It Happened on the Way to War (5 page)

“
Sijambo
, Jennifer.” She was one of the few teachers I called by her first name, though it still didn't come naturally. She had to correct me at least a half dozen times before I adopted the habit. In ROTC, even upperclass midshipmen went by
Mr
. and
Miss
.

Jennifer's office was small, windowless, and warmly draped in
kangas
and colorful artwork from her fieldwork site in Kajiado, a windswept expanse of land east of the Masai Mara. A brick propped the door open. She drank chai from an old jelly jar that sat next to a photograph of her husband and two young children.

I told her about the e-mail.

“Well, that's
great
news!” She clapped her hands. “This way you'll be sure to stay alive, and you'll just have to go to Kenya.”

“Thanks, Jennifer, but I really wanted to go to Rwanda.”

“Why?”

“Well, you know.”

“Yeah, but tell me again.”

“I'm going into the Marines and wanted to study ethnic violence.”

“Well, have you heard of Kibera?”

I shook my head. Jennifer explained that she hadn't heard of Kibera when she first traveled to Kenya as a Duke University undergraduate in 1989. The only slum in Nairobi that was talked much about then was Mathare. By the time Jennifer began her doctoral research at UNC, however, Kibera had grown exponentially and become the largest slum in Nairobi. It had a history of ethnic violence and a far more ethnically diverse population than Mathare. Jennifer offered to put me in contact with a family she knew with a house near the slum.

I didn't have much time, and I didn't have any other options. I thanked her and returned across the quad with the peaceful, giant poplar trees to my room at Old West Dorm. There were fewer than a dozen hits when I typed
Kibera
into Google. The first link took me to a BBC article about ethnic clashes between Muslim and Christian groups in 1995. The article identified Kibera as a “tinderbox,” and the largest slum in Africa. Off to the side was a photograph of a man lying in mud with a machete gash across his head.

Tinderbox
was a strong word, and the slum appeared to be a fault line between ethnic groups. If Kibera erupted into more violence, it could destabilize the entire country, and possibly even the region. This argument was implied but not drawn out in the BBC article. As soon as I realized it, I started a new proposal and the search for the next 5 percent who would give a damn.

*
  Philip Gourevitch,
We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
(New York: Picador, 1998), 163–64.

CHAPTER TWO

Big
Gota
(Fist Bump)

Kibera, Kenya

MAY 2000

THE FLIGHT FROM LONDON TO NAIROBI covers forty-two hundred miles in eight and a half hours. During the early colonial days in the late 1800s, when the British first started landing by ship in the port of Mombasa, the trip took weeks. With the exception of traveling via London, I didn't think I shared much in common with the old colonialists. They had arrived in Kenya to exploit resources. I was there to learn and to give back by “producing knowledge,” a heady phrase that my parents liked to use.

According to my watch, it was five in the morning back on the East Coast. I had stayed awake all night, gripped by anticipation. It had happened so fast since the moment I had walked into Jennifer Coffman's office. Kibera felt like a mystery. I viewed my research as an adventure to find and sort pieces of a neglected puzzle. During my final month in Chapel Hill, I had gathered more information. A librarian had tracked down an old doctoral dissertation from the 1980s that portrayed Kibera as a cauldron of corruption, cronyism, and competing tribal interests. A medical doctor at UNC who had conducted a public health assessment in Kibera had advised me that “it will forever change what you think of resilience.”

Most of my conversations had been phone calls with Kenyans living in the States. Few of these Kenyans had ever been in Kibera, though they all knew it as “Africa's largest slum.” Their descriptions of Kibera conformed to ghetto stereotypes. In their minds, the slum was a no-go zone of filth, thuggery, and ignorance. One Kenyan had described Kibera to me as a “cesspool,” where the people “swim in their own shit.” Another Kenyan had advised me to travel with at least a case of hand sanitizer. The stuff was cheaper and easier to find in the United States, he had said, and in Kibera “you'll need a ton of it.”

These Kenyans with whom I had spoken knew little about Kibera and never mentioned the slum's history of ethnic rioting. When I had asked about this volatile dynamic, most of them downplayed the events as squabbles among the poor. It was a point of pride that Kenya was a peaceful country, and they had objected to my suggestions that ethnic violence in Kibera could spill across the country. If I mentioned the Rwandan genocide, most Kenyans became outright defensive. Kenya would never go the way of Rwanda, I was told, because Kenyans “loved peace so much.” I didn't know much, but I knew enough to be skeptical of this peaceful-culture mythology.

