Tourist
Chasing the mirage of the Dark Continent.
I.
The first time I saw a dead body I was 22 years old and living in Nairobi. I was on my way home from work when I found him, sprawled along the side of the highway. His dry ebony skin looked like velvet rubbed raw. The way the man lay, opposite the flow of traffic, it seemed unlikely he’d been hit by a car. His jaw was bony; his eyes shut. His sunken cheekbones indicated malnutrition or dehydration in the very least—a less painful death, I’m told. The sun pricked the back of my neck as I looked down at the dead man while all around me the flow of pedestrians walked on, briefcases, grocery bags, and toolboxes in hand. I paused, watched at least a dozen men step over the corpse—unphased as through he were a simple crack in the side-walk—then tried my best to do the same. The only emotion they showed was indifference and so, as a result, must I.
It was my third week in Kenya. The first thing I was told on arrival was to do my best to blend in. Always walk with a purpose. Never appear puzzled or confused. But no matter how hard I tried, it was impossible. I was too blond haired, too blue eyed. I was seen as English, American, Dutch, Kiwi, German, Scandinavian, but always a tourist. From the toddlers who pulled my arm hair and poked my sharply-angled nose to the maize salesmen and ditch diggers who pointed and whispered ‘Muzungo’ as I crossed the street, it was obvious that I didn’t belong. I was a beacon here; I represented something. Even if I was yet to learn exactly what that was.
East Africa! I was finally tasting the fruit five theatrical viewings of The Lion King had planted in my six-year old mind. For one and a half decades it had been left to ripen, fertilized by Hemingway and Animal Planet, Jumanji and Graham Greene, by the plastic animals that lined my bookshelves and the pictures books that lay open at the end of my bed. It’s funny how satisfying a lifelong obsession can be as simple as stepping onto a plane.
16 years after I’d first seen Simba dangle off the edge of Pride Rock I decided enough was enough. As my spring semester of University began to wind down, I convinced my friend, Mark, that there were better ways to spend his summer than planting trees in Prince George. He knew someone who ran an orphanage in Nairobi and within a few weeks we had a round trip booked. Two months later, I was off—even before I’d heard back from the job to which I planned to dedicate two months of our three-month trip.
When are you available? The e-mail came the following week as I sipped dark Arabic coffee on a rooftop in Cairo.
I’m in Egypt. I can fly in in three days.
Egypt? How wonderful. Just give us your flight number. Someone will be at Jomo Kenyata waiting to pick you up.
The Kenya Children’s Home sat on the edge of the Kibera slum. ‘Why take children away from their natural environment when they can strive despite the odds’ was the motto on which the home had been build.
Mark and I were given a three-bedroom apartment ten minutes up the road. In the afternoons we would sit out on our patio and drink thick amber lager and watch great storks feast on the garbage piles of the slum across the road. Kibera was full of activity—one-shilling fruit stands, barber’s wielding oxidized razors in their single lawn chair shops—but it was always the storks that caught my eye. They were disgusting creatures: four feet tall, bald headed and prehistoric. The way that they walked across garbage pyres, embers still smoldering, always amazed me. Their fleshy grey talons were immune to the coals and the broken glass on the rooftops where they made their roosts. These creatures made adaptation look easy. If only I could say the same about myself.
The orphanage was home to 250 children between three months and 18 years old. It shared its campus with a private school, where the orphans were given free tuition while the rest of the seats were charged out to the rich children of the Nairobi suburbs. This money allowed the school to self-sustain.
My main duties were at the junior school. I taught arts and crafts to the first, second, and third years. “My name’s Teacher Jeff and I’m visiting from Canada.” I drew the Canadian flag on the chalkboard on my first day of class.
“Why is the leaf red?” A voice called out from a sea of 30 closely sheared heads.
“Where I’m from the leaves change colour in autumn. Our autumn’s in September. It’s quite cold.” It was mid-June, halfway through the Canadian summer. While I wore shorts the rest of the country was bundled up in polar fleece and leggings.
“Do you know why the Kenyan flag is red? It’s for the blood of white people,” a girl spoke up matter of factly from the back of the classroom.
“You mean the British,” I stuttered. “During the war for independence.”
“They owned us once.”
“That’s true…um…Did you know Canada was once a British Colony as well”
The children were silent for a moment. Then another boy piped in: “What tribe are you from then?”
I wasn’t prepared to give a School House Rock lesson of colonialism.
“Who’d like me to draw some of the wildlife of Canada?”
