once the election is over, everyone will lose interest, and the hawkers will be back on the streets. More than in its western counterparts, the political scene in Kenya is rife with cynicism. And it’s hard to look around us – with kids playing in heaps of dirt, and piles of trash strewn on the grass – and not feel like the status quo will be in place long after the campaign promises have ended.
A chubby little boy in blue galoshes looks up as we pass. He breaks off from his game and hurtles toward me with bright, beaming eyes, his face lit with rapture. He grabs me by the hand and tugs with all his might, bending at the waist, straining with effort. A few women smile nearby. They ask him where he’s going, and when he answers, they all burst into laughter. I ask Peter to translate.
“He says he’s going with the mzungu,” Peter says. “He says he is going wherever you’re going.”
With luxe resorts peppering the coast – as well as neighboring islands like Manda and far-flung Kiwayu – I’ve got plenty of work ahead of me. But I’ve already been braced for the rigors of luxury life. With the arrival of Ramadan squeezing me out of my usual budget comfort spots, I’ve been an up-market fixture around town, frequenting the same high-end haunts in search of sustenance. At the top of the list is Whispers, a Western-style café on Harambee Avenue, which shares real estate with the lavishly overpriced Baraka Gallery next door. In the shady backyard garden, surrounded by coral walls and coconut palms, I drink cappuccino and eat sugary desserts, flipping through the pages of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. That I’m reverting to my previous state of aspiring New York sophisticate doesn’t alarm me in the least. Ogling Patek Philippe watches and Dolce & Gabbana shirts and lithe Brazilian models cavorting in Cavalli swimsuits is, after all – in its own small way – research to prepare me for the job ahead.
For my first week in Lamu, Whispers – with its Ksh120 cappuccinos – was something of a guilty pleasure – a leafy sanctuary I’d retreat to every few days, when the fat black flies and Nescafes of the local eateries had overrun my sanity. Now I wake up in a state of disarray, anxious for the frothy pleasures I’ve become so accustomed to: just another caffeine junkie jonesing for the fix only Whispers can provide. Not coincidentally, it’s also the place where I’ve rekindled an embarrassing addiction to the VF society pages – those glossy stomping grounds of American socialites, Greek shipping tycoons and the ever-dapper Dominick Dunne, who photographs like he’s just been shot full of horse tranquilizers and formaldehyde and can’t quite make up his mind if he likes the buzz.
It’s here that I’m reacquainted with the fall-out surrounding the Brooke Astor home care scandal, and the divorce saga of designer Tori Burch, and the ill-advised emails that were the undoing of Republican Representative Mark Foley. Over a couple of blush-worthy paragraphs, all the elicit details of his IMs to young pages are aired for the world to see.
Maf54 (7:54:31 PM): where do you unload it
Xxxxxxxx (7:54:36 PM): towel
Maf54 (7:54:43 PM): really
Maf54 (7:55:02 PM): completely naked?
Xxxxxxxx (7:55:12 PM): well ya
Maf54 (7:55:21 PM): very nice
Xxxxxxxx (7:55:24 PM): lol
Maf54 (7:55:51 PM): cute butt bouncing in the air
Meanwhile, a childhood friend – recalling Foley’s abuse at the hands of a local priest – notes that the former Congressman seemed less than traumatized by all those after-hours sessions in the sacristy.
“For some people, it’s molestation,” he observes. “Maybe for other kids, it’s fun.”
I might turn up my nose at low-brow tabloids or the tasteless rumor-mongering of the American cable-news circuit, but give me some well-crafted, high-end smut and I’m just another gossip whore, turning tricks over $2 cappuccinos.
The task of researching remote resorts for the new gig, though, has posed its share of problems. The dirty little secret of travel writing is that you can get luxury rooms at a fraction of the price – making that $500-a-night hideaway a steal for under a hundred bucks. But without the similarly complementary transfer from Lamu town, just reaching these places will be an ordeal that requires either manic fits of ingenuity or buckets of disposable cash (as the $200 boat ride to Kiwayu Safari Village makes clear). Turning to my resourcefulness – and utter disregard for personal comfort and safety – I’ve decided to do these places on the cheap, taking my cue from the crusty old sea dogs who once sailed these same waters for weeks on end, guided by the stars, battered by the sun, and utterly desperate for a place to take a crap.
