A change in continents

Nairobi at two in the morning is not yet the noisy, chaotic, crowded and crazy place it will be a few hours later, but it’s still nuts. There are still thousands of cars milling about the streets, ignoring the lines painted in the road, driving the wrong way around roundabouts, dodging pedestrians with death-wishes and armfuls of something. The headlights are all dim and yellowed, the dust is thick and obscures the bicycles and vehicles without lights until the last minute, the horns are loud but still unable to make the bus in front move out of the way.

Locally, the new highway is called the “Super Highway”. It is being built by the Government of China and it is a massive undertaking. When it is finished it will hopefully channel traffic much more effectively north from Nairobi to the central provinces. But right now, it is a building site, and the cars and trucks and buses and so on are forced to edge their way around the bollards and the ditches, compress four lanes in to one at the bridges which are under construction, navigate the huge earth moving diggers that roar and stumble over the corrugated earth.

A lot of Kenyans I talk to like the Chinese for their approach to development aid. There is no hidden agenda of settlement and colonization, at least not on the surface. The engineers and trades supervisors arrive in their thousands, work on building the road for a few years, and then go home. They are replaced by others, on similar short term contracts. To a lot of Kenyans, many of whom are landless and unemployed, this is a much better approach than that of farmers coming to settle traditional lands.

Others are not so sure. They talk of the fact that Chinese entrepreneurs have bought up great swathes of farm land and are starting huge agribusinesses, which then export food to China. They may not settle the land, but they own it.

Yesterday I went on a short safari, to the Nairobi Game Park.  Our driver spoke of the fact that during the last tourist season, about 90 per cent of his clients were Chinese visitors. He had to talk to them through an interpreter, and found it hard because so much of what you see on safari comes in fleeting glimpses that require quick reactions to the voice of the guide. Although he laughed as he spoke, he wasn’t really joking when he said that soon there would be Chinese guides for the safari tours.

Like all stories, this one has two sides. For some, the Government of China is providing much needed development and jobs to a country which needs the assistance but does not want a return to its colonial past. For others, the Government of China is protecting its food supply and security interests and providing work opportunities for the huge surplus of unmarried young men which has resulted from the one child policy.

As we drove back through the traffic of a Nairobi evening, sated with our close-up experiences (and hundreds of photographs) of lion, rhinoceros, hippo, buffalo, giraffe, and dozens more, we crossed the new highway. The arc lights were still blazing, men were still working, dust was still billowing.

We got back to the guest house and I decided to take a shower. As I unwrapped the little bar of soap which sat on the sink, I noticed the brand. “Imperial Leather”. Now that’s ironic.