It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

  Some would call this the opening of the mind that comes with a liberal education and an international upbringing, others would label it deracination, pure and simple. Forget too thoroughly, and you lose your anchor. ‘Find out what language the Githongo family speaks at home,’ a Kenyan political analyst told me, a touch sardonically, when I explained my book project. ‘I’ll bet you anything it’s English.’ In Kenya, language holds the key to identity, with the mastery of each language–first indigenous, then Kiswahili, then English–signalling a growing sophistication and an increasing distance from traditional ways. The answer to the question in the Githongo case, as it happens, is that family members speak a mixture of Gikuyu and English amongst themselves, adroitly manoeuvring their course through the various cultures that have shaped them.

  Kenyan newspaper columnist Wycliffe Muga, a cheerful provocateur, sees John as an African so disconnected from his roots as to fall into the ‘coconut’ category–brown on the outside, white on the inside. ‘The people John really wanted to impress were not the House of Mumbi, but the House of Windsor,’ he chuckles. ‘His loyalty to Western values–things like a belief in the importance of rules, transparency, honesty and accountability–was greater than his loyalty to the tribe. What the Mount Kenya Mafia didn’t understand was that John wasn’t a Kikuyu at all. He was a mzungu.’

  To his recruiters, John represented a near-miraculous combination of skills and experience. But the forces shaping him were hardly calculated to produce the perfect presidential aide. They were calculated to produce the perfect whistleblower.

  9

  The Making of the Sheng Generation

  ‘Whether Luo or Kikuyu, our children will not act the way we do.’

  EVA GAITHA, director of a Nairobi coffin accessory company

  Not only had John’s talent-spotters misread their man. They had failed to register, in the complacent, careless way of the privileged, profound social and historical changes taking place around them, tendencies fuelling a national sense of exasperation with the old ways of doing things.

  Langata Cemetery, which lies on the road linking the suburb of Langata with central Nairobi, is not the quietest of final resting places. Just across the busy road bordering its grounds is Wilson airport, the capital’s second air terminal. It is a gathering place for traders sending bundles of the narcotic khat, grown on the chilly hillsides around Mount Kenya, driven to Nairobi at breakneck speed to retain maximum freshness, and dispatched to twitchy customers in Somalia, Djibouti and Ethiopia. Returning khat flights drone constantly overhead, so close that graveside mourners get an intimate view of the aircraft’s undercarriage and landing gear, fully extended prior to impact.

  The cemetery is in constant, heavy use. With up to twenty-five funerals scheduled on an average day, three to four ceremonies are being staged simultaneously in different parts of the grounds at any one time. Styles and trappings vary, for there is no equality in death. Ceremonies in the ‘permanent’ side of the cemetery attract convoys of new cars, gleaming black hearses, and grieving relatives shelter from the sun under spotless white gazebos. Funerals in the ‘temporary’ section, where the soil is turned over and used afresh every fifty years, kick off with the arrival of a careering, inappropriately gaudy matatu, hired for the day by a fundraising committee, mourners crammed inside, coffin lashed onto the roof rack, with only the occasional tree offering shade. But both sides of the cemetery have one thing in common–an awareness of being on an industrial conveyor belt of death, whose brisk momentum is perhaps a little undignified but at least leaves mercifully little time to wallow in grief. ‘It’s very speedy, all over in about an hour,’ says an undertaker. ‘It’s like a cocktail party. Everyone is standing, you’re all uncomfortable, but it’s over fast. That’s why people like Langata.’

  Demand is so heavy that the cemetery is running out of space. In the ‘permanent’ section, where members of the middle and upper classes end up below engraved marble stones, enclosed for all eternity in miniature villas with gravel lawns and iron gates, the grassy paths are being nibbled away by new burial plots. In the perfunctorily signposted ‘temporary’ area, used for the short of cash and for small children, new arrivals are being squeezed into spaces between existing graves, whose boundaries are discernible only to the cemetery officials and sweating diggers.

