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What a pity as lovely Kenya goes the Zimbabwe way!
Petina Gappah, The Daily Nation (Kenya)
January 15, 2008

http://www.nationmedia.com/dailynation/nmgcontententry.asp?category_id=25&newsid=114581

My friend Yvonne once told me that it was only when she lived in my country-s capital that she understood which city Nairobi was going to be when it grew up.

Harare in the 1990s was funky and groovy and uncluttered and happening. There was a flow of tourist money, there were film festivals, and arts festivals, there were Manchurian restaurants and people speaking of all the things they planned. There were more than 24 foreign airlines bringing the world to us. Now there are only four.

Zimbabwe in the 1990s was a country in which people still dreamed and planned with the reasonable expectation that their dreams would come true, and if they didn-t, they could downgrade them to lesser, but still acceptable options.

I once lived in a European city that had so few black people that I was most people-s only encounter with Africa. I was the Africa expert, giving little seminars on the genocide in Rwanda and the promises of South Africa-s rainbow nation. Throughout that time, I felt like a poser — the one African country that I really knew was Zimbabwe, the rest were as foreign to me as Slovenia or Poland.

I still feel I do not know Africa. I never can, but through reading, travel and friendships, I have come to love a number of African countries.

More than these, I love Kenya.

Kenya means very specific things to me. It means my friends at Kwani?, the hip literary journal which has opened a space in which the most moving and funny and lacerating and edgy writing is exploding out into the world. Lamu, a place like no other that I have visited. Kenya means all the amazing people that I have met in my travels there, filmmakers, and businesswomen, civil servants, media types, hotel staff, for I have stayed mainly in hotels, so that I am one of those for whom Kenya will always be a country of the permanent karibu, a county of the friendliest people in the world, an eye-rolling cliché that is nonetheless true.

I have conversed with Luo and Kalenjin and Kikuyu and, on one occasion, what I took to be Maasai teenagers, but who, according to my Kenyan companions, were Kikuyu dressed as Massai for the tourist dollars. On a beach in Mombasa, I cemented my Kenyan tourist credentials: I received the flattering attentions of a reed-thin "beach boy" with beaded dreadlocks.

Every time that I have been to Kenya, I have returned with a singing soul.

Like Juliet did to the love-struck Romeo in the Dire Straits song, Kenya exploded on my heart.

There was an underlying ache.

I wished we had this in Zimbabwe, that a rainbow coalition of political parties could unseat a stagnant ruling party and still have a vibrant opposition. I could not help comparing Nairobi-s greenness to Harare-s drought dry grasses and trees. My friend Silas once asked me what I thought we would talk about in Zimbabwe if ever we solved our crisis.

In Kenya, I found some answers. Kenyans filled the streets of Nairobi at the weekend, their bars were packed with smiling happy people, troubled, it seemed to me, by no graver political issues than the antics of Charity Ngilu.

On one weekend that I was in Nairobi, the papers were given over to a discussion of the school results.

There were league tables, and pictures of beaming little girls and boys and agonising editorials about why some regions were doing badly compared to others. I remember a picture of a woman with a smile that showed the insides of her teeth as she embraced her son.

Future doctor, said the caption.

For one used to headlines from the Zimbabweans papers about inflation going up to 15 000 per cent, and newspapers filled with the President-s daily warnings against "detractors and would-be colonisers" and the empty promise that Zimbabwe would never be a colony again, this all seemed achingly normal.

Then came December 2007.

And suddenly, it was not of Zimbabwe that a stern-faced British Prime Minister, European Union observers and the American President were talking, but Kenya. Suddenly, Nairobi was becoming Harare, and Kenya, Zimbabwe.

* Petina Gappah, a Zimbabwean writer and trade lawyer, is a member of Concerned Kenyan Writers, a coalition of writers formed to save Kenya at this polarised time in its history.

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