Michael Logan

Novelist, Journalist and other things ending in -ist

Limitless patience isn’t always a good thing

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If there was an Olympic discipline for waiting patiently, I am absolutely sure a Kenyan would win it, given the amount of training the average citizen has to go through every day.

I am in the process of trying to procure a birth certificate for our son Kristian, who was born on 13 December. On Tuesday, I went down to the city registry to begin the process, which I now realise will take a very, very long time.

The office itself looks like a paper bomb exploded. It is a tiny room in Nairobi City Hall, where every shelf is stuffed with old books piled high on one another. On every table are bundles of certificates, literally thousands of them, in no order whatsoever. The staff members have what can charitably be described as a leisurely approach, which involves drinking tea and eating chapatis while staring balefully at the scrum of people waving notification slips in an attempt to get their attention.

On the first day, I was sent away because the computers were down. On Wednesday, it took them an hour to establish they couldn’t find the certificate. This initial process involved a guy staring at the computer, typing in the notification number, staring at it again, typing the number, etc, until he wandered off to look for it. After leafing aimlessly through some bundles, he sent me off to Nairobi hospital so I could get the delivery note and help them find out who received the certificate.

An hour later, I return. They discover the guy who received the certificates isn’t there, and his phone is turned off (this is after another hour of waiting, and they only called him because I suggested). Off I go for lunch, with the promise they will look. An hour later I am back, only to find they are on a late lunch. They return 40 minutes late. Another woman then leafs through some papers, clearly unhappy at having to do her job.

She then tells me to come back tomorrow, when the guy should be there, and they will look again. At no point did anybody apologize for the loss, and the assumption was it was my issue to sort it out even though it was their mistake. When I explained they were making me run all over town to fix their mistake, I got a blank stare of the “why is this irritating mzungu annoying me” variety.

Throughout this all, there were at least 50 Kenyans going through similar grief. They all stood about, shaking their heads and telling me how bad it was. But not one of them was prepared to complain to the staff about the terrible system and their bad attitude.

Kenyans tell me all the time how pissed off they are that nothing works, but here’s the thing: the reason it doesn’t work is because you let it not work. If everybody in that office kicked up a stink, at the very least the employees would make an effort, if just for a quiet life. Yet it is the foreigners (including a London Somali lady who was having the same problem as me) that are left to complain. We can easily be dismissed as impatient interlopers who don’t understand Kenya, when all we are are people prepared to vocalize what everybody else is feeling.

So, Kenyans: if you want things to change, complain when it matters, instead of telling mzungus how terrible it is than looking faintly embarrassed when we do your complaining for you. If you guys had a bit less patience, the country would run better, and you wouldn’t build up five years of frustration that then suddenly explodes the way it did after the 2007 elections.

I’d like to die please

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I really need to take more pictures around Nairobi.

Yesterday morning I saw a man who apparently wished to give himself a menu of horrible ways to die.

He was at the top of a rickety structure comprised of two metal ladders lashed together to give double height. I would say with twine, but that would be dignifying what looked suspiciously like the string you would use to wrap a Christmas present. This ladder he was wobbling atop, about 20 feet off the ground, was leaning on a very tall, but threadbare hedge. He was on a hill, so the ladder was listing to about 25 degrees. He was using a sharp pair of shears to prune the hedge, which sat right on the edge of very busy road. Three feet away from his head was a transformer, attached to a pole leaning at a similar angle with electrical wires sagging.

So, I figure he could have fallen from the ladder, been electrocuted on the way down while stabbing himself in the neck with the shears, cracked his skull on the ground and then been run over by a lorry. I suspect that would have done the job.

Workmen don’t do health and safety in Nairobi.

The Kenyan Shining

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If ever anybody wanted to make a Kenyan version of The Shining, the Panari Sky Centre would be an ideal choice for the setting.

Looks very shiny and modern, right? In many ways, it is, but step inside past the glass and steel, take the elevator to the second-floor entertainment complex that includes an ice rink, children’s center and a closed-down cinema, and you will see what I mean.

We went skating on Saturday to find a handful of people describing forlorn and awkward circles on the melting ice in a barn-like room decorated by sad loops of tinsel that gave the vibe of Christmas in an old folks’ home, where the pensioners nod off over their pudding and dream of better days. Outside the rink are two empty glass counters where once you could buy tickets for the two cinema screens, whose entrances look more like the doorways to confessional booths.

In the deserted kids’ area you will find: an unbounced-on bouncy castle; a bucking bronco whose flaking plastic skin makes it look like it is suffering from foot-and-mouth disease; a huge plastic fountain, sporting a spooky eagle, where spotlights without bulbs hang limply over an empty basin full of dead flies; one of those machines where you try to pick up a cuddly toy with a crane – except the threadbare toys stare hopelessly out at you with dead eyes, pleading for release from their years of captivity; and a candyfloss salesman who looks like he has to live on his wares, so rare are customers.

Admittedly, the Panari doesn’t have the long history of the Overlook Hotel, and most of the ghosts would be of the customers who never came rather than those who indulged in sex, drugs, murder and the occult, but it is a wonderfully creepy location.

I think I feel a short story coming on.