  Once, burying a loved one in Nairobi was regarded as a near abomination by all but the colonials and Kenyan Asians, so rare that two French researchers described the city–inaccurately–as ‘a capital without cemeteries’ in a dissertation. Relatives paid for the dearly departed to be transported upcountry, back to the shamba they regarded as their true home. Only the destitute, nameless and friendless ended up in the capital’s cemeteries. Now, demand so far outstrips supply that the price of plots in Langata has quadrupled in five years. Undertakers shrug their shoulders and predict that the overcrowded cemetery cannot last much longer–‘In two years’ time this place will be full,’ mutters one–forcing the city authorities either to find a site for a new cemetery or to authorise the construction of private crematoria. And just as the former scarcity of local cemeteries once reflected the fact that the Kenyan nation was no more than an uneasy conglomeration of tribal statelets, the increasing tendency to bury the dead in the city marks a change in Kenyan society’s sense of itself.

  ‘The old folk always go upcountry,’ says Benjamin Kibiku, director of Montezuma and Mona Lisa Funeral Services, the first indigenous funeral business to open in Kenya. ‘With them, there is that feeling, “I have to be invested in the land of my ancestors.”’ Seeking a name that would be ethnically indeterminate, Kibiku baptised his company after a boyhood nickname and in tribute to his wife, ‘because she’s as beautiful as that portrait’.

  Montezuma and Mona Lisa’s motto–‘Service to the World’–is emblazoned on the wall of Kibiku’s office, and he relishes the phrase ‘one-stop shop’ when describing what the company offers: coffin with satin trimmings, hearse, mourners’ transport, gazebo, coffin-lowering apparatus–everything but the plot of land is included in the price. With quiet satisfaction, he shows off the forty-seat coaches, painted with the Montezuma logo, used to take city mourners back to their villages. ‘I was the first person to come up with this prototype. It’s specific to Kenya.’ Just behind the back wheels, each bus boasts an idiosyncratic feature: an empty compartment with a neat glass port-hole, for stowing and easy viewing of the coffin during the bumpy, hazardous trip home. No one wants a coffin falling out in transit.

  Montezuma’s coaches are permanently booked, Kibiku says, yet he’s noticed the beginnings of a generational divide. ‘Young families feel that they met in Nairobi, they married in Nairobi, they have no interest in upcountry. So when members die, they are buried in Nairobi.’

  The change is at its most obvious amongst the adaptable Kikuyu, least evident in residents from tradition-bound Western Province. Population pressure in Central Province means families are anxious not to waste farming land. A body on the premises not only gets in the way of planting, it makes land difficult to lease or sell. There’s also a question of cost, with an upcountry funeral setting a Nairobi-based family back up to 180,000 shillings, more than many can afford. But underlying all those considerations, Kibiku acknowledges, rests his customers’ subtly shifting concept of what counts as home. ‘An attitude change is under way.’

  That shift seems inevitable when one looks at the figures. Like other African nations, Kenya is experiencing vertiginous urbanisation, as shifting climate patterns, the subdivision of plots, soil degradation and mechanised farming push those who will never inherit land and are no longer needed to work it towards the city. In 1962, one in twelve Kenyans lived in urban centres; by 1999 the figure was one in three, with half the population expected to be city-based by 2015. ‘Whenever I go upcountry I’m always amazed at how empty it is,’ says a Kenyan journalist born in Luoland. ‘Only drunks, idiots and the old, only failures, stay behind in the rural area
s.’

  Originally designed for just 200,000 inhabitants, Nairobi now holds 4–4.5 million. It has more than doubled in size in the past five years, giving it one of the highest growth rates of any African city. That growth consists almost entirely of the poor, whose shacks have filled what were the green spaces in a network of loosely connected satellite settlements. Nearly two out of three of the capital’s inhabitants occupy the two hundred resulting slums, a steady source of income for City Council officials, too busy levelling fantasy ‘taxes’ on the unauthorised dwellings to want to alter the status quo. Among the most squalid the continent has to offer, these settlements nuzzle against well-heeled residential areas in provocative intimacy. ‘What’s striking about Nairobi is that each wealthy neighbourhood lies cheek by jowl with a slum,’ remarks former MP Paul Muite. ‘It’s almost like a twinning arrangement. Poverty and wealth stare each other in the face. And that’s simply untenable. Those slum-dwellers know what they’re missing, they’re educated now. I tell my wife: “There’s no way, long term, those guys are going to accept to die of hunger when the smell of your chapattis is wafting over the wall.”’

