Into Africa
Many have read or heard of Karen Blixen’s memoir of her years in Africa entitled, “Out of Africa”. Ms. Blixen had come to Kenya from Denmark to marry Baron von Blixen. Her book covers the years from 1914 to 1931, when she lived on and managed a four-thousand-acre coffee plantation in the hills near Nairobi.
Mine is a much more modest memoir and in the reverse order. It’s entitled “Into Africa”. It’s about a period of time I spent in Ethiopia, Kenya and the Great Rift Valley, the main section of of which runs from the Red Sea south west across Ethiopia and south across Kenya, Tanzania, and Malawi to the lower Zambezi River valley in Mozambique. My focus is on Kenya, however, mostly because of the the special time I spent with it’s wondrous people. Much like Ms. Blixen’s memoir, mine is tremendously fond of the African people but mine is also very thankful for the wonderful lessons they taught me about our global humanity.
Twelve thousand kilometers or 7,300 miles separate New York City and Nairobi Kenya. Lufthansa’s service from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport requires two flights. The first is a seven hour and forty minute overnight flight from New York to Frankfurt Germany, Lufthansa’s primary hub. The second is an eight hour flight from Frankfurt to Nairobi.
The first thing an American notices when boarding Lufthansa’s airbus A380 aircraft is the international flare of the crew. Their dark navy blue uniforms with touches of gold in scars and neckties screech-out with sophistication. The well manicured crew, both men and women, add additional flare to the cabin setting. The sophistication and worldliness of the crew becomes even more obvious when you hear the way each crew member attempts to speak to passengers in a language that makes each passenger feel comfortable.
However, none of the attractiveness of the Lufthansa crew or the airbus cabin makes up for the tedium of being confined to the small space of an aircraft cabin for what amounts to a full business day. Only attentive and polite service can compensate. It quickly becomes obvious that’s what the Lufthansa crew was trained to do.
Arrival in Frankfurt requires a change of aircraft from the Airbus A380 to an Airbus 340 for the eight hour flight to Nairobi. It also requires disembarking and spending an hour or so in Frankfurt’s International terminal, which would otherwise be pleasant if it were not for the drowsiness of the seven hour sleep among a few hundred equally uncomfortable strangers.
What’s immediately alarming entering the terminal is the brightness of the lighting reflecting off the chrome furniture accompanied by the blaring of flight information being announced in a variety of languages throughout the terminal. All of that would be confusing even without the drowsiness. Adding to the Salvado Dali-like atmosphere of the terminal at 3:00 AM, New York time, is the sight of young Europeans straddling chrome stools, eating a variety of wurst and drinking large steins of beer for breakfast. At that point you really wish you accepted the gorgeous fruit dish the Lufthansa flight attendant offered just before dimming the cabin lights.
After a brisk wash-up in the Lufthansa lounge, however, it’s not that long before boarding begins for the eight hour flight to Nairobi. All of the exotic stories about Kenya from Karen Blixen’s “Out of Africa” and Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” to Jane Goodall’s life studying chimpanzee in neighboring Tanzania make the flight pass by in what seems like an instant. Even though it’s been two workdays since leaving New York the glistening sun and brilliantly clear blue sky of Kenya are spectacular in the true sense of the word spectacular.
Nairobi is only ninety miles or one hundred and forty kilometers from the Equator but at six tousand feet above sea level it’s year round climate and temperatures are very pleasant. February is the hottest month, with an average temperature of 21°C (69°F) and the coldest is July at 17°C (62°F). Generally Nairobi is a constant 20°C (70°F). Air pollution is a visible problem in Nairobi, however, taking away from the otherwise pollution free skies of Kenya. The city’s poor air quality is almost suffocating with congested streets where passenger vehicles, trucks and motorcycle taxis jostle for space while belching clouds of black smoke. Burning fuels for cooking and lighting creates household air pollution which only adds to in Nairobi’s poor air quality.
The first Christian mission in Kenya was founded in 1846, by Dr. Johann Ludwig Krapf, a German sponsored by the Church Missionary Society of England. Krapf established a station among the Mijikenda peoples on the coast. He later translated the Bible into Swahili.
In 1895 the British government claimed the interior of Kenya as far west as Lake Naivasha; it set up the East Africa Protectorate. The border was extended to Uganda in 1902, and in 1920 the enlarged protectorate, except for the original coastal strip, which remained a protectorate, became a British crown colony. With the beginning of colonial rule in 1895, the Rift Valley and the surrounding Highlands became reserved for whites.
