The voice of Africa
Aidan Hartley went on a pub crawl to find out what ordinary Africans think about such weighty matters as debt forgiveness and Bob Geldof
Nairobi
Hardly anybody bothers to ask ordinary poor Africans what they think about the G8 summit, so I did. On Sunday I went on an extended pub crawl around the Ngong Hills. First stop was the filling station outside Nairobi’s game park. ‘Aid won’t help us,’ said the petrol attendant. ‘Our leaders will steal it.’ ‘How do you know that?’ I asked. ‘I’m an African, I know,’ he said. ‘What do you think of Bob Geldof?’ His face brightened. ‘I love Bob Marley very much!’ ‘What about Bono?’ Blank stare. On the other side of the road a herd of buffalo waggled their ears as matatu taxis hurtled to and fro.
I drove on into the slum of Ongata Rongai. Fauvist signs advertising all imaginable human activities jostled with heaps of smoking rubbish, vegetable stalls and butcheries. I passed the Maximum Miracle Centre, Willy Fabricators, the Exciting Hotel and La Fairly Boutique. A drumbanging procession of men and women dressed as Old Testament prophets swayed by as I entered the Honey Pot Club and ordered Tuskers.
‘Yes I think Bob Geldof is a great man,’ roared Elias ole Mong’i above the plunkyplink of Congolese rumba music. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because he’s fighting for the poor, that musician.’ I am incredulous, but the poor Kenyans who have heard of Geldof genuinely admire him. I asked Elias, ‘What would you do if you saw a Boomtown Rat?’ Blank stare. ‘Who’s Bono?’ Blank stare. Elias sells beaded Maasai artefacts to tourists in the city and feels he’s up and coming in the world. He agreed the G8 should forgive debts and double aid to Africa to help lift his home village on the slopes of Kilimanjaro out of the poverty which he blames on misrule by Kenya’s leaders since independence in 1963. ‘In my village they live in desperate poverty. All they know is God, who helps in time of drought and time of rain. Don’t keep us in darkness, but let the money be channelled to the people, not the leaders. Who benefits if you bring me £200 today and I don’t take it to the community? If tomorrow you bring £400, who benefits? We have greedy people in society. We elect leaders and they lie to you very good, but tomorrow they’ll never remember you.’ I drove on past the Memento Pork & Mutton Butchery, Emaculate Café, and Three Wangs Enterprises. At the Nameless Pub I chatted to a businessman who runs a small cleaning services company. ‘Surely it’s all about getting business in Africa started, not aid,’ I said. ‘Yes, but it’s not easy to do business in Kenya unless you know somebody in a high office.’ Back on the road, the scruffy townships gave way to open green pastures and the summit of the Ngong Hills, from where I gazed back east at the smoggy slums of outer Nairobi. Then I turned west into the Rift Valley, a virgin landscape so big I cannot do justice to it in words. Here I gave a lift to a man and a woman. ‘I am Hannington,’ said the man. ‘I’m a police officer and this is my dearly beloved wife Agatha. And I love her.’ Agatha giggled into her hand. The police in Kenya are famously corrupt and I asked Hannington about this. ‘Sir, in this country a rich man can build a ten-storey house in six months. A poor man cannot afford to even put a roof on his hut in that time. On my salary I must buy food, clothes for my children, education. It is very hard. You must look at corruption from different angles.’ Hannington went on: ‘If you want an economy to be good, then you must have a good road so that you do not need to buy shock absorbers. But the minister doesn’t fix the road. He uses the money to buy five cars for himself. And that is why I have to ask you for a lift, sir.’ The road wound in switchbacks down to the hot floor of the Rift Valley. I dropped my hitchers at the Rib Village Roast Meat and Beer Point and raced on past termite hills and herds of cattle kicking up plumes of dust. Weaverbirds chattered in the waita-bit thorn and myrrh trees. A breeze rippled through the red oat grass. The hills were tawny, the rain clouds blue, and I was headed for the bar near the home of a soothsayer I used to visit. On the wall of the bar there is a mural of a man struggling up a tree pursued by a snake, a crocodile and a lion. Beneath is a caption that says YOU CANNOT ESCAPE FROM DEATH. Here I bought half the bar a round, and men chewing through heaps of goat meat invited me to sit and eat with them. Flies buzzed about and a steer ready for slaughter bellowed nearby.
‘Aid? It is a big killer!’ said Wasila, who was pretty drunk. I told him we were not talking of Aids. ‘Oh, I thought you meant HIV,’ he belched. I bought Wasila a beer and he stared at it. ‘I work as a driver, so that I can buy bread for my family. We drink in bars because we cannot afford bread. I spend what money I have here so that when I go home I am totally drunk and nobody will ask me for money, because they know I have none. The way aid works is like this beer. The leaders will give me one and I will be happy. Tomorrow the beer is gone and nothing will go to my children at school. In 60 years I’ve never seen aid. I have no land, no assets. The big boys have put it in their pockets.’ Other drinkers believed in aid. ‘We love development but we have no way of asking the donors ourselves,’ said John Serbebi. ‘The donors should follow the projects they start. Help doesn’t reach us. It’s like there’s a lid on us.’ Serbebi keeps cattle and works as a human rights monitor for a local NGO. It is his ears that illustrate his transition between old and new worlds — once they dangled long with weights but are now tied up in tidy knots. ‘Isn’t it about free enterprise?’ I asked again. ‘To succeed in business you have to be healthy and educated,’ he replied. ‘These are the two big expenses in life. If we are healthy and educated, then we can succeed in business.’ The bar was now filled with Maasai elders in red togas waving sticks, smacking their dry lips in anticipation of beer. I met a man from the soothsayer’s family and asked him what he thought of the future. ‘Africans are OK. They’re going to be very OK.’ I asked how. And he just smiled.
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