What tribe are you from? From the moment I heard that question it troubled me. As a third-generation Canadian I felt no connection to the colonial blood that still spiked my veins. But although I’d grown up without this identity, I’d also adopted nothing in its place. My lifestyle held no trace of my Italian, Scottish, or Irish roots. Hell, neither did my appearance: sun-bleached hair, a squared-off jaw, and a Roman nose. And to be a Canadian, what did that even mean? At home over half of my co-workers were Filipino; I’d dated a Chinese-Canadian whose relatives had been in the country longer than mine had. In Victoria, I’d never be able to pick out a tourist in the street based on the colour of his skin or the language she spoke. Even our Nationally recognized holidays were devoid of noteworthy traditions: there were no blown out eggs at Easter, no sugar skulls tracing the curbs each October to honour the dead.
I quickly realized that none of my fantasies of Africa had been built around the city. Nairobi’s rusted scaffolding and cratered sidewalks fit poorly into my childhood projections of the Dark Continent. Restaurants accepted the American dollar at a better return than the Kenyan shilling and English outweighed Kiswahili on just about every bus. I’d travelled over 10,000 kilometres but felt no closer to the country I’d been fantasizing about since age six.
Even the orphans failed to provide the immersion I was after: although many of them had distinct features—bright Kenyan eyes, rounded Ethiopian cheekbones, caramel Sudanese skin—most had lived here since the first four months of their lives. They had learned the heritage of their country, but they were never really part of it. They were observers, just like me.
I’d heard about an elephant orphanage barely outside the city, but my days were saturated with lesson plans and swimming. Every Sunday, I intended to go following my chaperone duties at church, but Kenya was on the verge of a constitutional referendum. Services swelled each week to include heated debates on gay marriage and abortion— two issues treated more liberally in the proposed constitution. Vote ‘No’ we were told over and over by the preacher. By the time I got home it was already time for dinner.
This wasn’t the Africa that I’d come to see.
Toward the end of July, Mark and I were offered a weeklong contract at the Soila Maasai girl’s school in the Rift Valley. No electricity, no running water, meat twice a week or less; although the campus was considered a sanctuary for the girls that stayed there, the charity had a hard time sending volunteers for longer than a few days at a time. Mark and I were intended to guinea-pig an extended residency. We were to write a report on what two ‘westerners’ would need to make a long-term stay a more reasonable request. A brief Google search had told me that giraffes were the region’s common pests.
“Let’s leave tomorrow!”
The school principal met my request with a grimace. My proposed departure was 8 days before Kenya’s referendum, likely to be opposed by the conservative Rift Valley communities. There had been a riot on the field across from the school a week earlier and the road through the Rift Valley was long and unmonitored. Who knew what would happen if two young white males—prime scapegoats for the western influenced constitution—were to attempt the journey alone.
“How about the following week?” she said. “You really shouldn’t be looking for adventure at a time like this.” But I was sidetracked by the artwork that dressed the walls of her office: portraits of the African countryside, lava domes that rose like alabaster fangs from the belly of the Maasai Mara and windswept wildebeests on their migratory route across the baked plains.
Monday morning, I told the kids it was my last day.
“I’m off to see the rest of Kenya. This is my first time outside of Nairobi, so I’d like you all to do me a favour.”
I explained to them the day’s lesson plan: I would draw my favourite parts of Canada on the blackboard and they would draw their favourite things about Kenya. “That way I’ll know what I should visit. This is your chance to show me your country.”
The students seemed okay with my sudden departure. They were silent for 30 minutes as I sketched a chalky mountain range across the blackboard. I drew an early spring sunrise from the snow-capped peaks of Whistler, the crisp clean waters of the Okanagan in July. I was eager the share the natural beauty of my country I was sure the kids would do the same. When ten minutes were left, I stopped by each students desk to see what they’d produced.
The first boy’s name was Sean—a bright-eyed 10-year-old who attended the school from 8:00 to 5:00.
“Keep it,” he said when I asked to see his picture. My favorite Parts of Kenya was written in purple crayon across the top. Drawn below were a black SUV and a machine gun.
Jeff McAllister
II.
The highway into Suswa hugged the cliff-side at unnatural acute angles. Beneath us, the dust-baked crucible of the Great Rift Valley shimmered in the high-noon sun. It was like staring at the horizon through a jar of homemade honey.
