The Africans (7 page)

T
HE MUD
is ankle-deep in Mathare Valley during Kenya’s long, cold rainy season from March to June, and from a distance the area looks like a huge junkyard, its sides and floor cluttered with stacks of wood and cardboard and all manner of discarded oddities. Stretching out for more than a mile north of Nairobi, the valley is filled with a strange silence, leaving you with no more sense of motion or color than a one-dimensional black-and-white photograph would. At night you could drive right by it without realizing there was a living soul anywhere around.

Yet this valley is home to more than 100,000 people, a makeshift city as large as South Bend, Indiana. Like so many other Africans, the inhabitants had deserted their villages for the promises of the city. But the city had neither jobs nor homes for them, so they squeezed into the slums outside Nairobi, and places like Mathare Valley—with no running water or electric light—became the graveyards of hope for Africa’s shifting populations.

I remember walking through the valley one day, picking my way along the muddy paths that meander among the shanties, and being struck by how still everything was. It was like a movie without sound. I stopped at a lean- to whose roof was made of paper bags. A pot of maize porridge was cooking outside, and Mary Ngei leaned over the charcoal embers to protect her family’s meal from the soft rain. Was she willing to talk for a while? Yes, she said. Was I willing to give her a few shillings for her time? Sure, I said. She
pulled from her pocket a piece of paper that was worn and held together by tape. She unfolded it carefully, smoothing each wrinkle, and held it out for me to examine.

“There,” she said, “you see. All A’s. Hannah always got all A’s.”

Mrs. Ngei, forty years old and the mother of thirteen children, folded her daughter’s report card in tidy little squares and tucked it under a loose board in her wooden bed where she kept a few other treasures. No, she said, Hannah was no longer in school. In fact, she wasn’t quite sure where her fifteen-year-old daughter was. All her children had dropped out of school because the Ngeis were unable to pay the annual enrollment fee of 30 shillings ($3.70). The younger ones had become street urchins, begging and scraping for survival in the Nairobi streets, and the older ones, she feared, had turned to prostitution and thievery. Her husband walked to Nairobi almost every morning, looking for work as a casual laborer, but he had found no more than five or six days’ employment in the year that they had been in the city, and she had no particular hope that he would return home that evening with either money or good news.

“Really,” she said, “I don’t know what we will do. This is no way to live. People get sick here, they just die. They don’t get to see a doctor. We could go back to the
shamba
but there’s no doctor there either. And no jobs and no money. What we need is to get Hannah back in school so she can be smart and get a job and help support us.”

The Nairobi City Council views the valley dwellers as illegal squatters and periodically dispatches several bulldozers to level their jerry-built world. Knowing that they must often flee on short notice, the people disassemble their homes every morning, piling the cardboard and chunks of wood neatly on the ground. Every evening they rebuild them. The entire process takes only a few minutes, but it enables the squatters simply to pick up their homes and move if they hear the rumble of bulldozers approaching over the hill that separates Mathare Valley from the old colonial mansions now occupied by ambassadors and millionaire Kenyans. For two or three days after the bulldozers have cut through the hollow, the place remains empty. Then suddenly, mysteriously, one night the inhabitants return and by morning it once more is a tangle of shanties and filth, of people going through the dreary routine of life as though nothing had ever happened.

I wrote a story for the
Los Angeles Times
about the Ngeis and a
few weeks later received a letter from a California reader saying she would like to pay for Hannah’s education, perhaps even sponsor her at a school in the United States. Could I get in touch with the Ngeis? the writer asked. I returned to Mathare Valley. But in the time between my two visits the bulldozers had come and the Ngeis had gone. Someone said they were still in the valley and had set up their shack in a different place. Trying to find Mrs. Ngei was like picking a single face out of a sell-out crowd at Dodger Stadium. Two hours later, having failed, I went back to my office. Even good fortune had mocked the promises of the city.

Millions of Africans today, from Kenya to the Ivory Coast, from Niger to Botswana, are following the same path as the Ngeis, lured off the farms and into the cities by the dream of a better life. The result of the rural exodus is an urban nightmare: slums, crime, psychological trauma and economies that simply cannot expand fast enough to provide jobs or social services for the world’s youngest and fastest-growing continental population. Here are some capital statistics: The population of Lagos, Nigeria, has grown from 300,000 in 1970 to 3 million today. Nouakchott, Mauritania, had 5,000 residents twenty years ago; today it has 225,000. Nairobi, a city designed for 250,000, will have 7 million residents by 2050 if current growth rates continue. In 1960 only one black African city, Kinshara, Zaire, had a population of more than 500,000; now there are ten.

In Kenya the minimum monthly wage is $43, but the jobless rate runs about 45 percent, and as in other African countries, there is no such thing as unemployment compensation. Thirteen percent of Nairobi University’s 1,800 graduates will be unable to find work for at least three years. According to the International Labor Organization, 60 million Africans—half the adult population—cannot find work, and if Africa is to meet the ILO’s goal of full employment by the year 2000, it will have to create 150 million jobs, a target that is clearly unattainable. Upper Volta’s major export is people, with 600,000 laborers doing seasonal work in neighboring countries. Unemployment in Djibouti can be as high as 85 percent, and the closest real job market is on another continent, in the Persian Gulf states.