Cyclist’s Tricep 1, Nob End Motorist 0

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I’ve often been cautioned against cycling in Nairobi, usually taking the form of the question “Are you a complete mentalist?” when I say I use my bike to get around. Despite these concerns, I’ve never found it to be as dangerous as people say and never had a collision – until today.
I was merrily cycling along a quiet back road in Kilimani when a nutbag in a 4×4 zipped past and slapped his wing mirror into my tricep. I heard the sound of his wing mirror smash as I veered into the gutter and fell off.

He clearly knew he had hit me, and accelerated off. Once I’d checked my arm wasn’t broken (it’s fine), I vowed revenge in a manly fashion to a startled gaggle of young white girls nearby and chased him with the intention of remonstrating vigorously (i.e. punching him in the coupon). Over the brow of the hill, I saw his car at the next junction, where it had collided with another vehicle. In his attempt to flee, he had gone onto the wrong side of the road then tried to force his way back in when confronted by an oncoming vehicle.

In true Kenyan fashion, a mob of outraged bystanders had formed, and were giving the guy pelters for hitting me then the other car. He brazenly tried to say he hadn’t seen me, despite all the evidence to the contrary, and then offered to pay for the damage. Considering the damage to my arm was zero, and the damage to his car was a broken wing mirror and a dented front right fender, I felt justice had been done, and cycled off leaving him to the growing crowd of wananchi wanting to have their say.

The offence wasn’t serious enough for a lynching, so I think he is probably ok. He’ll know never to mess with a Scotsman’s tricep again, though.

Kenya cops and their guns

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You know, I do rather wish that Kenyan police officers would keep their automatic weapons pointed at the ground a bit more often.

I’m sure you’ve seen the scene in Pulp Fiction, when Samuel L. Jackson is a bit too casual with his handgun and ends up spraying gore out of the back of the kid in the backseat’s head. Well, on more than one occasion, a cop has sat down next to me on a bus with his gun clutched across his chest. It is very disconcerting to have a gun barrel waggling around inches from your temple as the rickety old bus jiggles over potholes. I have this strange desire to keep my brain inside my skull, rather than splattered all over the grubby windows of a KBS banger. Call me picky if you like, but that’s just the way I feel.

Equally, having two officers sauntering in front of you in a busy shopping center with their guns slung over their shoulders, the barrels swinging around jauntily at head height, makes me feel a touch uneasy. Such moments are the only point in my life I wish I were at least a head shorter. It isn’t like the guns are exactly modern either, and who knows whether the safety is on.

Every day you read that the police have bravely shot dead “suspected” criminals in a variety of situations. I do wonder how many of those deaths were of the “my gun went off when I was picking my nose too vigorously and blew a hole in the forehead of a 79-year-old blind cripple, who has just become a notorious criminal” variety.

Things I love about Kenya 4 – racist dance troupes

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They are Kenya’s answer to the Black and White Minstrel Show, an act so incredibly racist that white people probably should take offense. But they are also very, very funny.

I’m talking about certain dancers who dress up as old colonials. They wear khaki safari shorts, shirts and hats. White socks sprout out from tackety boots and climb up to knobbly knees. Huge fake bellies swell their shirts to the verge of button-popping. Their faces are painted with big white beards. Their dance is all slapstick: they blow whistles, twirl canes, fall over, kick each other in the ass, stamp around with a bandy-legged gait.

The first time I saw the act was in Visa Place, as we were waiting for the incredibly vulgar guitarist Mike Rua to come on and play what was essentially the same song for the rest of the evening (nothing wrong with that, of course – Galaxie 500 made a career out of playing one song in 30 different ways). We were the only white folks in the packed, sweaty bar, which stank of the grilled chicken, goat and beer just consumed.

When the dancers started their routine, people went crazy: pissing themselves laughing, slapping their thighs, the whole bit. It was highly entertaining, but I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened had we been in Western Europe and the dancers had been white men blacked-up and dressed in the Western idea of traditional African garb. They would have been booed off the stage. In Visa Place, people just kept glancing at us and laughing even more. Such behaviour is so un-PC in the UK that in a recent theatrical production about Al Jolson’s life, they did not show him blacked-up to avoid causing offence.

That’s one of the funny things about Kenya. It is perfectly acceptable to work on a whole set of assumptions about all white people – essentially, to be racist.

I’ve had many conversations with Kenyans, during which I told them some things about my own culture that were surprising to them. In the interests of promoting cultural understanding, I’d like to clear up a few myths:

1. There are poor white people and white criminals, although we have essentially moved all of them to one city, Glasgow, where hopefully they will fall on each other like the rabid dogs they are and perish (although we tried this a long time ago, and the end result was Australia).

2. We can dance. Shuffling from side-to-side, out of time to the music, arms flopping around: this counts as dancing, doesn’t it?

3. White people can actually wash a dish, pick up their dirty clothes, carry a shopping bag – although admittedly you don’t see much evidence of that in Nairobi.

4. Not every white person is a complete mug who will gaily splash money around. Some of us are Scottish.

5. Yes, we do have enormous penises (this may be a rumour I am trying to spread myself).

I could go on. And I usually do. But on this occasion I won’t. So there.

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