I commandeer a boat one afternoon, a puttering little ferry that will take me to the Manda Bay Resort and back for Ksh2,000 – about thirty bucks. The captain waits for me by the jetty, an overpowering stench of diesel piping up from the water. He starts us forward with a lurch, the engine roaring to life, and soon we’re bumping over the choppy sea toward the mangroves of Manda Island. The sky is overcast; a light rain begins to fall, silver drops that pelt the water and spread a white sheet over the waves. Before long the storm begins to gather strength: broad curtains of rain draped across the mangroves as we steer toward a narrow channel. The captain works the rudder and wipes the rain from his face; beside him his young son grins bashfully and dangles a bare foot over the side, a little yellow rooster crowing on the breast of his knock-off soccer jersey. We pass a dhow rocking from side to side, the crew battling with the wind-battered sail. The smell of woodsmoke pumps from the mangroves. The rain slows, and a school of fish leap from the water – a flash of silver, like a handful of coins scattered across the sea.
After close to an hour the resort comes into view, its thatched-roof bandas discreetly tucked among the coconut palms. A couple of pleasure boats bob just off-shore, while my own ferry – the paint flaking from its flanks – makes its inglorious way toward the beach. There’s a man in olive pants and a fitted polo shirt watching gravely from the shore; he’s holding a walkie-talkie and regarding us with scarcely concealed contempt. I wave cheerily, though he does not – it’s worth noting – wave back. The captain drops anchor, forcing me to hitch up my shorts and wade fifty feet to shore, where the guy with the walkie-talkie gives me a look that all but says, “I think you’ve got the wrong beach, white boy.”
Fuzz and Bimbi, the resort’s owners, are standing barefoot in the sand, looking tan and salubrious and pleased as punch to be Fuzz and Bimbi. They’re busy sending off an older British couple as I splash my way to shore, holding my flip-flops and notebook up high and looking exactly like someone who’s washed up with the seaweed. Bimbi’s still waggling her long, slender fingers as their boat clears the mangroves. Then she turns my way, looking from my drenched shorts to my idling, beat-up boat and back, and all but wondering out loud whether I was just dredged up from the reef and whether I can’t be tossed back.
Once I’ve explained myself, though, she quickly warms. I’m ushered to the lunch table, where a garrulous group of Brits are comparing notes on neighboring resorts and smacking their lips over the vanilla pudding. We make small-talk about Lamu, and they pepper me with questions about the town I’ve called home for these past few weeks. How are the locals? What have I been eating? Do I feel safe after dark? I’m more than a bit surprised when I hear they’re on their fifth trip to the archipelago; just from how they say the word Lamu – practically holding it at arm’s length – you get the feeling they just came across it for the first time, flipping through a glossy brochure.
Later Bimbi takes me aside to answer my questions about the resort. I hunch over my notebook and bluff my way through scrupulous notes, glancing up now and then to sneak a peek at her marvelous, surgically enhanced breasts. She veers off on tangents, gossiping about other resorts or certain indiscretions among her guests following a particularly Bacchanalian night. Suddenly she stands up and chirps, “Oh look, it’s my little pied wag-tail,” making tweet-tweet noises as a tiny bird hops onto a nearby couch. I scribble the words “pied wag-tail” in the margin of my pad. Afterward she shows to a sea-front banda that’s big and breezy and just dying to have a certain travel writer doing cartwheels across the veranda. We stand outside and admire the view, with the late-day sunlight washing the mangroves and the waves lapping at the sea wall. Then she leads me back to the dining room, waves of blond hair cascading down to her sun-browned shoulders, her firm rear swaying in a bright-patterned skirt.
I think I’m going to get awfully used to the high life.
After the bank debacles and hungry nights of Mombasa, the return to Nairobi Backpackers feels like a welcome homecoming. It’s a feeling that lasts for all of twenty minutes. It doesn’t take much longer to realize that all’s not well, with a handful of new faces busying themselves around the hostel and a rash of whispered intrigues chasing me down the now-barren halls.
