Kenyatta was re-elected president in 1966 and the next year changed the constitution to gain extended powers. He was re-elected, in 1974, in one-party elections in which he was the sole presidential candidate. He was Kenya’s prime minister for a year and president for 14 years. He died in office (Kenya’s largest landowner at the time), and was succeeded by Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi, who was president for 24 years, until he was defeated in 2002 by Mwai Kibaki.
Mzee is credited with the Kenyan policy of harambee – ‘pulling together’ in Swahili – which encourages communities to work together as part of building a new nation.
Exiting Tanzania at the Horohoro border post was a really slow process. All our luggage had to be removed from the bus and each person had to claim his or her bags and take them to the customs office. Thank goodness, the offloading of bags was halted when it started to rain. Those passengers whose bags had not yet been checked were presumed innocent, myself among them.
It was a short drive to Lunga Lunga, the Kenyan border post. After checking my passport, the Kenyan immigration officer there said, ‘Oh, Bafana Bafana.’
I politely replied, ‘Yes.’
Again it worked, and he stamped me in. I understood then that our national soccer team was a big brand name in the rest of Africa.
Besides a few incutras, there was hardly anyone at the border and, as a result, no new passengers joined us. We got back on the bus relieved, although a little damp, and continued on our journey to Mombasa. The man, who had been sitting next to me in the bus all the way from Dar, must have eaten Malawian beans during the break for it was not long before he started to fart. And he did not stop. There was no smell, thank goodness, but the loud, very loud, noises were unmistakable. The inflated man didn’t seem to care, though.
I have always heard that yawning is contagious. What I didn’t know was just how contagious farting is. Before I knew it I had a sudden but very urgent need to expel some wind myself. I am sure all of us have found ourselves in a situation where the more you try to suppress wind, the more pressure it creates in the bowel. My bowel could take only so much pressure but, as a gentleman, I could not fart out loud. So, after slightly shifting and lifting my left cheek while faking an endless cough, I let out one of those quiet but very long and great reliever-farts. I felt like saying ‘Aaaaahh ...’
A few seconds later, smelling strongly skunk, I realised that it had not been a good idea to cough so much. But it was too late.
The fart seemed to have been an ice-breaker. Soon thereafter my neighbour and I started chatting about women, food and politics. He remarked that so many Tanzanians were forced to move to Dar es Salaam and other big cities because of the failure of the socialist-inspired agricultural system where ordinary farmers had no choice but to comply with government directives.
The vegetation on the Kenyan side of the border was exactly the same as in Tanzania: palm trees, banana trees, long green grass and evergreen bush. I was surprised to see such lush greenery because I’d read that only about 20 per cent of land in Kenya is considered suitable for agriculture; most of the land, especially in the northern part of the country, is semi-arid. Only the coastal belt, through which we were travelling, received sufficient rainfall for agricultural purposes – 1 000 millimetres more per year than the rest of the country.
It took us just short of two hours to cover the 100 kilometres or less from Lunga Lunga to Mombasa, Kenya’s second largest city. Although it is near the coast, Lunga Lunga is a very isolated place in the middle of nowhere. Nevertheless, we went through four roadblocks en route to Mombasa. When travelling on this wonderful continent called Africa there is one thing you can be assured of – roadblocks. On our journey, soldiers would stop the bus and talk to the driver for a few seconds before allowing us to go through. I wondered, in Kenya and in other countries too, what the point of the roadblocks was. I never discovered what they were looking for. Whereas roadblocks in northern Malawi consisted of two drums and a wooden beam, in Kenya a spike chain was stretched across the road. Because it was after sunset a lamp was added.
I did not know that the city of Mombasa is built on a 15 square-kilometre island (Mombasa Island), which is separated from the mainland by two ‘creeks’ – narrow channels of water. From the south, the direction from which we arrived, people and cars cross over to the island on the Likoni ferry. It was already dark when our bus, together with a few cars and some pedestrians, was ferried across to the city. I booked into a cheap motel recommended by the cab driver in a suburb called Kibokoni.
Whatever I had expected of Mombasa, it was a surprise to see how deserted the streets were, considering that it was not even three hours after sunset. At the bus station a few cab drivers were waiting for business, otherwise all was quiet. Even on our way to the motel we encountered only a few cars on the road. The streets were lined with mostly old and not very tall buildings, some modern office blocks, providing variety. Mombasa reminded me of Mgungundlovu (Pietermaritzburg) back home, an historical and now important administrative city with little nightlife.
As he dropped me off, the cab driver remarked, ‘If you want to have a great time, that small white building down the road has beautiful girls who can de-stress you.’
‘Thanks for the tip,’ I said as I took my backpack. I held back from asking him, Do I look stressed to you?
The non-descript hotel had five floors and long zigzagging grey corridors. Inside, suddenly there was life. While checking in at reception, I could see through an open door that people had hung their washing on a line in the adjacent courtyard. Considering the number of people hanging around in the reception area and the kids under the age of three running freely up and down in the corridors making a noise, it felt and looked more like a block of flats than a regular hotel.
