New Year’s Greetings, I am reading Christine Stephanie Nicholls’ Red
Strangers: The White Tribe of Kenya. The makeda calls lighter skinned
black people yellow and my brother was once told that he was so light
he was turning yellow. Red strangers, yellow people.
This younger brother, who is at school in cooler climates is home for the holidays, this time he has brought someone with him, a foreign someone, and such visits being what they are, it turned into a touristy holiday- show the visitor around the house.
Nothing odd about that, except that everyone keeps treating him, my younger brother, as though he was himself a foreigner. All his knowledge of Kenya, all the Swahili in the world, does not help him. They do not believe, they cannot believe without his passport that he is Kenyan. The taxi people and the girls in the clubs are not too bad. Their enquiries lead to conversation and even to friendships. It’s different though with people in uniform, guarding what we call our national heritage. It is this heritage that they doubt he has privileged rights to.
They insist that he pays alien rates. They can accept, they say that he is a resident, but not that he is a citizen. They have him and his girlfriend roasting in the heat of the Rift Valley floor for hours on end, trying to convince the guards that he is Kenyan, and a student. No, there are no discounts, and the poor youth who were determined to go to almost every place in the Rift Valley find that they cannot afford it after a few such encounters. They start feeling stupid, and wasteful, and very resentful. The budget was for one foreigner and one local, but no, it will not be. Now, even the exchange rates offered when their Kenya shillings run out are more than ten shillings under the rates advertised in the papers.
Their Kenyan driver/ tour guide is no help. He is shrinking, shy.
We generally do not own Ids at my house, similar reasons as these, people in uniforms, demanding extra documentation, extra proof that we belong, making an unnecessary hustle of what should be a routine procedure. Should my brother have taken his passport with him, like a club card entitling you to discounts? Perhaps, but would that not have been careless, especially as he is expected back in class soon and the risk of losing it all too real? No one would want to lose their passport somewhere between Naivasha and Nakuru.
He is still smarting from the embarrassment, my brother, but it has me thinking.
First, why are holidays to Kenya so prohibitively expensive? I know, it is possible to have a good holiday for one thousand dollars, but the Chinese students we had over who achieved that had to live like monks and expose themselves to two muggings and the loss of two cameras and an ipod. We lament low tourist arrivals, but tenuous is the link between quality and price in Kenya, and this city, Nairobi is more expensive than most in the world.
I remember reading an interesting review of a Nairobi Hotel located somewhere near Central Park in Nairobi in the Rough Guides series of Richard Trillo. It warned visitors to the hotel of the dangers of being out near the park at night, but added that the real muggers were likely to be encountered at the front desk of the hotel.
More than pricing, uniforms are all good, but could the guards at public parks be a little less obtuse and more, you know PR-aware. Let’s cut back on the askari/ policeman deportment. The staff at parks in Nairobi seem to have it right, why can’t the Rift Valley ones? Rules are rules yes, but couldn’t they be translated and transmitted a little less aggressively?
I read that the government was allowing under 18s to get into game parks free between Christmas and New Year’s Day. This is useful for promoting local tourism, but it would be even more useful to get young adults, from anywhere in the world in at easier to afford rates. We get these visitors to fall in love with our parks, and chances are we have won ourselves their lifetime loyalty. We put them off with these obstacles and we may be losing them for life. Of particular note is the need to make Kenya attractive for all those Kenyans studying or working abroad; their classmates and friends present a massive pool of potential tourists. They can send much more than just remittances home. They can send their friends here, winning them over from the seduction of South Africa, South America, South Asia or Southern Europe.
Whenever I come home, the entrepreneurial taxi men at the airport try to make an extra coin charging me 5000/- to town, I smile and answer back, ‘mimi ni mwenyeji’. That gets me some discount, but I have been told now that I still sound stupid enough to pay on average 200/- above the market rate. Policemen have also held me, along with a number of more obvious ‘mzungus’ for an hour on the road, mainly because they needed to get bribed, and I was deftly pretending not to be picking up on the coded messages.
I have been accused of being Jamaican by a friend’s mother, and even of being Ethiopian by the Utumishi people.
Foreigners do not have it as easy here as before, not any more by these accounts. My mind suggests that this attitude may be an improvement, such aggression against foreign looking folks is an improvement over the servility that many, including the artist formerly known as Barry Soetoro have lamented in the past,.
But we are not taking tourism or visitors to our country at all seriously. As I finished typing this, and having changed from the depressant and repellent that is the Kenyan news, I saw a Magical Kenya ad on CNN. It was nothing on the Indian, Malyasian, Thai, Macedonian, Bulgarian or Slovakian ones, but worst of all, it had a European Union escutcheon on the bottom right, with all those happy stars. A blot on ours.
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no it's not, don't be daft!