August 26, 2004
overlooking kenyatta: mission and moving on
“at the foot of the Ngong hills…” (Blixen, K.), Well, almost at the foot of the Ngong hills, anyways - I was cheated. It was in Nairobi Kenya, actually in 1989. On a week long debrief (waiting for the KLM flt. out of Jomo Kenayta Airport), I took some advice and 600 Am bucks to town with me. I went to the open Bazaar between Moktar Dada street and Kenyatta Avenue. I bought Ebony Makonde carvings and Batiques in African themes, glassware and brassware, a cane sword, some discrete daggers in discrete shafts, Ebony and hammered land-rover-spring-bladed, traditional Masai axes, and clay heads in the form of a Masai man and woman – gifts for all my brothers, cousins and all my new sister-in-laws, cousin-in-laws and mom and dad.
In the two-year span of prime life it took to spend in Africa, there were many new faces to buy for. I spent about 200 bucks Am. Then I had a burger loaded and “chips” for lunch at wimpy’s on the second floor of an office building the window of which overlookcd Kenyatta ave. An alluring young Kenyan lady sat beside me for lunch a minute later. I looked alternatively out the window at my burger, taking bytes of it, and nervously out of the corner of my Baptist up-brought eye, at her not so subtly positioned in my direction, bare legs.
I was fresh out of eighteen months of conservative village-living in Dodoma. Eye-batting with her and her bare legs through lunch, I managed a nervous smile, at the most two, between bytes of wimpy meat-n-bun. She then suddenly smiled extremely sweetly and propositioned to spend the afternoon with me and some of my money. Well, I never.... At the same moment I came to a new self knowledge. I understood what it meant to be a white man of 22 in downtown Nairobi eating lunch at an innocent wimpy’s with an alluring young Kenyan lady choosing eat lunch, like, right there, beside ME, dorky, glasses-faced, an in-love-with-only-airplanes-since-1967-kind-of-guy, with a mission from God to fulfil, and with just barely enough of inkling of the consequence of choosing to spend the kind of time and money she was hoping for.
So yeah, I excused myself, saying: “Ha! I have an excuse! I’ve a mission from God to fulfil, madam, otherwise I’d very likely be impossible for you to stop once you've invited me to have fully-clothed, unprotected sex with you right here in this over-crowded fast-food restaurant.” Wait a minute; I didn’t say that at all. I only fantasized about saying that along with fantasizing about the not so subtle positioning of the bare legs of the alluring young Kenyan lady and her so sweet smile, as I was chokin’ the chicken before I went to sleep that very night, to relieve the tremendous stress of having a mission from God to fulfil, and of course, also, out of a simple, wilful, harmless submission once again to a rather unassuming male habit that 95% percent of us men engage in before we discover a more fitting place for peter.
I didn't go blind and, funnily enough, it wasn't the alluring young Kenyan lady who cheated me. It was a Blackman on Kenyatta Ave, after lunch (and my excuse to the alluring young Kenyan lady), calling out to me from behind after I passed him on the street, asking me why I didn’t greet a black man on the street. “Are you a Dutch, from South Africa?” Eh? I had to turn and see who would dare hint that I had a trace of racism in me. Come on, I grew up in Cameroon. I stayed in Tanzania’s capital village, Dodoma for eighteen months, not only greeting but learning from, working alongside, living with, and eating with them every day.
Me, not greeting a black man? How dare you suggest I am racist! So I turned greeted the black man and he engaged me in pleasant conversation regarding my knowledge of the ANC and Nelson Mandela’s plight – buddy was still in apartheid’s klanger back then - and because I was touched by his fib and sympathetic to Mandela’s plight, the black man on Kenyatta managed to wangle 10 Kenyan shillings out of me. He wangled too, an address in Canada where he could reach me to pay me back.
