A FRUIT OF UNRIPE WISDOM (OR THE REASON WHY I NEVER LIKED KAREN BLIXEN)

With all their pride and handsome noses, many ‘old school’ wazungus come to Africa with so much romance and fire burning in their hearts that one can only wish to pour bucketfuls of ice-water on their heads.

It all starts with the promises of an exotic hotel in a glitzy magazine that ‘provides the ideal getaway to the luxury traveller who is looking for a unique enchanting experience of serene beaches and traditional wildlife that Africa has to offer’

Or an ubiquitous nudge from a distant aunt who travelled before to Africa and fell for ‘the spell of the land and became instantly reborn’ after passing through ‘idyllic villages’ where ‘the men and women were eager to burst to song at her sight’ and she was able to learn a lesson about happiness from the way they ‘managed to laugh and sing despite their moderate means’.

It all ends in pleasant journeys through Africa where, like new shiny coins falling into a murky mine, they admire the primeval days of their iron ore; the seduction of the unsophisticated and the simplicity of the smiles of the mud-splattered, mucous-blocked children who will flock around and break into a rictus of joy when given a 250 ml can of yoghurt to fight over.

Words such as ‘corruption’, ‘Aids’ and ‘poverty’ will be avoided (apart from the militant kind that move about in herds called conferences reciting the same old tale till it is tedious listening to them) and replaced with spiels of how they were ‘awestruck by the majestic leaps of Maasai warriors’ and how their tears fell at the sight of the ‘tragic beauty of the wildebeest migration in the Maasai Mara’

Ultimately we will be reminded of the amazing world we live in and why we should never lose our customs, our dances and our music for it is a ‘rich heritage’ and that we should always ensure that this part of the world remains ‘wild and untouched’ for it offers so much ‘tranquillity and serenity that the rest of the planet could learn from’.

They will hold their passports safely nevertheless and despite the ‘enchantment and magic of the land’ grumble at any delays in their return flights for somehow they still need to rush back to their ‘boring, developed world’ where people are ‘cold and unfriendly’ and not like us ‘pleasant people’.

We will be left behind always, perpetual guardians of the African serenity and tranquillity. The beach boy to be in love with the Malindi sand and the erotic promise a beckon from another Italian tourist brings. The Maasai woman selling her trinkets to trot back to her house-fly infested manyatta and seek for no more pleasure than the promise of a new bore-hole to be dug in her village. The sweaty-faced tea-picker to trudge every morning through rain, shine and poor pay and be in love with the immense expanse of green tea and marvel at how lucky he is to be outdoors when everyone else is cocooned in concrete prisons in London, Sidney and New York.

Beneath this calm veneer painted over ‘untamed Africa’ is a loud discontent. I remember as a child the way it painfully agitated me and I would walk to the edge of the Kerio valley and stare at the horizon and pray for the vision to overpass that limit and stare at another busy world I had heard of but never seen. I desired more practical experience than I possessed. An acquaintance with a variety of character than was here within my reach. My heart would heave with exultant movement as I allowed my mind to dwell on that bright vision; to feel it swell, quicken and expand with life; but most of all to relive, if only for a moment, a greater existence of my being, before the relentless sun took me back to reality with its heat.

It sad and narrow-minded for these more privileged fellow-creatures to think we ought to be satisfied and confine ourselves to our tranquillity. The African mind seeks for action and greater exercise of its faculty just like any other mind. Millions, however, of my dark-skinned brothers are condemned to a still doom; an absolute stagnation and restraint of the soul as if they were mangrove trees stuck in a dismal swamp.

There is another reality of Africa however, a more vivid kind and filled with so much goodness. It shows in the face of a graduate who steadfastly applies for jobs and believes he will eventually get one for deep down he knows he is intelligent and hard-working enough to add value to the corporate world. It shows in the hard, chiselled faces of hawkers in Gikomba who haggle and cackle their voices hoarse selling second-hand clothes to make enough money to buy land and build a brick house where there children will be able to sleep soundly. It shows in the speech of a woman dying of Aids who sits her children beside her bed and makes them promise that she be the last one in the family to die from the disease. It shows in the matatus that flood our towns in a riot colour, bringing men and women of all kind and tribe, to hustle and move about in our pot-holed roads and dusty shops in pursuit of their private hopes, dreams and happiness.

That is the kind of Africa I love, not the one Karen Blixen and her followers try to create.