This was Maasai land. Cattle dotted the hillsides, wakes of ochre trailing them in the wind. A local man slouched forward beside the highway, his body draped in a purple cotton blanket. His face looked like it had been carved of dry bark.
There was something primitive about this land. Perhaps, tied up with it’s association to the discoveries made here nearly a century ago. Olduvai Gorge and the Leakey excavations. Early human skulls caked in volcanic ash. It’s fitting, I thought, that the continent of Africa resembles the human heart. It’s from this valley that the lifeblood of humanity first flowed.
We arrived in Suswa just before lunch. The town was a rundown one-kilometer strip along the highway that connects Nairobi to the Maasai Mara National Park. Other than the occasional sun-pinked face that would peer out from passing Jeeps, Mark was the only other white person that I saw all week. Although the town was a checkpoint in the exportation of geothermal energy, Suswa had no electricity of its own. Each night as I read my novels by candlelight, I heard the colossal steel towers humming violently outside my window.
At the school I spent most of my time behind the scenes. Despite being an education center, the Soila institute also held a social agenda. The main goal was to endow the girls with a notion of female equality from a young age. The theory was that these ideas would take firmer root as the girls grew up in a sanctuary outside of the more patriarchal villages.
Until recently, the Maasai people were infamous outliers of modern East African culture. Kimaasai still takes dominance over the national language Kiswahili in the region; however, it’s common folklore that the Maasai people were finally integrated into contemporary East African culture when corrupt parliament members began to seek out young Maasai warriors as bodyguards. Money was introduced into a society that had previously survived on an economy of livestock. There was no going back.
A major opponent of the school was female genital cutting, a procedure common in the valley. At Soila, each girl is told the hazards of the operation, but once she graduates the program, whether or not she receives the surgery is her decision. Most men will not marry a woman whose genitals have not been ‘properly treated’. I’d heard that following their term at Soila, many of the girls return to their villages as foreigners—their viewpoints as estranged from their peers’ as Mark’s or my own.
Our first Friday, the president came to town to campaign for the new constitution. A sea of colour swept over the sepia valley. People from the surrounding villages had made the pilgrimage by foot, each family wearing its own patterned blanket.
A bald woman, adorned in red and white beads sold me a lukewarm Coca-Cola. A man offered to sell me his tire-rubber sandals so that he could afford a pair of used Nike Dunks at a stall down the road. Different Maasai wore riffs on the traditional costume, but one feature always remained intact: the ringu—the ceremonial club—tethered to each man’s waist. Ebony, rosewood, the materials varied but the design was always the same: a slim shaft, and fist sized head with a sharpened nipple—crafted to crack a skull with a single blow. Some men, who could not afford a ringu held weapons of their own design: sawed off crowbars or aluminum pipes. One man held a drillbit as thick as a child’s wrist, a jagged bolt fixed on the end to substitute the club’s wooden head.
The ceremony began with traditional Maasai dancers. Halfway through, a black jeep tore its way through the crowd. A row of armed bodyguards, their khaki suits immaculately pressed, stepped out of the car to escort the president. I craned up on my tippy toes to snap a picture when a man in uniform grasped my arm.
“Come with me.” He held me just above the elbow. At his waist was a dark black baton. His sunhelmet shone with a fresh coat of polish.
I turned around to signal Mark, but couldn’t see him. The man pulled me toward him and began to walk in the direction of the president’s escorts. He tugged me along in a series of jerks, tensing with each step, lagging as he stopped to shoo the audience out of his way. With each lag his grip loosened. I could easily yank myself free. I could disappear within a moment, into labyrinth of coloured cloaks. But what then? I spotted Mark weaving through the group behind me. Then the grip. Then the tug. Then we stopped.
We reached a corral of aluminum fence-pieces that encircled the podium from which the president would speak. My escort spoke to a man on the other side of the gated closure. When Mark caught up we were both thrust through the gates and into a pen full of similarly dress security guards. A man wearing a badge marked Chief of Security signalled for us to follow him. We circled the podium and found ourselves under a sun canopy set up to face the crowd.
“Sit please,” he said, pointing to a row of lawn chairs. Each chair was marked with a piece of paper, which read Guest of Honour.
“Thanks,” I said with a sheepish smile. But the guard said nothing. My excitement dissipated as soon as I saw the reaction of the crowd.
I scanned the throng for the teachers that had come with me, but all I saw were angry faces. It made sense; I was given a private view while they sweltered, shoulder to shoulder, standing in the sun. I was a symbol of the president’s hospitality, but an empty one. The ceremony was about three hours long and alternated between Kiswahili and Kimaasai; I couldn’t understand the speeches. I didn’t even have a vote to cast.