It’s been close to two months since I left Nairobi, and in that time, poor Papa Ken has visibly deteriorated. His skin has gone gray and lifeless; he’s unshaven; his hair is a mess. There’s something flickering in his eyes that, if I didn’t know any better, I’d associate with the onset of full-blown, off-the-wall madness. In recent weeks he’s begun to share wild plans for the future that, in a frightening twist, he genuinely seems to believe. Half of the staff has quit since I left in August; the other half is confused, concerned, and more than a little afraid.
Despite the fact that the employees weren’t paid last month, despite the fact that the phone line’s been shut off and there’s a long line of angry creditors stretching from here to Kakamega, Papa Ken’s decided it’s time to remodel. He’s built an outdoor kitchen next to the pool table and moved all of the furniture – including the TV – into the yard. He’s added a second computer to the new Internet café, having declared one permanently off-limits, so that he can surf Facebook at a moment’s notice at any time of day (a peculiar new fetish, about which more later). He’s hired a few of the guys to paint a mural in the living room – a sad, strange portrait of chocolate-colored hills and orange-rind horizons that looks less like a fresh African morn than a new day dawning in the bowels of hell. They’ve painted the ceiling blue and added a handful of clouds – half-hearted dabs of white and gray smeared over the cracks and water stains.
The cosmetic changes are, it seems, the first deranged steps in what promises to be a wholesale transformation. Papa Ken’s been busily outlining his plans to turn “Papa Ken’s Family” into a global enterprise – plans that, as I’ll quickly learn, are already well under way. He hands me a wrinkled print-out that, he explains wearily, he’s been working on day and night for weeks. This is what it looks like, I suspect, when sheer, utter lunacy – slightly diminished by a low toner – finds its way onto a few pages of A4. From his base in Sheffield – which he’s optimistically described to me as “the outdoor adventure capital of England” – Papa Ken will sow the seeds of a vast, worldwide empire. The plans for Sheffield are modest: a youth hostel with easy access to hiking, biking, horseback riding, and “Tank driving and amphibious vehicle driving (later)”. But it’s in the rest of the world – where, I’m assured, Ken has “family” in more than 200 countries – that the manic vision will truly take flight.
All week, in a series of “Breaking News” reports, Ken’s assailed us with the latest updates from abroad. He’d clap his hands enthusiastically and say, eyes aglint, “I just got off the phone with investors in Italy,” or “I just picked up four new hostels in Sudan,” or “We’re in Czechoslovakia!” – a location that, no doubt, will work nicely along the overland route from Prussia to Yugoslavia. One night, drunk and flushed and on the verge of a long-overdue breakdown, he shouts, “I don’t need this fucking place! I have 999 other hostels around the world!” Morgan, mild and sympathetic, gently steers him to the fireside and tops off his glass of Vat 69. The guests around the fire quickly clear out, downing the last of their Tuskers, scurrying back to their dorms and bandas, and making sure to lock the doors.
All the bitterness of his failures, the desolate loneliness of those long nights by the fire, seem to have finally pushed Ken over the edge. Surfing through profiles on Facebook – a site which he sees as vital to the growth of Papa Ken’s World – he boasts of a global network of “more than a billion,” all the while lending a running commentary to his search. (“She’s Maltese….She’s Colombian….She’s a real fireball.”) He’s been sending long, rambling emails to his extended family, outlining his plans for the future and urging prospective investors to get in on the ground floor. For the modest price of $1,000 a share, anyone can buy into the burgeoning enterprise. They’d be in good company, too: All week, Ken’s boasted of the presidents, prime ministers, sultans and emperors who have the privilege of calling him a close personal friend. Even the late Haile Selassie, it seems, likes to pop in on Papa Ken for a drink, advising him on matters of life, love and liquidity from beyond the grave.
That Ken is desperate for cold, hard cash is obvious; equally obvious is the fact that his wild pleas are falling on deaf ears. I follow the train of his thought through a series of emails, the tone getting more and more dire with each passing day.
“For those of you who are still hesitating about partnership,” he writes, “you can see that if you don’t act now, you are going to miss the one opportunity to really become part of a Titan at it’s birth.”
A few days later, discouraged by the responses, he writes, “I will try to explain in detailed, but simple English, because for many of you, English is not your first language.”