My room on the fourth floor, which I reached by a flight of stairs, offered a single bed, a small table with a red plastic chair and a shower with cold water. For the time being, it was enough.
The next morning I made my way to one of Mombasa’s landmarks – the strange star-shaped fortification known as Fort Jesus, built in the 16th century by those stalwarts of Christianity, the Portuguese, to secure their dominance over the trade route to the East. After years of fighting, it was captured by the Arabs in 1698, hence the local name for Mombasa, Kisiwa Cha Mvita, which means ‘island of war’ in Swahili.
The main reason for the battles between the Arabs and the Portuguese and, later on, between the British and the Arabs was economic. Mombasa, with its natural harbour, was and still is ideally situated for purposes of trade along the East African coast. Although Malindi offers port facilities further north, Mombasa remains the major trade centre in the eastern and central African region. Fort Jesus sits at the mouth of the harbour and, therefore, whoever controlled the fort controlled the port and Mombasa Island. And whoever controlled the port controlled the economy.
Fort Jesus has seen it all: starvation, murder, battles, siege … The fort was built with such thick and high walls that it was impossible to get either in or out by climbing over them. From the entrance there are steep stairs that lead into the courtyard where cannons are still mounted, ready for action. While Kenya was under British rule, Fort Jesus was used, for over 60 years, as a prison, where criminals were incarcerated for a variety of offences. Today, along with the museum located inside it, it is the main tourist attraction in Mombasa.
What I didn’t know, excuse my ignorance, is that Swahili, too, developed for economic reasons. Naturally, the Arabs and their African trading partners could not communicate at first, so over time a lingua franca evolved through absorption of many Arab words into the original Bantu language (meaning a language that indicates ‘person’ with -ntu) of the coast. The word Swahili comes from the Arabic sahel – ‘bounda ry’ or ‘coast’. With the addition of ki- (‘language’), it becomes ‘coastal language’ – Kiswahili.
Kiswahili is still the most commonly spoken language, not just in Tanzania, Kenya and U
ganda (where it is an official language) but also in Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Somalia, the Comoros Islands and Mozambique (where it has become the second language of millions of people). I simply have to learn to speak it. As the most widely spoken language of sub-Saharan Africa, it is now the only African language used as an official working language by the African Union.
In Mombasa it struck me, for the second time, that the history I was taught at school did not reflect the role that the Arabs had played on the African continent. I had been brought up to believe that the British and other Europeans colonised Africa, but what I learned in Zanzibar and Mombasa was that Africa had lost its virginity to the Arabs centuries before Europeans even began lusting after our continent. By the time Europeans got to East Africa, Arabs had fully established trade routes and were transporting not only Africa’s natural resources but human cargo as well. In the Fort Jesus Museum these facts are graphically illustrated with artifacts and short descriptions.
Having immersed myself in the history of the place, I went next to Mombasa’s Old Town. It is not as old and big as Zanzibar’s but has the same kind of carved wooden doors and small alleys. Unlike Zanzibar’s Old Town, Mombasa’s does not have a lot of traffic.
While I was walking around, I was twice approached by men who shook my hand and, after a small chat, said, ‘Karibu’. I had thought they would try to sell me something but, to my surprise, they just greeted me and went on their way. The third one even said, ‘Feel at home, my brother.’ I am still not sure how they knew that I was not Kenyan.
That, amongst other things, is what makes us Africans African: the desire to make a stranger feel at home. It’s a great pity Europeans and Arabs took advantage of our natural hospitality and exploited it with such dire consequences.
I must have wandered around the Old Town for about an hour, getting lost twice. Some things just never change. I consoled myself with the thought that not having a sense of direction was a weakness I had to live with. How else could you explain that I had left my job to do this trip? I’m fortunate that my fiancée, although she does not always understand my directionlessness, never tries to put me on the straight and narrow. In fact, she sometimes even joins me in my incomprehensible pursuits. For example, when I started parachuting, she did not want to know about it, but in January 2005 I bought her a tandem-skydiving ticket as a birthday present. It was at 10 000 feet above Umdloti (north of Durban), just before leaping out of the plane – while attached to the tandem master – that I proposed to her. Obviously, she said yes. Who would not like to get married to an adventurous and handsome guy like me?
In the afternoon, I discarded the idea of going to Mombasa’s northern beaches and, instead, went for a walk in the city centre, mainly along Moi and Nkrumah roads.
Although the relaxed Swahili culture of Mombasa was much to my taste, I had to take a bus to Kenya’s capital city, Nairobi, the following morning. Like Dar, Mombasa was proving to be hot and humid and, sitting at the bus stop, I was sweating as if I were in a sauna. Everyone else also seemed to be sweating and at that moment I had another brilliant commercial idea, Business Idea Three: sell handkerchiefs in Mombasa. Later I noticed that my idea had been stolen – there were quite a few hawkers selling handkerchiefs. I had to conclude it was a non-starter.
The Scandinavian Express bus to Nairobi had ultra comfortable seats and seatbelts throughout, so I sat back and relaxed. Soon the air-conditioning had cooled the whole cabin and they were handing out biscuits, 350-ml cans of soft drinks and 500-ml bottles of water. Although the road was initially very rough, owing to roadworks, it improved within an hour and before I knew it we were cruising on a highway.
