A funny thing happened on the way to Tanzania.

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I’m sitting in the lounge of Kigali International Airport, drinking a coffee and surfing the free WiFi (murakoze, Rwanda!) and waiting for my flight to board. World news is scrolling across the TV screen, images from the slums of Nairobi, where violent clashes between armed demonstrators and the police have left seven dead. Kibera, again, is in flames, and Nairobi’s nerves are frayed. I’ve picked, it seems, a bad time to go back to Kenya. But then, why go back to Kenya at all?

Admittedly, the idea’s been brewing for weeks. Having spent a good chunk of ’07 drifting around the country, and having seen a tentative stability set in in recent weeks, it seemed only right that I should drop in on some of my friends - Joost at the newly christened Milimani Backpackers in Nairobi, Basilio on the coast, David in the Mara - and see how the country’s doing after all the post-election chaos. I still haven’t made it out of the neighborhood, after all: my planned route through northern Tanzania would take me just a few hours’ drive from Nairobi. So rather than brave the tortuous roads of western Tanzania - in the rainy season, no less - I’ve sucked it up, shelled out two hundred forty US bucks, and booked myself a flight to Nairobi.

Even with the inauspicious news from the BBC, I’m giddy all morning. I gave five months of my life last year to Kenya - five months of ugali and matatus, five months of jambos and karibus - and this feels like something I wasn’t expecting anytime soon: a homecoming. Lifting into a curtain of rain over Kigali, bumping through the clouds across Lake Victoria, descending into a cool gray Nairobi afternoon, I picture a few weeks’ worth of coffees at Java House and wood-oven pizzas at Osteria del Chianti; afternoons rifling through the second-hand books in the Ya Ya Centre; curries with the whores at Annie Oakley’s. Yes, Nairobi, it’s good to be back, after all these months. I even indulge myself for long enough to imagine the old Backpackers staff greeting me at the gate: Julius beaming beneath his Yankees cap; Morgan sitting in dignified repose by the fire; long-suffering Mama trudging through the halls on her gnarled, old-woman’s feet, carrying a load of laundry into the yard.

But the old staff is long gone; Joost told me as much in an email last week. And it only takes a few minutes for me to come tumbling back down to earth. Traffic is bottlenecked on the airport road, a polluted, potholed stretch of buckled tarmac running past office parks and power plants and gray industrial zones. Men come rapping on the window, selling socket wrenches and screwdrivers, air fresheners, dishrags, peanuts and pillows and pirated DVDs. A young guy hawking a vegetable peeler shaves thin, wilting slices off a head of cabbage. Boys lead old blind men between the slow-moving lanes, clanking loose change in metal cups. Nairobi, with all its dirty, free-wheeling, energetic sprawl, seems less a destination than a frame of mind. And quickly, joltingly, reluctantly, I’m channeling my inner hustle, leaving leafy, well-kept Kigali far behind.

In the gray, dusky half-light, I pull into the Backpackers compound. It was almost ten months ago that I first arrived in Kenya, sitting in this same yard in the cool pre-dawn hours, listening to the birds rioting in the trees. Whatever the future held was, on that wet Nairobi morning, something of a mystery. The chaos and intrigues of Papa Ken’s World, the harrowing trip to Samburu country in the north, the sultry weeks on the coast, eating samosas and coconut rice and watching the waves break across the shore: it was all a story waiting to be told, and one that, looking back after all these months, I’m not so sure I would’ve believed at the time. But here, now, back again, listening to those same birds squawking their dismal squawks in the treetops, there’s something strangely fitting about coming back to where I started.

If these past few months have been an adventure for me, they’ve been a more harrowing trip for Kenya. With the chaos following December’s disputed elections - the rioters took to the streets on New Year’s Eve: an inauspicious start to 2008 - the world watched as one of Africa’s most stable democracies steadily, bloodily unraveled. Now, after the storm, sifting through the wreckage of what those troubled months had wrought, Kenyans are coming to terms with the long, slow process of rebuilding. More than 150,000 are still displaced, hunkered down in tattered IDP camps around the country. Tensions remain high, with many Kenyans - uprooted from their homes, fleeing to their traditional tribal homelands - wary of what awaits should they return. The government, after spending months at each other’s throats, has concocted a “grand coalition” that seems to be less concerned with reconciliation than doling out the spoils of leadership to friends, families, and party cronies.

And the economy has taken a brutal hit. Tourist visits dropped by more than 50% in the early months of the year, compared to the same period in 2007. On the coast, where dozens of resorts are shuttered, more than 25,000 Kenyans are out of work. Western tea plantations were ravaged by fire during post-election riots. Dairy and grain farms were crippled when transportation came to a stand-still. Across the country, where thousands were displaced by violence, farmers are anxious for the start of the rainy season. Most were late to plant their crops before the rain’s onset, and experts are predicting food shortages as the country copes with a small harvest.

