How young people can live in Nairobi West baffles me

‘Why does anyone live in Nairobi West?” I wondered aloud after being stuck in a traffic jam for two hours there.

It can’t be the convenience because the roads are chock-a-block on a Sunday night. You are close to everywhere else, if only you are willing to walk.

Traffic moves at a snail’s pace, and if you are being rushed to the hospital in Nairobi West, you will almost certainly die en route. 

Nairobi West should, perhaps, be a study in the worst of what Nairobi can offer, and is a nightmarish representation of what a 24/7 economy would look like if we allowed people to drink themselves silly.

The place has more khat shops per square kilometre than South C, but still, mercifully, nowhere near Eastleigh.

It is as if the locals are determined to pick up the slack occasioned by the European Union’s ban on the product. The shops are open and patronised 24 hours. So you always have square-jawed louts with protruding eyes staring at you unblinkingly, communally trying to ensure that Meru farmers do not file for bankruptcy.

However, khat isn’t even the real drug problem. The problem is alcohol. Nairobi West is a place that can only be described as an alcoholocaust.

This is beer country and features the greatest contributors to brewers’ bottom line. There are little tin shops separated by shower curtain- coloured tarpaulins that sell all manner of rotgut. The cheaper, the better.

OVER WEIGHT WOMEN

There are no frills and no attempts at entertainment to distract the people from the main reason they are there – to get plastered. The language inside the bars is always profane, the chatter always savage. It’s all talk of football and women’s bits.

Some bars pretend to distract you from the gulps but here, drinking is a way of life (or death). The calling here is to drink, to drink steadily and with steely determination. To drink in sickness and through wealth, in health unto death. Every corner seems to have a bar, and all the bars spill out onto the street, and even Wednesday nights begin to look like the last days of Rome.

I have never seen a place more geared towards inebriation and the love of booze, where delirium tremens, an addled brain and an inflamed liver are the highest aspirations. If I were an insurance salesman, I would sell policies to Nairobi Westers; they will not be around to collect  them.

The place also has a recent-immigrant problem. South C, which used to handle the spill-over of successful importers and charcoal salesmen based in Eastleigh, has become too gentrified and expensive.

So more often than not, Nairobi West holds the reserve of the country’s Kiswahili-as-third-language speakers.  You see the money changers everywhere, with dollar signs in their eyes, the exchange rate in their DNA, and a sack of money close by.

Then there are the women. You see them around, aggressively coutured, 10 kilos above in their high heels and all glammed up for a night out.  Their hair is Premier League, their faces might pass off for the Championship, but their smiles are firmly Second Division. Their hair has been tortured with stuff Chemical Ali would have been squeamish about using on a Kurd. All of them look the same (and I imagine have the same IQ). 

I wasn’t sure about that health survey statistic about 40-something per cent of Nairobi women being obese or overweight, but after spending four nights in Nairobi West, I think the number is grossly understated.

If only women here and everywhere in Nairobi spent half the time they spent in the salon in the gym!

Nairobi West is all bedsits and one-bedroom houses that go for a king’s ransom. This attracts the aspirational fake-it-till-you-don’t-quite-make it crowd. 

PIMPED CARS

Men here are far better than women at shopping for clothes. They care more about their appearance and cuticles than the women do. 

They even know the difference between cashmere and satin. I can bet you that the men in Nairobi West bedsits have, on average, more perfume than the women (They try to justify this by calling it cologne and making sure it comes in priapically shaped bottles). 

They are proper man-girls with even greater emotional range than your crazy ex-girlfriend.

You would make a fortune selling men’s hair gel because they all obviously have hairdryers at home with at least three settings. Everyone has a huge watch with a dial large enough to be seen from space, which doesn’t make sense because traffic here is never in a hurry.

The men all drive hand-me-down Subarus, which they park outside their bedsits. They all hope to trade in the remains of their car for a VW Golf when the Impreza is eventually wrapped around a street light. The bedsits don’t seem to matter much, because all their free time is spent in the pubs and they are usually passed out in the house.

The cars have all the bells and whistles: a side skirt here, neon lights  there, perfect to look at but will not move due to the never-ending traffic jam. Cars here aren’t for transport, silly; they are there to remain stationary as a status symbol. 

Aspiration and acquisition are the emulsifiers of people living in Nairobi West. The gilded façade maintained by overdrafts and loans. It is the banks, really, that own everything. The place is so perfectly unaware of its inadequacies (no reliable transport, bedrooms no larger than a chicken coop) and without a redeeming quality to its name, perhaps except that the drunks look benign.

The place is too young, too male and too damn aspirational. Nairobi West appeals to many people, but it’s the wrong kind of people. By the time you are 30, you should have moved on and upwards. The  problem is that too many men like being stuck in this infantilising hell.

My question, though, is: everyone who lives in Nairobi West can afford to move out, so why on earth don’t they?

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Who is being racist, the Chinese or the local media?

KENYANS WERE ANGERED when they learnt that  a Chinese restaurant in Nairobi denies Africans entry after a certain time due to past criminal incidents.

There are banks that do not allow men to open accounts, golf associations that ban women and universities reserved for women. There are organisations that admit people only from certain areas or specific religious denominations. You can clearly discriminate membership on sex but not race, despite sex being a more consequential biological characteristic. Logically, if one is legal, the other must be accepted.

The worst part was down to our television stations. They went and filmed dogs hanging on hooks under a xenophobic subtitle: “Look at those racist dog-munchers.” As if there is any law cast in stone against eating dogs.

Another station had a article of how “Chinese” were caught dumping decomposing meat. The “Chinese” were actually two Kenyans and a person of Chinese origin. They conveniently ignored the Kenyans and concentrated on the one oriental, making you wonder who really the racist was in this case. 

Once you accept that eating a sentient being is right, you cannot draw lines on species. For instance, in Tana River, they eat crocodiles, while Naivasha subsists on a diet of donkeys.

China has a sixth of humanity, and feeding them is an agricultural feat that requires a diverse source of protein.

The Chinese restaurant was the victim of racism here.

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In Europe, there was revulsion when the FAO suggested that they start crunching insects like locusts, yet in Africa locusts are a delicacy. 

This supposed squeamishness with regard to meat from carnivores or omnivores does not even apply throughout the country.

For instance, in Tana River they eat crocs, Naivasha subsists on a diet of donkeys, which many object to, yet  in France equine

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Enough of these useless apologies!

POPE JOHN PAUL II apologised for the crusades, for African slavery perpetrated by his church, the treatment of Galileo Galilei, and for the terrorising of Protestants during the Reformation.

He was always ready to apologise for mistakes made centuries earlier, but never said a thing about his church’s policies against stem cells and its refusal to endorse contraceptives.

Tony Blair also apologised for the Irish Famine caused by the British a century before his birth but said nothing about the Iraq war, which was his fault, although he did contribute to Iraqi veterans’ medical charities.

Our President has also apologised for unnamed past mistakes of his predecessors and his government.

Politicians like John Paul II — he was a head of state — Blair and Uhuru are always willing to apologies for their predecessors wrongdoings, but are silent about their own failings. Apologies that cost nothing are worthless. If you mean what you say, there must be restitution and compensation to victims and their heirs, not just empty words.

Kenya is still an underdeveloped and unequal mess due to historical injustices, and Uhuru is a prime beneficiary of some of the worst injustices. If he’s serious, he should begin giving the prime land his family controls back to the people it was acquired from.