The further we travelled from the coast the more the vegetation changed, from tall palms to short trees and shrubs. The traffic stayed the same – mostly big trucks carrying cargo, which underlined the strategic importance of Mombasa and its shipping facilities for the rest of the country.
Our itinerary included dropping off passengers at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, the busiest airport in central and eastern Africa, about 20 kilometres from Nairobi. Approaching the airport I remembered that a few days earlier Leonie (remember her, that good-fornothing, useless Dutch gal with messed-up morals I met in Dar?) must have boarded the plane back to her man in Amsterdam at that very place. I put the thought out of my mind.
As we dropped off the passengers near the domestic terminal, I could see – in the distance among the airplanes parked in the international area – a plane that belonged to SAA. The sight of the tail painted in the colours of the South African flag instantly made me homesick. The thought of jumping off the bus and flying back to Johannesburg crossed my mind but I suppressed such a stupid idea. It was like when you are out running and you suddenly see people having a braai. The thought of stopping and joining them shoots into your head and you start asking yourself, especially when you are tired, questions such as: Why do I have to do a difficult thing when there are easy things to do? That was exactly what I was thinking as the bus drove out of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
Apart from the airport distraction, the seven-hour trip from Mombasa was uneventful and, suddenly, we were in the urban environment of Nairobi. Although I am not a city person at heart, it felt good to be in the big city again, among skyscrapers, traffic, crowds of people. As we got to the city centre it was becoming dark and the traffic was bumper to bumper. It looked as if urbanisation was happening at a faster pace in Nairobi than the authorities had anticipated.
Nairobi – from the Masai ewaso nairobi or ‘stream of cold water’ – started off in 1899 as a railway camp, called Mile 327, on the 1 400-kilometre line built by the British (not Rhodes), using Indian labour, between Mombasa and Kampala in Uganda. The compound soon grew into a town. By 1907 it had become so well established that it was made the capital of British East Africa, the newly-formed federation of Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda. A hundred years later, Nairobi is one of Africa’s major cities.
Being in ‘Nairobbery’, as it is sometimes referred to because of the prevalence of crime, aroused mixed feelings in me. I was happy that I had reached the unofficial halfway point of my Cape to Cairo trip unscathed. At the same time, I was filled with vague feelings of anxiety. I knew that the second half would be more difficult and probably also more dangerous.
From the bus station I took a cab to a Nairobi backpackers on the outskirts of the city, the address of which I had found in a guidebook. It felt wonderful to be in a good dormitory in a properly run establishment. What I like about backpackers is that they are informal, the surroundings casual, the patrons unpretentious, without issues and always willing to give advice and supply recommendations. As usual, most of the patrons were from the US and UK, each and every one of them besotted with Africa and either heading to or from Lamu, an archipelago of low-lying desert islands that seems to epitomise Swahili culture. I looked at the map and saw that Lamu was quite near the Somalian border and too far from the track I was beating for me to contemplate a visit.
The next morning I set off for the Ethiopian embassy, which was only a 15-minute walk from my backpackers. By the time I arrived there were five people waiting in the queue. Getting an Ethiopian visa looked like a straightforward process: fill in a simple form, attach your photo and hand it to the attractive lady at the counter, together with the required amount of money.
All five people in front of me did exactly that. When I got to the counter, the officer looked at my form and, instead of asking for payment as she had done with other applicants, picked up the phone. After a conversation in a language I couldn’t understand, she put the phone down and said, ‘Take a seat.’
I tried to pretend that I was not stressing but, deep down, I really was. Five minutes later another lady came to reception to call me. I followed her as she led me to the last office at the end of the passage. The sign on the door said Head of Consulate. That sign almost made me wet my pants.
In my visa application I had lie
d about two things. Firstly, I felt I could not say that I was unemployed. So I had put down the name of my fiancée’s employer. Secondly, and not as serious, I had lied about the hotel where I was going to stay in Addis Ababa. On the form I had given the name of a five-star hotel. I thought the embassy might have phoned either my ‘employer’ to confirm my employment or, possibly, the hotel to confirm my booking.
As I knocked on the door of the Head of Consulate I knew that I had been caught out, one way or another, for supplying false information. So I made up my mind: if they declined to issue me an Ethiopian visa I would go to Uganda instead and bungee jump at Jinja before heading back to South Africa by public transport.
There were two well-dressed gentlemen in the huge office, one sitting behind an L-shaped desk and the other on a three-seater couch. I decided to sit down on the three-seater. As I sat down I realised that I had not been invited to sit. I stood up. A split second later I thought, what the heck, I have already sat down. So I sat down again. All of this – sitting down, getting up and sitting down again – happened in quick succession before either of the two gentlemen had said anything to me.
Then the Head of Consulate – I assumed it was he because he was seated behind the desk – said to me, ‘Hi, Khumalo. So are you Zulu?’
With my plaited hair I never expected anyone to mistake me for a Zulu, but I had to admit that I was indeed umZulu (a Zulu).
Dark Continent my Black Arse Page 12