  The biggest slum is Kibera, virtually an obligatory stop these days on visiting VIPs’ itineraries. Kibera, bizarrely, lies within a tee shot’s distance of Nairobi’s golf club. Aerial photographs show the neat green medallion that is the club abutting what looks like a brown sea of broken matchsticks, in fact the corrugated-iron mabati roofs of between 800,000 and 1.2 million residents, prompting the immediate mental query: ‘Why don’t they just invade?’ Kibera is where the phrase ‘flying toilets’ was added to the English language, a description of the method used to dispose of faeces–dump it in a plastic bag and throw it out of the window–by residents who couldn’t be bothered walking to the public latrine. Yet while the slum does not boast regular electricity, tarred roads or clean water, it offers hope of a different kind. If your children miraculously survive to the age of five in Kibera, they will go on to receive a far better education than their rural equivalents, and in that education lie untold possibilities.

  By the late 1990s, many analysts were confidently predicting that population trends alone would accomplish what Kenya’s presidents had failed to achieve with their national anthems, independence days and flag salutes: a true sense of nationhood. Nairobi’s first slums were mono-ethnic, the result of colonial attempts to corral Africans into distinct, controllable areas during the Emergency years. The newer ones started out that way, but the phenomenon didn’t last long. Often dubbed a Luo settlement, Kibera itself actually contains forty-two separate tribes, ‘all doing their jig together’, as an official from the UN’s Habitat told me. Ethnicity blurred in playgrounds, schools, universities and offices. ‘When people first arrive in Kibera, they initially go to where their people are and look for work. They arrive with nothing, so to cut costs they sleep six to a room. The longer they live together, the more they fuse. They are forced to share meals, they share mandazi [doughnuts]. They mix at school, at political rallies, at prayer. The old people are the problem. But the kids don’t know whether they are Kikuyu, Luo or Kalenjin, whether they are from Tanzania, Uganda or Kenya.’

  Even in the space of the dozen years I reported on Kenya, it was possible to log a fundamental shift in the way Nairobi’s residents viewed themselves. When I first arrived, the easiest way to discover someone’s ethnicity was to ask where they came from. Nobody ever said ‘Nairobi’. Even those born and brought up in the capital felt they were essentially from somewhere else. Historically a mere junction between Kikuyuland, Maasailand and Ukambani, Nairobi just happened to be the place you received an education, held down a job or brought up a family. It remained a form of no man’s land, an accidental city, commanding little pride, strictly temporary. By the end of the Moi era, the reaction to that same question was different, and as often as not came with a defiant stiffening of the spine. ‘Where am I from? I’m from Nairobi,’ a student would say, or: ‘Look, I consider myself a Kenyan.’

  Kenya’s demography makes radical change inevitable. A staggering 70 per cent of the population is below the age of thirty. That statistic, shared with many African nations, is as hopeful as it is terrifying. And the fact that those youngsters do not think in the same way as their parents is highlighted by the fact that they no longer speak the same language. English and Kiswahili might be Kenya’s official languages, but pupils tumbling out of school and students in the university canteens chatter to each other in Sheng, to their teachers’ despair. A witty, cheeky, freewheeling Clockwork Orange-style brew of Kiswahili, English and indigenous Kenyan languages, with added dollops of reggae jargon, American slang, French and Spanish, Sheng originated in Nairobi’s Eastlands slums in the 1980s. Adopted by matatu touts and rap artists, it radiated along the taxi and bus routes, spilling over into Tanzania and Uganda, moving from one urban centre to another. So popular has it become that sending an email or text in Kiswahili or English rather than Sheng is considered disastrously uncool by anyone below the age of twenty. Infiltrating radio stations, it has forced its way into national newspapers and spread its tentacles across the internet. Kenyan publishers promise future books in Sheng, it features large in advertising slogans–why, it even crept into Kibaki’s speeches.

