Literary Culture + Reverse Culture Shock

Friday, we got out of class at 12:30 and headed straight to the second annual Storymoja Hay Festival Nairobi (which, according to their website, brings "together writers, storytellers, environmentalists, poets, filmmakers, education, and health professionals together to share their ideas and stories) downtown in Uhuru Park.

In the park, there are always people sleeping all over the grass in the middle of the day. Some of them don't have jobs, some don't have homes, some are sleeping on their short break from work, but you can tell they're not planning on a short nap. This is four-stage, REM type sleep.

You can paddle boat at the park, but I'm not sure you'd want to, considering how dirty the water must be. I could smell it.

We find the festival on the abandoned fairgrounds which Lynsey, who's lived here seven years, has never seen in operation. Unfortunately, we walked to the wrong side where there was absolutely no entrance or way out, and were going to have to walk all the way back around, when we found a hole in the fence, so we ducked through there instead. We cut over and paid the 500 shilling day fee for the festival.
We mostly went to see Michaela Wrong, the author of "It's Our Turn To Eat." She spoke with Petina Gappah, a short story author from Zimbabwe, currently working on a musical.

Petina told a true story to illustrate the severity of Zimbabwe's inflation. A man once went to buy sausage, the price of which was 5 million. He walked to the till, and it rang up to cost 6 million. He asked the attendant, and she responded that the price had increased on his way to the till. She said you would go into a grocery store and be able to see all the rust under where the food usually is. The only items would be a pee-colored drink no one wanted, single-ply tissue paper, and some mysterious hardware goop. She once saw a man pull black market cheese from his underwear to sell in a laundromat.

She spoke about how she once overheard a 45 minute conversation about bread. I drew a connection between that and the constant conversation about money at all levels of society here. People always ask you how much things cost, about the car they have, they prize looking nice and, in the rare case that they have the money, wearing brank names. It's that when such a large portion of the society doesn't have it or didn't used to have it, people value it so highly that they become obsessed. It's like the obsessive control of eating leading to binge eating.

She talked about throwing fits in bookstores over the "ghettoization" of African Literature when it's placed next to the Travel Section.

Michaela Wrong writes about corruption, and other such controversial, whistleblowing topics. Her books have been denounced on National television, she's been denied Visas, etc. She is British, and says she and her family and her job might not have safe if she'd been a resident of one of the countries she's written about. In Kenya, very few booksellers sell her book for fear of retribution. One of the students in our group asked if she ever feels like a voyeur intruding on people's privacy or exploiting their tragedy. She responded that it can't because, "In some ways, being a journalist is being a professional voyeur. You can call it being a voyeur, or you can call it bearing witness."

We watched a documentary about The Goldenberg Scandal in which all levels of the Kenyan government was implicated in stealing 600 million US dollars, or 10 % of the countries GDP, by trading false gold with the national bank. It also talked about the all-too-common police killings and disappearances, and how often the public looks away when the police claim the victim was a thief, without said victim ever having stood trial.

An Indian restaurant we pass all the time and have wanted to go to had a booth set up. I got delicious vegetable paneer. Huge birds, similar to crows, circled overhead. They would swoop down to steal food from your plate if you neglected to sit under a tent. Little boys (possibly someone's children but they seemed completely unsupervised so it's more likely they snuck in) made a game of scouting out people's plates and using leftover food to throw into the air for the crows to catch midflight.

After the Hay Festival, we took a matatu out to The Village Market.  You pass through beautiful Karuru and Sigiri Forests to get there. It's a shock to see trees and flowers everywhere in such proximity to where there are none. The colonists purposely allotted themselves all the good, arable land. The other side of the city has terrible soil and can look like the Sahara. Many of the embassies are nestled into the beautiful forests. It's sickening to see those sprawling, pristine mansions. It's a twisted paradise.

We didn't really know what to expect from Village Market. We'd just been told to go there.
It's an outdoor shopping mall, with waterfalls, and mini-golf, and movies, and bowling, and waterslides. White high schoolers run around gossipping and eating gelato. We even saw frat-boy types, and a white boy wearing pyjamas. They're the children of diplomats and embassaries. We got really excited about how great a deal some purses were, for 2300 shillings. Turns out the purses were 23,000.

It's shocking and disturbing to be back somewhere like that in the midst of what we see on a daily basis. We discussed white guilt and whether it's healthy, over Irish Coffees, appreciating the irony.

We ate cheap and delicious Middle Eastern food.

Eventually, Dennis, my friend from whom I bought my laptop, arrived having just come from work. He works 12 hour days five days a week, one 8 hour day, and gets one day off. He has to sell hundreds of laptops a month.
He brought with him a guy who claimed to be his friend, but whom, in fact, he'd pretty much just met that night. Over the course of the night, we increasingly realized the extent of this guy's crazy. He'd probably been drinking before he arrived. He was Tanzanian, but grew up in Silver Spring, MD, where he apparently spent 4 months in jail for some DUI/DWI related offenses. He claimed he was in Silver Spring because his mother was working at Oxford... or Cambridge. He never stopped talking about himself, and the money he has, and complaining that he has no friends because they all want something from him. He repeatedly told us the tragic story of his ex-fiance, whose name he had tattooed on his neck, and the car accident he'd gotten in either yesterday, two days ago, or years ago, depending on the rendition. He also showed us pictures of his son. He once claimed his ex hid him from him because she was worried the child would love him more, then claimed she hid him because she'd been told she couldn't have a child and was, therefore, overprotective of him. Neither of these stories sounded legitimate. He also cried when we asked him how his day was, saying no one had ever cared enough to ask him before... but he might have been faking it.

We listened to a jazz quartet, who performed jazz versions of Bob Marley and a halftime "Isn't She Lovely." Unfortunately, the crazy guy took the fact that we didn't want him to sing with the jazz players to mean that we thought he couldn't sing, and proceeded to attempt to prove us otherwise. Maria went up while he was talking to the bass player, midsong, and made him sit down.

We left shortly after with Dennis to escape Mr. Crazy. Unfortunately, our cab repeatedly broke down. The driver would nurse it back to health, then it would break down again. It was dark and somewhat scary, but the doors were locked. Eventually, he called another cab, and we sat and waited. We sang along to "No Woman, No Cry" with the cab driver (it's always good to make friends with drivers here, because it's safer to call and catch a ride with someone you know... though, one driver friend of our group was clearly drunk when he drove some of the girls around, so I don't think any of us will be calling him again.)