At Backpackers, where a former manager, Patricia, has stepped in to fill Papa Ken’s safari boots, the air is funereal. Business has been slow since the hostel reopened two months ago; for my first few nights, just a pair of wispy, somber backpackers flit through the halls like shadows. With the last hectic days of Ken’s reign resembling the fall of Saigon, the place was gutted by creditors and disgruntled employees - most of whom went unpaid for nearly three months. The yard which Ken had lavishly decked out with wooden tables and cushiony sofas is outfitted with a few meager sets of lawn chairs. The dorms which slept eight a piece are sparsely furnished: just two double bunks in the boys’ dorm, two single beds in the mixed. A solitary bed frame sits in the middle of the girls’ dorm, looking slightly adrift. The cleaning woman’s strung a clothesline across the room. She uses it to hang the laundry when it’s raining outside.

With an angry snarl of litigation surrounding it, it’s a minor miracle that the place has even opened its doors. More surprising still is how much of the old Backpackers gang I bump into during my first days in Nairobi. Isaac and John and the rest of the mechanics have taken up at the auto body shop next door; they’d been working there full-time before the owner hired them out to Ken. Freddy is frying up stews and nyoma choma at a restaurant nearby. Even Julius - flagging me down with his long, limber arms from across the street one bright morning - has landed back on his feet. He’s enlisted his son, Mike, to help him start a new safari venture, following none too closely the script written by a certain Papa Ken. The company will combine a youth hostel and campsite with affordable safari tours across East Africa. They’ve chosen the name Wild Ways Adventures, a tip of the hat, perhaps, to Papa Ken’s Wild Rover. They’ve also chosen a site just steps from where Ken himself once drunkenly raged: the Salama Annex, a favorite haunt of the ex-pats and pensioners who would pick up prostitutes at Annie Oakley’s next door.

Julius shows me around the place one afternoon, eager to show off the fruits of his labors. The post-election violence in Kibera hit his family hard. One of his sons was attacked by thugs with machetes - reprisal, Julius suspects, for an earlier confrontation with a neighbor - and the rapist who assaulted his daughter last year was set free. He’d been slogging through the Kenyan justice system when the riots began; justice had better things on her mind and quickly lost interest. Julius shakes his head sadly, his eyes dropping to the parking lot gravel.

“They were very bad times in Kibera,” he says, “very, very bad.”

Inside he introduces me to the owner - “Mama Salama” - and shows me around the hotel. Julius has struck a deal with Mama Salama to use some of the Annex’s rooms for Wild Ways Adventures - a bit of reciprocation for all the business he brought her way when he was working for an overland tour company years ago. He opens a few doors, stepping to the side with a dramatic sweep of his arm. The rooms are gaudy - dark woods, plush armchairs, layers of cheap, sensual fabrics suggesting the mean intimacy of a thousand one-night stands. Thick-heeled, fat-thighed, love-meager women have used these rooms for casual embraces. Adulterous husbands have fussed with their belts, smoothed their pants, inspected their collars for incriminating signs. I tell Julius the place looks swell. And admittedly, once you get past the hand-job allure, the rooms - with full baths and TVs and queen-sized beds - are, at twenty bucks a night, as good a deal as you’ll find in Nairobi.

Outside Julius shows me the campsite - still cluttered with gravel and rusted sheet metal - and the concrete barracks that will soon house dorm rooms. Workers bustle about, clouds of dust hanging heavy in the air, and things seem to be speeding along. Julius adjusts his cap and claps me loudly on the shoulder. They’re expecting their first guests in just a few weeks. He’s happier than I’ve ever seen him before, and as we sit down for a few celebratory Tuskers inside, he begins to lay all his cards on the table.

The dorms and camp ground are just the first steps: with time, Julius hopes Wild Ways can be a full-service safari center for East Africa and beyond. Already they’re organizing packages for Kenyan tours: the Masai Mara, Lake Nakuru, Amboseli, the coast. Soon they’ll incorporate northern Tanzania - the Serengeti, Ngorongoro - as well as gorilla tracking in Uganda and Rwanda. Once the company has hit full stride, they’ll be able to venture further afield: Ethiopia, Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique. Julius’ son, Mike, has spent the past five years working with overland tour groups in East and Southern Africa, and he flips through his passport so I can inspect the visas he’s amassed. Namibia and Botswana, Zimbabwe, Sudan. Julius beams as I show my appreciation. An overland veteran himself, he’s blazed many of the same trails over the course of his long career.

“I have spent these years training him to follow in my footsteps,” he says, giving Mike an affectionate pat on the arm.

With their overland connections, Julius and Mike are already lining up their first clients. Mike’s girlfriend in London has built them a website and is working on PR, and if there’s a strange new smell wafting through the halls of the Salama Annex, mingling with the stale beer and cheap perfume, it’s the smell of potential success. Both seem so fired up by their prospects, so eager to throw new ideas my way, that even I’m bitten by their hopeful bug. Why shouldn’t they be able to pull it off, after all the hard luck and empty promises that life has thrown at them? That Kenyans are still coping, hustling, struggling and striving seems like some sort of triumph, in the end. And with all the half-assed safari companies shuttling beat-up minibuses to the Masai Mara each week, Julius and Mike have as good a chance as any to find their own niche.

Somewhere - whether in a white-padded room, the arms of a hooker, or the streets of Sheffield - Papa Ken might even be smiling for him.

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Comments

[Ali]

13th April 2009 - Publish Day
Great to see you blogging again! - I've got some reading to do now :)