By the time I worked in Nairobi in the 1990’s the economy and society had been dramatically changed from the days of the East Africa Protectorate. While few residents of Nairobi lived in gated communities like the one in this picture, a growing number of Kenyans and many expatriates did. Sadly, however, the gates that protected the residents and properties in this community were not decorative. They were essential protection from roaming groups of poor young men looking for a target on which they could unleash their indignation against wealth about which they had little understanding. With a promise of privacy from the poor majority and an assurance of sharing time with fellow moneyed neighbors, living in a gated community became every upper middle class Kenyan’s goal.
It was in a house like one of the ones above to which I was invited to dinner by my colleague, Jamie Barmasai and his wife, Lilly, along with their three lovely children, Sam. Caro, and Liz. Jamie was actually Nigerian while his wife Lilly and children were Kenyan.
Like many westerners, Jamie and Lilly met at the University of Nairobi where he studied economics and she nursing. Caro was 13, Sam was 11 and liz was 8, much like our three children. Sam especially reminded me of our youngest son, Tom. They were both boisterous but inclined to make sure they liked you before they let too much about themselves be known.
After diner this is the game I played with Sam. To me it looked like what we called “Chinese Checkers” in the States but in Kenya it’s called Pachisi, which is actually a Hindi name for a cross and circle board game that originated in medieval India. It’s been described as the “national game of India”.
It’s played on a board shaped like a symmetrical cross. A player’s pieces move around the board based upon a throw of six or seven cowrie shells, with the number of shells resting upwards indicating the number of spaces to move.
This is a picture of the 10 most popular video games being played by ten year olds in the U.S. while I was visiting Nairobi. Thinking about the difference was a bit startling to me but not as startling as when I had to say good-night to the children. After saying good night they walked up stairs to their bedrooms while their parents locked gates, like the following, at the bottom of the steps behind them.
Later that night Jamie and Lilly walked up the same steps to their bedroom while domestic security guards locked the same gates behind them. Parents and children were now locked-up in their bedrooms until the sun rose the next morning. I was seven thousand miles away from my son Tom and my family but could not imagine them having to be locked-up in the upstairs of our house in rural Pennsylvania while I was away. It was a startling revelation.
The other startling revelation I had during my visit with the Barmasai family was the way young children look-up to and admire their parents, especially boys their father and girls their mother. I had never been away from my family for any extended period of time before and, other than trying to be “a good parent”, had not given our parental relationship much thought. However, being seven thousand miles away from your family in a dramatically different culture forces thoughts like those to the forefront of your mind and can be intimidating.
Children the world over need parents and parenting. They may act like they don’t but that behavior in and of itself speaks to their craving for parenting.
Eleven year old boys like Tom and Sam, especially, want to show their independence from their older siblings who they believe are always ordering them to do one thing or another. Many times the younger siblings are absolutely correct. The older ones are ordering them around because they want to pretend they’re the parent. It didn’t take me long to notice how Jamie and Lilly had to “step-in” between their children, just like my wife and I, to remind them of everybody’s position in the family. Parents were parents with all of the authority and mostly responsibility and children were children with little but equal responsibility. Children may be responsible for alerting parents should a sibling be in jeopardy but they had no authority for ordering a sibling out of jeopardy. Both in Nairobi and rural Pennsylvania that type of ordering usually resulted in bad feelings and often bad consequences.
Universal aspects of family life is an observation I often wish people from all over the world could make. It’s the one thing I’ve found that forces us to understand our common humanity and the need we have for each other. Even if we’re all not parents we’ve all been members of a family. We’ve all at least had parents and relatives of one type or another. While those relationships have not always been the best they all should have taught us that every other human being we come to know has relationships with other human beings, most often other family members. Those relationships come with responsibilities and sometimes benefits. Tragically, children the world over bear the consequences of relationships among other human beings. Children are the defenseless ones who need to be protected and cared for. It’s adults, sometimes parents sometimes not parents, who’ve been given the duty to care for and defend defendless children.
This picture of the Mbevi family from Nairobi reminds me so much of the Barmasai family with whom I visited.
Simon Mbevi is the founder and director of Transform Nations. He’s Married to Sophia. The couple have two daughters, Covenant Mutheu & Beracca Muuo and a son Promise Muuo. Simon has written “Dad is Destiny: The Difference a Father Makes”, in which he writes, “A father’s shadow follows you wherever you go. Whether your father is (or was) present or absent, abusive or passive, good or not so good, you owe it to yourself to understand yourself better as you understand what you got or missed from your dad ”. That’s likely advice most psychologist and counselors in the west would offer those in their care. It only reinforces my wish that all could observe the universal aspects of the family on the lives of all human beings. It’s what I’ll remember most from my trip “Into Africa”.
Originally published at neutec.wordpress.com on March 14, 2018.