Everyone with whom I spoke agreed that Kibera needed a lot of help. Where was the government? It was one of my first questions, and I was shocked to learn that the president himself, Daniel arap Moi, lived in a mansion less than one hundred yards above the slum. I found this hard to believe, and most of my Kenyan contacts laughed about its absurdity, as if to say, “Good luck figuring it out, kid.”

A Kenyan businessman sitting next to me on the flight from London seemed intrigued by my research proposal and its focus on youth. He managed a hotel in Nairobi, and he suggested that job creation was the key to fighting poverty and violence. When I asked him if he employed residents from Kibera at his hotel, he replied hesitantly, “You know the problem there is trust, not skills, trust. You see?”

I could understand a businessman's concern about trust in his workforce, but his attitude struck me as discriminatory. Did poverty alone make people less trustworthy?

My attention shifted to the work ahead. It was a daunting to-do list. With five weeks on the ground I needed to identify at least a dozen youth leaders who would participate in life-history interviews, piece together Kibera's past, and determine what organizations, if any, existed to help youth and prevent ethnic violence. I hoped to spend my nights in Kibera because living there could help establish my credibility.

This action-oriented plan presupposed answers to two questions: Could I handle it? Would the community accept me? Deep down, I didn't know the answers. Nevertheless, I felt an intoxicating sense of possibility that stemmed from the idea that I could help make sense of what appeared to be a forgotten part of the world. My research could make a real difference.

“
JAMBO, BWANA
. YOU military?” A Kenyan customs officer pointed to my dad's olive-green duffel bag. Faint traces of black ink remained where his rank and service were once stenciled: FIRST LIEUTENANT, USMC. I viewed that old duffel as a talisman, a force that would help keep me safe when I faced danger.

“Yes, sir, I'm a student in military training,” I said in Swahili.

“Oh, that's good Swahili. You're welcome.” He waved me past without inspecting the bag.

By the time I landed in Nairobi, I had only one solid point of contact near Kibera, a woman named Elizabeth. Elizabeth was the acquaintance of Jennifer Coffman's who lived with her husband, Oluoch, in a housing development adjacent to the slum called Fort Jesus. Elizabeth and Oluoch welcomed me on my first night with a feast of beef stew, a maize meal called
ugali
, and
sukuma wiki,
collard greens.

“
Karibu
Kenya.” Oluoch greeted me with a firm handshake. “I am your father. This is your mother.”

They certainly didn't look like my parents. Oluoch, who coordinated homestays for an American study-abroad program, was built like an ox. His thick neck blended into his shaved head. Oluoch might have made a great lineman on an American football team had it not been for his age, which I assumed was about forty-five, and his beer belly. His aloof attitude contrasted with Elizabeth's natural warmth. Her vibrant blue and yellow gown and
kanga
wrap draped elegantly off her body. She was full figured like the patrician women of Renaissance paintings. A Montessori nursery school teacher at a private school, she and Oluoch earned enough income to fall into the lower end of Kenya's thin middle class.

We squeezed the
ugali
like putty and dipped it into the savory beef broth. Elizabeth began asking me about my parents. “Oh, sorry,” she said when I mentioned I was an only child. Although I joked that I had given my parents enough work as an adolescent so that they were content with one child, neither Elizabeth nor Oluoch seemed able to comprehend that some parents could want to have only one child. Apart from that awkward moment, we made easy and natural conversation. Elizabeth spoke about her daughter studying at an American university. Oluoch told me stories about attending conferences at universities in the United States and asked about UNC and our famous basketball team. He was impressed that many of our players studied Swahili.

“No wonder they're such a good team,” he said, laughing.

As we finished dinner, Oluoch commented on my research proposal. “We read your thing. Very interesting. You know, these people, you'll meet some of them down there.” He waved his hand toward the wall. “They live like animals. They have nothing.”

Oluoch's condescending tone bothered me, but I withheld my impulse to say something. I was a guest in his home, and I needed his help. Oluoch was going to arrange a meeting at the Ministry of Education through a personal contact to fast-track my research permit. He also offered to introduce me to Dan Ogola, a youth leader in Kibera who could show me around. He trusted Dan because Dan had once helped an American student who was lost in Nairobi's Uhuru Park, a place notorious for muggings. Dan had escorted the student back to Oluoch's house in Fort Jesus and never asked for anything in return.

“But more important”—Oluoch raised his finger—“the boy is a Luo. And you, you are a Luo. When were you born?”

I was sure I was a white guy from Rhode Island, but I went along with it. “Nineteen seventy-nine.”