He was a member of a small band of Nairobi based con-Robbers whose buddies accosted me after about twenty more minutes of shopping, posing as Kenya secret police asking why I was helping a member of the ANC. They accused me of giving information and money to an ANC agent in South Africa. It worked. They had me believing they were secret police – all the ID’s were pretty authentic looking - and that my only way out of this was to pay a sizable bribe. I handed over my 400 bucks in the middle of the day, in a small crowded cafeteria of people having chai, on Kenyatta Avenue. They got me. I was cheated by them. In vain, I reported it to the Nairobi police.
In the two-year span of prime life it took to spend in Africa, there were many new faces to buy for. I spent about 200 bucks Am. Then I had a burger loaded and “chips” for lunch at wimpy’s on the second floor of an office building the window of which overlookcd Kenyatta ave. An alluring young Kenyan lady sat beside me for lunch a minute later. I looked alternatively out the window at my burger, taking bytes of it, and nervously out of the corner of my Baptist up-brought eye, at her not so subtly positioned in my direction, bare legs.
I was fresh out of eighteen months of conservative village-living in Dodoma. Eye-batting with her and her bare legs through lunch, I managed a nervous smile, at the most two, between bytes of wimpy meat-n-bun. She then suddenly smiled extremely sweetly and propositioned to spend the afternoon with me and some of my money. Well, I never.... At the same moment I came to a new self knowledge. I understood what it meant to be a white man of 22 in downtown Nairobi eating lunch at an innocent wimpy’s with an alluring young Kenyan lady choosing eat lunch, like, right there, beside ME, dorky, glasses-faced, an in-love-with-only-airplanes-since-1967-kind-of-guy, with a mission from God to fulfil, and with just barely enough of inkling of the consequence of choosing to spend the kind of time and money she was hoping for.
So yeah, I excused myself, saying: “Ha! I have an excuse! I’ve a mission from God to fulfil, madam, otherwise I’d very likely be impossible for you to stop once you've invited me to have fully-clothed, unprotected sex with you right here in this over-crowded fast-food restaurant.” Wait a minute; I didn’t say that at all. I only fantasized about saying that along with fantasizing about the not so subtle positioning of the bare legs of the alluring young Kenyan lady and her so sweet smile, as I was chokin’ the chicken before I went to sleep that very night, to relieve the tremendous stress of having a mission from God to fulfil, and of course, also, out of a simple, wilful, harmless submission once again to a rather unassuming male habit that 95% percent of us men engage in before we discover a more fitting place for peter.
I didn't go blind and, funnily enough, it wasn't the alluring young Kenyan lady who cheated me. It was a Blackman on Kenyatta Ave, after lunch (and my excuse to the alluring young Kenyan lady), calling out to me from behind after I passed him on the street, asking me why I didn’t greet a black man on the street. “Are you a Dutch, from South Africa?” Eh? I had to turn and see who would dare hint that I had a trace of racism in me. Come on, I grew up in Cameroon. I stayed in Tanzania’s capital village, Dodoma for eighteen months, not only greeting but learning from, working alongside, living with, and eating with them every day.
Me, not greeting a black man? How dare you suggest I am racist! So I turned greeted the black man and he engaged me in pleasant conversation regarding my knowledge of the ANC and Nelson Mandela’s plight – buddy was still in apartheid’s klanger back then - and because I was touched by his fib and sympathetic to Mandela’s plight, the black man on Kenyatta managed to wangle 10 Kenyan shillings out of me. He wangled too, an address in Canada where he could reach me to pay me back.
He was a member of a small band of Nairobi based con-Robbers whose buddies accosted me after about twenty more minutes of shopping, posing as Kenya secret police asking why I was helping a member of the ANC. They accused me of giving information and money to an ANC agent in South Africa. It worked. They had me believing they were secret police – all the ID’s were pretty authentic looking - and that my only way out of this was to pay a sizable bribe. I handed over my 400 bucks in the middle of the day, in a small crowded cafeteria of people having chai, on Kenyatta Avenue. They got me. I was cheated by them. In vain, I reported it to the Nairobi police.