  This rogue language’s popularity is something of a contradiction: Sheng was originally invented to exclude the puritanical parents and ball-breaking teachers who threatened to prevent a younger generation having a good time. Kenyan youths wanted to be able to discuss their sexual adventures, hangovers and boozy nights in their elders’ presence without the latter cottoning on. A language in a hurry, it did away with the grammar and spellings slowing Kiswahili and English down, and had the same ingredients of topical humour and impish wordplay as France’s Verlan or London’s Cockney rhyming slang. Breasts are ‘dashboad’–from the English ‘dashboard’; protruding buttocks are baptised ‘to be continued’, a Casanova is a ‘lovito’. One of the many words for party is ‘hepi’ (‘happy’); a cigarette is a ‘fegi’ (from the English ‘fag’); a friend a ‘beste’, and the term ‘jigijigi’–sex–needs little explanation.

  Constantly inventing new terms was part of the game, allowing the speaker to show off his ability to dip into five or six languages without pausing for breath. As a result, a web-based Sheng–English dictionary, still being compiled, gives at least thirteen alternatives for ‘girl’–including ‘chic’ (Spanish/American), ‘chipipi’ (Luhya) and ‘mdem’ (French)–seven for ‘money’, and five each for ‘house’ and ‘school’. Sheng spoken in Nairobi’s Dandora slum differs from that spoken in the city’s Eastlands area, and because the language is always on the move, shifting like a Chinese whisper from mouth to mouth, it dates fast. On their return home, Kenyans in the diaspora find the Sheng used in their blogs no longer matches the Sheng spoken by childhood friends. Incomprehensible not only to parents but even more so to staid grandparents back in ‘shags’, ‘deep Sheng’ is a barrier behind which the new generation can hide its secrets.

  Traditionalists shake their heads, seeing the threat of dissolution. ‘Let Sheng be left to matatu touts, drug pushers, hopeless hip-hop musicians and school dropouts,’ argued a columnist in the Standard, slamming it as ‘linguistic jingoism’. But the dialect probably represents exactly the opposite, a force for national unity. Supporters point out that whereas Kiswahili and English were brought to Kenya by Arab traders and English settlers, Sheng was an indigenous invention. ‘At last, here is something truly ours for once, which unites us, and which we haven’t inherited,’ wrote a defender. As a language of the poor embraced by children of the elite, as anxious to sound trendy on the playing fields of their private schools as any slum urchin, it is a class leveller. Writer Binyavanga Wainana sees Sheng as the expression of a youth revolution which militates against the sharp tug at the ethnic heart-strings many Nairobi residents experience with the onset of maturity. ‘As you get older, entering into marriage and having children seems to
tribalise you. All those ceremonies, marriage arrangements, land issues; those decisions about which language to bring your children up in and which school to attend; they activate something in people they didn’t know they had.

  ‘Sheng has given us all a safe language to speak. There’s a kind of hopefulness to it, a feeling of establishing a sensibility which encompasses tribe, is working-class, inward-looking, philosophical.’ Perhaps, on a continent in which identity and language are so interlinked, in which almost every African seems to have mastered four or five languages; and with each language, four or five different ways of interacting with others, only Sheng, with its rich, shifting mix of associations, can express the kaleidoscopic entity that is the modern Kenyan.

  If the Sheng generation is more streetwise, technologically savvy and sexually knowing than its elders, it also has a radically different awareness of its rightful place in the world. As the Kenyan middle class expanded, so did the numbers of youngsters sent abroad to complete their training. Parents dispatched their offspring hoping they would learn how the world worked and win the keys to Western-style prosperity. But those who return–and a disconcertingly high proportion choose not to–look at their continent and their kith and kin with the pitiless, unforgiving eyes of the youthful idealist. They have done the maths, they understand economics and have read the newspapers. They are all too aware of how much better things work elsewhere, painfully conscious of the extent to which, in foreigners’ minds, Africa is logged in the ‘basket case’ category. And for that they blame the very people who paid for their eye-opening educations.