The carcass on the roadside was never far from my mind those eight day in Suswa. The rally did little for Mark and my popularity around town, and the day before the election we decided that it was best we cut our visit short and take off for the liberal havens of the East. On August 3rd we watched our final sunrise over the windbent grasslands before squeezing into a supply truck. The first two hours of our trip were spent snuggled tight between two sacks of maize flower. The next ten, on a bus that would bring us all the way to the sea. On August 4th, we took in the sunrise at 5 a.m. on the shores of mainland Mombasa. My body sore, I sucked sugar cane, to stay awake.
On the coast Mark and I ran into the only other North Americans that we’d spend time with that trip—Ben, a Texan, and his girlfriend from Mexico.
We shared a breakfast table. Ben drank his coffee from a travel mug he’d brought from Kruger National Park in South Africa.
“How was it?” I asked; my vision of ‘Wild Africa’ shimmered back into focus.
“That was the first time I realized that we were really in Africa.” Ben chuckled as he rolled the thermos back and forth between his palms. “One morning I woke up and walked outside to grab my breakfast. Our guide pulled me behind the tent and asked me if I wanted to buy a gun. Of course I wanted a gun, who doesn’t.” He poured half a bottle of hotsauce onto his scrambled eggs. “But here and now? I was curious, so I asked him to show me.” Ben stirred his plate until it was a smooth slurry of red. He gulped down a few forkfuls before continuing his story. “Turns out that they found poachers on the game reserve just a few kilometres and shot them dead before they even got a chance to use those rifles he was selling. Pretty things, them guns. Shame I didn’t have the room in my luggage. Imagine how that would look above the mantle-piece back home.”
Jeff McAllister
III.
Pretty things, how distracting they were! We caught a bus the next morning for Tanzania and almost immediately the violence of the last week was forgotten. I spent long hours staring sleepily out the window at the transforming coastline. Baobabs reached like skeletal hands from the mud-caked earth. Cattle, with horns so long that they looked as if they’d fall over, wove up and down the volcanic hillsides. As we crossed the border, excavation sites pock-marked the hillsides, exposing red clay that dripped like blood from the earth.
But somewhere between Tanga and Dar es Salaam, the sun went down. And suddenly in the darkness all the ghosts returned. In the moonlight I saw that body on the roadside in Nairobi. I saw two poachers, half eaten by hyena, at the foot of the Limbombo Mountains. I wondered how many more corpses existed out there, lost and never found. Not that it seemed to matter. As the moon slipped behind a cloud, darkness pressed itself tightly against the window.
I drifted in and out of a fevered sleep that night. The penetrating drone of the engine felt heavy in my chest and the glass of the window chattered against my skull. Sometime around 3 a.m. the darkness dissipated once more to reveal an 18-wheeler overturned in the ditch. Tire tracks slashed the bush where the truck had swung sharply and leapt from the road. Its steel underbelly glistened beneath the dimness of the moon. A fire burned deep within its mechanical ribcage but not a single vehicle stopped to assess the wreckage. I watched the flames shrink into the distance. Our bus pressed onward into the inky night.
I was drunk and strung out in Dar es Salaam when I met Paul and Jack. They looked like the characters of a reality TV show: Paul was fat, black and wore a baggy Springboks jersey; Jack, bony, blond and white, with slicked back hair and a slim-fitted tank. They were best friends since childhood. “Two black Zimbabwean motherfuckers,”as Jack put it. They’d both been working in separate countries for years, but met up every August for a few weeks vacation.
“Fuck Zambia. It ain’t home.“ Paul spat at us when Mark mentioned we were considering a trip down to see the falls. “I’m Zim through and through. It’s all about where you grew up.”
“Cheers brah,” Jack raised a pint of Krest Bitterlime spiked with Whiskey. The light that shone through it fell green across his face. His moustache looked as though it had been penciled on with a pale brown Crayola. “Let me guess, med students?” He spoke in sharp-staccato.
“Hopefully,” Mark said. He was in his third year of biochemistry. I wasn’t quite sure where school would lead me, but there was a time not too long ago when my answer would have been the same.
“It’s okay, we don’t blame you.”
“Most of you are.” This was true. About 90% of the travellers we’d met had been medical students from the UK on their electives. “Could be worse, you could be phil-an-tropistssss…” This time Jack drew out the syllables, long and serpentine.