Still later, in even more simple English: “THIS IS NOT A FRANCHISE, IT IS US, THE FAMILY, CREATING A UNIQUE, WORLDWIDE FAMILY NETWORK, WHICH WILL GIVE YOU ALL, SOLDIERS, DOCTORS, DENTISTS, LAWYERS, CONCERT VIOLINISTS, VETS, NURSES, TEACHERS, BUSINESS PEOPLE, FAMILY PEOPLE AND SO ON, a hobby if you wish, a further secure income, virtually free travel to anywhere in the world, a career in travel if you wish, the key to finding volunteer opportunities anywhere in the world, a unique, international family, and so on. Do not be blind!”
In a strange twist, a member of Ken’s actual family has finally turned up at Backpackers: his brother John, a clinical psychiatrist who’s arrived from Madrid. Pale, concerned, nursing Tuskers behind a pair of card-shark shades, he spends long hours sitting by the fire, keeping an eye on his brother and taking notes on a legal pad. When he wants to unwind he rests his cowboy hat on the table and dips into Noam Chomsky. Things are getting really fucking weird. One night in the yard, debriefing me and Joost – a portly Dutch kid who somehow became the nominal manager while I was gone – John explains that he can’t force Ken to get help – Ken has to want to help himself. That Ken might be in no position to ask for help doesn’t seem to make matters any easier. And poor Joost, who flew to Nairobi on a one-way ticket at Ken’s urging, spends a frightening amount of time staring grimly into the middle distance, wondering just what he’s gotten himself into.
It’s a question I’ve begun to ask myself, too. After all the weeks I’ve spent here, I feel committed to Backpackers, and I’ve managed to grow close to much of the staff. But the situation is approaching unbearable. Ken’s nightly tirades send us all shuffling out of our rooms in bare feet and PJs; when one guest asks him if he can please keep it down, he tells her to go fuck herself. Later that night, he tears into Morgan for letting the cooks go home early, because Ken’s decided, at half-past two, that he needs a sandwich. When Morgan tries to pacify him, the veins in Ken’s neck begin to bulge. He lets loose a rain of abuse and profanities, only to apologize, at the top of his lungs,
“I’m not shouting at you, I’m shouting at Kenya!”
Kenya, it seems, doesn’t care to take notice.
The days go by in fits of desperate fantasy and blind fury. One morning, after a particularly frightful night, Ken gathers the staff by the fire. He’s gotten his old tweed jacket off the moth balls – his favorite conciliatory gesture after a night in the sauce – looking very much like he was just upholstered in a suburban Ohio basement circa 1973. He wants to have what he calls a “reheartening.”
“We’re going to bring enjoyment and love and peace back to this world,” he explains, while the employees hunch around the fire and scribble God-only-knows-what in their notebooks.
The fire has become an important symbol for Ken, an eternal flame that perhaps sums up his undying faith in a future that only he believes in. “Fire is life,” he maintains. (While the poor, superstitious staff keep insisting, “Water is life. Fire is for devils.”) He insists that it’s stoked day and night; sometimes Morgan has to chop firewood in the darkness – anything to keep the flames going – the sound of his ax ringing out and echoing through the hostel’s halls.
That Papa Ken can’t face the darkness inside or out is a sad commentary on his emotional unraveling.
I’m reminded of those famous lines of Auden’s:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
This fort, this sand castle, is all that’s left of Papa Ken. And when he shouts in defiance, “I don’t need this place!” it’s not a cry for help: it’s a cry to be swept away.
One night he flies into a fit of rage that has even Morgan keeping a safe distance. We try to call the police at half-past two; in typical Nairobi fashion, there’s no answer. It takes more than an hour for us to pacify him with drink and reassurances, and it’s close to four when we finally leave him by the fire, drunk, loveless, lost: a disconsolate soul on another sleepless night in Nairobi.
By day the men sit hunched in the shade, listlessly staring at the waves or furrowing their faces over the Koran. You can practically hear the hunger pangs rumbling in their stomachs and chasing me down the street. It’s a curious time for me to be surrounded by such asceticism. For the past month, working my way up the coast, I’ve enjoyed my best dining in Kenya. Gourmet pizzas in Watamu, fresh grilled fish in Malindi. Along the waterfront in Lamu, where the restaurants Bush Gardens and Hapa Hapa compete for tourist traffic, I’ve gorged on prawn curry and barracuda kebab and garlic kingfish for under five bucks. So while Ramadan will hardly be a test of my faith, it’s sure to be a trial for my unruly appetite. Most of the restaurants around town are closed till sunset, prompting the humble recognition of just how grumpy I can be without a nice sit-down lunch and my afternoon banana-coconut milkshake.