More than half of Cape Verde’s fisherman population has left the island republic for want of work, and today there are more Cape Verdians living in Massachusetts and Rhode Island than in Cape Verde. In Ethiopia and Tanzania city jobs are so scarce that the governments
truck people, sometimes at gunpoint, back to the rural areas. Botswana, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Mozambique send tens of thousands of their unemployed young men to the South African mines.

Just a mile or two from Mathare Valley, in the heart of downtown Nairobi, Francis Thuo can look out of his window in the International House at the sprawling city below and can see, far off in the distance, the African plains where giraffes and zebras and antelope still roam in great numbers. Thuo, a prosperous businessman in his mid-forties who is chairman of the Nairobi Stock Exchange, wears a three-piece business suit with a Lions Club emblem in the lapel. He sends his five children to private schools and his office is tastefully and expensively decorated, with wall-to-wall carpeting and mahogany furniture.

A long time ago, shortly after he had dropped out of school, Thuo remembers walking across a bridge in Nairobi with his father, a meatcutter who could not afford the fees to educate his eight children. They stopped to watch a dozen men, bare-chested and sweating, labor with pick and shovel along the roadside.

“Look at them,” his father said. “If you do not take your studies seriously, you will end up like them. There will be nothing for you to do in life but dig ditches.”

Thuo never forgot the advice. He went to work in a gas station, then for an accounting firm. He taught himself to read and write. He studied economics at night and took correspondence courses in history, and in 1964, the year after independence, opened the first African brokerage house in East Africa. He is proud that he bucked the odds and won, particularly when he recalls that in his youth the colonialists gave the Africans virtually no opportunity “to prove our worth” except as common laborers.

“What concerns me these days is that our children are having it much too easy,” he mused. “Unless we push, they just don’t seem to be pulling their own weight. They want life handed to them on a silver platter.”

His anxieties aren’t much different than those you might hear in Middle America. That’s not surprising, for Africans like Thuo—members of a new, emerging middle class—have dreams and goals and values with a distinctly Western flavor. They are educated, economically ambitious and dedicated to making their children’s lives
better than their own. They sacrifice for their children, complain about inflation, worry about the unruly behavior of today’s youth and are greatly concerned with increasing their own wealth and security.

Thuo escaped from his past through sheer hard work and tenacity. Others moved up in class more through circumstance than design, being the benefactors rather than the creators of a system inherited from the colonialists. They simply stepped into the void left by the departing colonialists and expatriates, and as often as not, stayed there more because of tribal nepotism than merit. But Africa’s new middle and upper classes, as minuscule as they may be, are an encouraging portent for the future. If they can grow and become a majority class, as happened in the United States, they could become the foundation of economic and political stability in Africa because more people will have a stake in their country’s well-being. The Nairobi Stock Exchange that Thuo chairs represents a noteworthy step in that direction.

The exchange surely must be the world’s smallest and most informal. It has no trading floor, no permanent home and no assessment for a seat. The five members of the exchange meet every morning over coffee to examine the status of Kenya’s health. For about twenty minutes they scribble notes, bicker and barter, accomplishing their ritual with the good-natured kidding of old friends. International events have little influence on the market; it is local conditions that matter.

Prices are established during the morning “call-over,” with the five members meeting in a different colleague’s office each day. Actual trading is done over the phone or through the mails by Nairobi’s five brokerage firms, which offer their clients seventy stocks valued from a few cents to a few dollars a share. (Blue-chip stocks in 1982 included City Brewery at 40 cents a share, Nation Printers and Publishers at 70 cents and Brooke Bond tea, $2.65.)

Thuo says “an educated witch doctor’s guess” would be that about 1 percent of Kenya’s 16 million people are stockholders. That is a significant figure, considering that Africans in the colonial era had virtually no money and usually reckoned their wealth by the size of their family or herd.

“Capitalism has been part of the African life since time immemorial,” Thuo says. “Measuring your wealth in cattle or the size of your family was a sort of capitalism. This is a new world we live in
now and what we’re dealing with is just another form of capitalism—money instead of cows.”

With powerful binoculars you could very nearly see the village of Meto—and another face of Africa—from Thuo’s fourteenth-floor office window. Meto, tucked in thorn-bush-covered plains south of Nairobi, is populated by several hundred Masai, tall nomadic tribesmen who wander with their cattle in an endless search for grass and water.

On the surface, Meto appears stationary in time. The people still live in clusters of one-room huts known as
bomas
that are made of mud, sticks and cattle dung. Small and comfortably cool even in the heat of summer, separate
bomas
are reserved for each of the owner’s wives, and inside there is one section for the humans, another for the calves and goats.