“Or one of those white celebrities, here to adopt a baby.”
“Let me tell you, there’s nothing that gets me sicker than a white woman with a little black baby. The only thing worse is if he’d got two gay daddies. It’s unnatural. It’s wrong.”
“Makes you severely question where the fuck you belong.” Paul drilled a knuckle against his temple.
I wanted to object—I’d grown up next door to a French family with a Haitian son; he’d always been happy hadn’t he?— but the Zimbabweans had reigned in the conversation to themselves. They spoke about the Tanzanian economy and the Rwanda genocides, their voices loud enough to include us, but it suggesting we were meant spectate rather than contribute our own thoughts. Paul and Jack punctuated their rhetoric with the shots of liquor that they ordered in plastic sachets.
“Do one with us, man.” Jack placed a 200 mL baggy in a glass and slid it across the table. “Shit’s strong, you’ll love it.”
The baggy had orange flames screen-printed on the front. Konyagi—official spirit of Tanzania. I choked down what tasted like a cross between gin and vodka.
Shortly after, Mark and I called it a night and stumbled back to our banda.
“Good meeting you guys and sorry to disrespect. Coolest white dudes I’ve met,” Jack shouted and slapped Paul on the shoulder. As I walked down the beach, his laughter faded against the sounds of the sea
The next morning, I awoke to bitterness. It wasn’t just the Konyagi that sat heavy in the back of my throat, or the mosquito bites from falling asleep with the door ajar. It was everything that the Zimbabweans had said last night. Cold and subtle as the tide beneath our hut, Jack and Paul’s words had pooled in the back of my mind.
“It’s all about where you grew up.”
“Coolest white dudes I’ve met.”
I’d suffered the travelling blues before, but this time the sentiment was different. I looked up to see three fruit bats, huddled upside-down in the doorframe. Eyes like halos, they met my gaze, unblinking. It was in those ambrosia depths that I suddenly realized what I was: a stranger and a squatter, uninvited and unwanted. I clawed my way, toward the door, startling the bats from their roost. I stepped out on the beach to gather my thoughts and watched them fly away home, their wings unzipping the cold morning mists that had gathered in the sky.
It was on the shores of the Indian Ocean that my childhood visions of Africa died. It wasn’t a violent death, but something long and bled out; the impala in the leopard’s jaws that finally ceases to kick. I’d been fighting these odds for too long. I was tired of trying to make everything fit.
I was reminded of the great storks that loomed like stormclouds above the waste piles of Kibera. Pink-headed and predatory; this was how I’d been seen by those maize salesmen, those ditch diggers. I was a scavenger and a parasite. I was the medical student taking advantage of the experience offered by third world health care; I was a business man, purchasing ebony to sell back home at five times the price. I was a writer, collecting stories to impress my friends. A country founded on colonialism has no choice but to live off another nation’s skeletons. Poor and malnourished, it then falls victim to the very species that ailed it in the first place. History flows in one direction: there are some things that cannot be changed. Nairobi was poor and I was white. There are some things that cannot be changed.
I finally did get to go on my Safari.
I watched lions sun themselves on the limestone slopes of the Ngorongoro crater. I cleansed my own sunburned-skin in the iridescent green of the Ugandan Nile. And there were times when I felt I’d found the Africa what I was looking for. I was swept up by images beautiful and consuming: a bull elephant’s trumpet at sunset. But it only took seconds before the sound slipped away into the empty belly of the Savannah. All that was left were echoes.
“Which tribe are you from,” I was asked again the day after I returned to my flat outside Kibera. This time it was by a little boy in my apartment complex. He had parked his bicycle on the brick walkway in front of my doorstep. The buildings cast shadows behind him, long and hazy in the midday sun.
“I’m from Canada,” I said as I pulled my keys from my pocket. “Our tribes are mixed.”
He looked confused.
“I no longer know,” I corrected myself. “Most of us don’t.”
“Is that why you’re here?”
I laughed. That old travelling cliché: one travels to lose himself and finds himself in the process.
“I’m a tourist.” I said. The word slipped out far too easily. To loose yourself, if only! There are some parts of an identity that are just too hard to shake. “But I’m leaving soon.”
“Home?”
“Yes, home.”
“Nice to meet you.” He smiled before peddling away. The beads between his spokes jingled. The wheels turned over and over.
Jeff McAllister
Dig this story? Why not recommend it? While you’re at it, read more of my travel writing at: Keyboard + Compass.