So I’ve made the acquaintance of the few upmarket places in town: the New Lamu Palace; the Swahili-styled boutique hotel, Lamu World; the trendy Whispers Café, which shares real estate with the overpriced schlock at the Baraka Gallery next door. A week ago, when cheap eats were abundant around town, a cappuccino at Whispers or a frutti di mare pizza at the Palace was the stuff of the occasional splurge. But now, with the local haunts shuttered from dawn to dusk, I’ve been forced to play my white-man’s trump card: a bashful acknowledgment that, if the occasion demands, I can eat a $12 lunch with the best of ‘em.
That’s not to say I can do it with a clear conscience. For the first few holy days I navigate the busy streets with my head hung low, avoiding eye contact and fidgeting with my fingernails and briskly ducking into the first place that’s willing to feed me. I eat with the guilty relish of someone who’s enjoying a hearty meal in spite of the hungry faces on the other side of the windowpane. Afterward I hustle out the door and turn the first corner I find, anxious to dodge any disapproving stares: afraid that my dirty, sated little secret will give me away with a content gurgle of the stomach.
It’s not until late in the afternoon, as the sun begins to dip beneath the minarets, sending long shadows down the street, that Lamu’s collective appetite really begins to stir. The locals set up food stalls in the narrow alleys: men selling grilled meat skewers and fried, doughy bhajias and meat-filled potato katlisses. Boys sit Indian-style in the dirt and hack at piles of coconuts. The streets are filled with smoky aromas. Fathers buy great bundles of food wrapped in newspaper, bringing their booty home to break the fast when the sun sets.
I stock up, too, carrying my greasy pages from the morning’s Nation in the crook of my arm. Even as dusk approaches, even as lunch lurches and settles in my stomach, those plump packages are urging me toward all sorts of indiscretions. In just a few minutes the call to prayer will blast through the streets; the faithful men of Lamu, lean and sun-battered and wilting after another long day, will tear into their samosas and chapati and guzzle tamarind juice with a youthful recklessness. But those few minutes are more temptation than I can stand. I slip into an open doorway, creep up a flight of stairs, and turn a few corners until I’m hidden from eyeshot. And like the fat kid who buries his head in the fridge after midnight, hoping no one will miss a few extra drumsticks, I prove to myself what a horrible Muslim I would be.
For two months in Kenya, I’ve done my best to blend with the locals: sleeping in a smoky cow-dung hut with a Maasai family; bumping along a rocky road for fifteen hours in the back of a lorry truck; braving the grim, monotonous cuisine of ugali and nyama choma – the grilled meat that has, in your average Kenyan chop-shop, all the taste and texture of an 18-inch Pirelli. Certain cultural gaps between us can never be bridged; but in whatever small ways, inching closer till I can dimly see the far shore, I’ve tried to see for myself what it is to live in a Kenyan’s shoes. And so it is during this, my first full-fledged Ramadan. I’ve exchanged salamu leikums with the men on the street, woken to the call to prayer blasting from the mosque outside my window. How hard can a day of fasting be?
I wake to a bright Ramadan morning, the birds twittering in the casuarina trees and the donkeys braying and clopping by the waterfront, intent on making a statement – if only to myself. I sit with my laptop on the terrace, a warm breeze rattling the makuti thatch. It’s a few minutes shy of nine. The tortoises are prowling under the tables, nipping at my toes and making their gross, lusty overtures toward each other. It’s just past nine. Already I’ve lost my focus, my eyelids are heavy. I don’t know how I’ll make it through the day. Hardly twenty minutes after I’d woken with steely resolve, I order a cup of Nescafe and a Spanish omelette. I’m a long way from salvation, I’ll be the first to admit, but even I’m disappointed by such a sorry showing. I’m sheepish again as I walk through the streets, the men following me with hungry, drowsy eyes, thinking pious thoughts and dreaming of Paradise.
