CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
T OWARD THE END OF my second week in Kenya, Auma and I went on a safari.
Auma wasn’t thrilled with the idea. When I first showed her the brochure, she grimaced and shook her head. Like
most Kenyans, she could draw a straight line between the game parks and colonialism. “How many Kenyans do you
think can afford to go on a safari?” she asked me. “Why should all that land be set aside for tourists when it could be
used for farming? These wazungu care more about one dead elephant than they do for a hundred black children.”
For several days we parried. I told her she was letting other people’s attitudes prevent her from seeing her own
country. She said she didn’t want to waste the money. Eventually she relented, not because of my persuasive powers
but because she took pity on me.
“If some animal ate you out there,” she said, “I’d never forgive myself.”
And so, at seven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, we watched a sturdily built Kikuyu driver named Francis load our
bags onto the roof of a white minivan. With us were a spindly cook named Rafael, a dark-haired Italian named Mauro,
and a British couple in their early forties, the Wilkersons.
We drove out of Nairobi at a modest pace, passing soon into countryside, green hills and red dirt paths and small
shambas surrounded by plots of wilting, widely spaced corn. Nobody spoke, a discomfiting silence that reminded me of
similar moments back in the States, the pause that would sometimes accompany my personal integration of a bar or
hotel. It made me think about Auma and Mark, my grandparents back in Hawaii, my mother still in Indonesia, and the
things Zeituni had told me.
If everyone is family, then no one is family.
Was Zeituni right? I’d come to Kenya thinking that I could somehow force my many worlds into a single, harmonious
whole. Instead, the divisions seemed only to have become more multiplied, popping up in the midst of even the
simplest chores. I thought back to the previous morning, when Auma and I had gone to book our tickets. The travel
agency was owned by Asians; most small businesses in Nairobi were owned by Asians. Right away, Auma had tensed
up.
“You see how arrogant they are?” she had whispered as we watched a young Indian woman order her black clerks to
and fro. “They call themselves Kenyans, but they want nothing to do with us. As soon as they make their money, they
send it off to London or Bombay.”
Her attitude had touched a nerve. “How can you blame Asians for sending their money out of the country,” I had
asked her, “after what happened in Uganda?” I had gone on to tell her about the close Indian and Pakistani friends I had
back in the States, friends who had supported black causes, friends who had lent me money when I was tight and taken
me into their homes when I’d had no place to stay. Auma had been unmoved.
“Ah, Barack,” she had said. “Sometimes you’re so naive.”
I looked at Auma now, her face turned toward the window. What had I expected my little lecture to accomplish? My
simple formulas for Third World solidarity had little application in Kenya. Here, persons of Indian extraction were like
the Chinese in Indonesia, the Koreans in the South Side of Chicago, outsiders who knew how to trade and kept to