“No, no. What time of day? When?”

“Six A.M.”

“Ah, yes, I should have known. You are Omondi.”

Elizabeth clapped her hands. “Ah, Omondi!”

“It's a good Luo name,” Oluoch said. “And because you are our son, you're a Luo. You are from Ugenya. That is our home in Nyanza Province near Lake Victoria, where we eat a lot of fish. We like fish. This name, I can see it on you. You have ambition. Omondis, they can be ambitious. This is a good thing.”

“Yes, it's true. Yes, they can!” Elizabeth cheered.

“The nickname for Omondi is Omosh,” Oluoch continued. “Luo names always start with an
O
or an
A
. So now you know how to identify your brothers and sisters.”

It felt special to receive an African name. I didn't know that it was a common offering from host families to young college students.

“Thank you,
Mama
,
Baba
,” I said with a smile, using the Swahili words for “mother” and “father.”

“My son Omosh.” Elizabeth clapped her hands together. “Omosh of Kibera.”

MY FIRST NIGHT was miserable. Wide awake with the excitement of being in a new country, my mind raced and my body fought to resist jet lag. When I did finally fall asleep, the mefloquine pills that I was taking to guard against malaria filled my brain with hallucinogenic dreams. I would have stopped taking the drug had it not been for all the Vietnam War books that had imprinted my mind with vivid images of death and suffering caused by malaria.

Cluck, cluck, cluck, coookooo.
A rooster in the small courtyard sounded off at four A.M. I cursed the bird, flipped on the light, and started scribbling down reflections, including my reaction to Oluoch's description of Kibera as “down there.” I needed to go there. I needed to go where I wasn't comfortable. That had always been part of the attraction, whether it was Rwanda, or Africa's largest slum, and I was impatient. Fort Jesus might be considered a ghetto by American standards, but the living seemed to be easy. I needed to find someone who could show me the ropes and help me locate a few places to stay in Kibera. If Dan was as large and as imposing as Oluoch, he might make a perfect confidant.

After a half hour of writing, I turned to Tom Mboya's
The Challenge of Nationhood
. Jennifer Coffman had recommended the book to me with a comment about how his death was a loss to the world. The book, part of a series edited by the legendary Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, identified Mboya as a chief architect of Kenya's independence, a friend of John F. Kennedy's, and a politician “widely regarded as the most likely successor to Jomo Kenyatta as President.” I was taken by Mboya's voice, and noted a few of his passages about political manipulation of ethnic identities. In one passage, Mboya concluded, “Perhaps the most crucial factor during this period is the role of personality of the men at the top—those who head the governments of the new states.”

Writing in March of 1969, six years after Kenya's independence, Mboya warned that if the first generation of African leaders, such as Jomo Kenyatta, did not stop rewarding their own ethnic groups at the expense of the nation, the “second generation leadership would inherit a framework that is so dependent on personality that it cannot survive the person on whom it depended. This could bring with it a phase of deep political problems—tribalism, personality cults, foreign intervention and even military coup.”
*
Four months after those words were published, assassins gunned down Tom Mboya on a busy street in Nairobi's city center. He died at age thirty-nine, a father of five children, and a martyr for the democratic ideals he espoused.

THERE WAS A knock on the door shortly after I put down the book. I rose to meet Jane Atieno, Elizabeth's maid and house helper.
“Mimi ni Omosh,”
I greeted her.

“Wacha!”
she exclaimed. “Omosh, you? No.” She shook her head back and forth as if it were the first time she had met a white person with an African name. Her hair was short and shaped like a pancake with a part down the middle. She had wide hips, strong arms, and an unforgettable, breathtaking smile.

“Aye, you're up early. Students, they don't get up so early. It must be true you are an Omosh.”

“Yes, I was born early in the morning. I'm a morning person.” I was proud to have a chance to show off a nugget of new knowledge. “And you, what time were you born?”

“Let me tell you,
atieno
means ‘night.' I was born in the night. But I have to wake up early, and so that's what I do.”

We made small talk as Jane heated milk and prepared a tray with bread, jam, and margarine. Her English was spotty, so I transitioned to Swahili. She pointed out corrections as I stumbled through sentences. When I moved to the sink and started cleaning dishes, she protested. “Oh, no, Omosh, this work I need. If you want to take my work then you can lift that bag there.”

A cloud of soot exploded into my face when I dumped a bag of coal into the storage trough. Jane pursed her lips and waited to gauge my reaction. As soon as I smiled, she burst out laughing. “Oh, Omosh!”