wave at the two waiters who remained standing by the kitchen, thinking they must have somehow failed to see us. For
some time they managed to avoid my glance, but eventually an older man with sleepy eyes relented and brought us
over two menus. His manner was resentful, though, and after several more minutes he showed no signs of ever coming
back. Auma’s face began to pinch with anger, and again I waved to our waiter, who continued in his silence as he wrote
down our orders. At this point, the Americans had already received their food and we still had no place settings. I
overheard a young girl with a blond ponytail complain that there wasn’t any ketchup. Auma stood up.
“Let’s go.”
She started heading for the exit, then suddenly turned and walked back to the waiter, who was watching us with an
impassive stare.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Auma said to him, her voice shaking. “You should be ashamed.”
The waiter replied brusquely in Swahili.
“I don’t care how many mouths you have to feed, you cannot treat your own people like dogs. Here...” Auma snapped
open her purse and took out a crumpled hundred-shilling note. “You see!” she shouted. “I can pay for my own damn
food.”
She threw the note to the ground, then marched out onto the street. For several minutes we wandered without apparent
direction, until I finally suggested we sit down on a bench beside the central post office.
“You okay?” I asked her.
She nodded. “That was stupid, throwing away money like that.” She set down her purse beside her and we watched
the traffic pass. “You know, I can’t go to a club in any of these hotels if I’m with another African woman,” she said
eventually. “The askaris will turn us away, thinking we are prostitutes. The same in any of these big office buildings. If
you don’t work there, and you are African, they will stop you until you tell them your business. But if you’re with a
German friend, then they’re all smiles. ‘Good evening, miss,’ they’ll say. ‘How are you tonight?’” Auma shook her
head. “That’s why Kenya, no matter what its GNP, no matter how many things you can buy here, the rest of Africa
laughs. It’s the whore of Africa, Barack. It opens its legs to anyone who can pay.”
I told Auma she was being too hard on the Kenyan, that the same sort of thing happened in Djakarta or Mexico City-
just an unfortunate matter of economics. But as we started back toward the apartment, I knew my words had done
nothing to soothe her bitterness. I suspected that she was right: not all the tourists in Nairobi had come for the wildlife.
Some came because Kenya, without shame, offered to re-create an age when the lives of whites in foreign lands rested
comfortably on the backs of the darker races; an age of innocence before Kimathi and other angry young men in
Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta started to lash out in street crime and revolution. In Kenya, a white man could
still walk through Isak Dinesen’s home and imagine romance with a mysterious young baroness, or sip gin under the
ceiling fans of the Lord Delamare Hotel and admire portraits of Hemingway smiling after a successful hunt, surrounded
by grim-faced coolies. He could be served by a black man without fear or guilt, marvel at the exchange rate, and leave a
generous tip; and if he felt a touch of indigestion at the sight of leprous beggars outside the hotel, he could always
administer a ready tonic. Black rule has come, after all. This is their country. We’re only visitors.
Did our waiter know that black rule had come? Did it mean anything to him? Maybe once, I thought to myself. He
would be old enough to remember independence, the shouts of “Uhuru!” and the raising of new flags. But such
barré
(Barré)
#1