Africa No.3 - Co-existence / Kenya

In Kenya, human world and animal world are parallel..

They are mixed up altogether, making a big mess trying to confuse a random tourist like me.

（a beauty, Masai Mara)

As soon as I came in to Nairobi, I made a booking for a safari tour for Masai Mara. 310 US dollars for 3 days including entrance fee for the national park. Not bad.

I felt a bit pressured that time. Pressured to see touristic Africa. Animals in savanna. Lions hunting zebras there. Rangers driving around trying to spot them. These are everyone’s image about Africa and I wanted to finish them before going to off-the-beaten-tracks.

So I went with a tour group out for the national park- which is too huge to be called a national park, by a scrapped old Nissan 4WD. It took us a while day to get there after several times of engine break-downs. It was already eventide when the 4WD opened its roof to make it an open-air safari drive. The red sun was starting to set and trying to add some pink-orange flavor to this originally brownish national park. And there were a herd of zebras.

To our excitement, our driver who was a ranger as well started out the safari car. ‘It is not just zebras’, he said. ‘You will see more than that in a few seconds.’

And there they were. A couple of lions indulging in the dead flesh of a buffalo.

We could almost hear the sound of them crunching. Thud thud. They masticated the dark-red flesh and pure-white bones into the stomach. Then they started to flirt. It went on for 10-20 minutes and we felt a bit awkward than exciting after a few minutes.

(a couple, Masai Mara)

Animals kept on appearing to our sight for the next day and the day after. Hot bonny giraffes, sad fate looking antelopes, monstrous gnus and buffalos. African elephants lumbering around and white little birds singing on gray trunks of elephant. Jackals. Families of cat-like lions and cheetahs relaxing and gamboling at home. And zebras again and again.

What amazed us the most was none of those safari-like animals. It was a single hippopotamus walking on the dry savanna.

A hippo on the land? I was suspicious when our ranger ordered us be quiet. We were enjoying taking photos of a lion family at that moment. Kids were crawling around the mother lion and they totally looked like cats.

We saw the direction the ranger told us to see. There was merely a black and round little thing walking towards us, and this black thing turned out to be quite slimy. For sure it was a hippo getting out of the Masai river.

As the hippo was getting closer, the mother lion started to stare it, getting ready to stand up and fight against the hippo. Lions kids went behind her, watched attentively the situation.

“A hippo is strong.” I read this somewhere. “If they get down to work seriously they can always harm lions. They are the strongest.” Kidding, I supposed when I read this. I knew I had to believe it this time though. The mother lion gave her-and her family’s- way to the hippo.

That hippo was no longer a lazy snoozing hippo which we have always seen. It was a strongest animal which menace a herd of lions simply by walking towards them.

Co-existence, I felt. And compartmentalization at the same time. Some distinct species have their own territory which others cannot intrude. But they still have to encounter.

(a family, Masai Mara)

*

Having 42 tribes in one country, Kenyans speak their tribe language and good English as well, but not that much of Swahili, like Tanzanians do. This implies part of their identity comes from their tribal origins, and not very much from their country-Kenya.

We hear lots of news about conflicts between ethnicities in Kenya now and then. 5 years ago in 2008 there was a conflict concerning the election campaign, of which 2 candidates were from 2 major tribes in Kenya, Luo and Kikuyu. This conflict has been spread out and ended up killing the thousands of people from the ethnicity which opposing candidate belonged to.

The following election in 2013 has been done peacefully and things about the ethnic conflict seemed like slowing down. But there was still smoldering feeling of bitterness even after the Supreme court declared it fair that one candidate won 50.07%.

I noticed how much influence the politics has on their identity, when I went over to the suburban town of Machakos, 2 hours drive from Nairobi and majority of this town is Akamba tribe, who has round little face, amiable characters and uptempo music with peculiar rhythm. They say this town is a town of Akamba tribe. Even outside Machakos they say the same thing. When I talked to a taxi driver in Nairobi telling him that I just visited Machakos a week before, he turned out to be a Akamba tribe and said, ’Machakos is a nice town as it is a town of Akamba tribe.’

This peaceful middle-sided town was getting noisier that time, to prepare for the coming election campaign. Politics here is all about ethnicity, and ethnicity is the origin of Kenyans’ identity.

                                                                                                            

(girls,' I know who I am')

Getting back to Nairobi, there are two contrastive shanty towns that I’ve visited; Kibera slum and Koch slum.

Kibera slum. Located in a bit west but in the center of Nairobi, is the biggest slum in Kenya, second biggest in Africa, with a million habitants living inside. I went there with a tour, paying 16 USD and wondering if this was a zoo visit. Can their normal lives be an exhibition itself?.

There are little blocks which differentiate the group who live in the same area, and these areas have names. The tour guide was from a certain block, and he warned us before coming in, ‘Kibera slum in general is not safe. As long as you guys stick to me you are safe, but only in this area. Because they know me and do not give my foreign friends any harm. I cannot guarantee your safety outside.’

Kibera slum was the slum just as you imagine as ‘shanty towns’. Pavement torn off-or still under construction, dusty area with smell of excreta, garbage found everywhere. Kids run around, women work, men never work. Very much crowded. Staring at foreigners with cameras and trying to tell them this is not a circus here.

When you ask them where they are from, their answers would not be ‘Kibera’. They would answer with the area code of Kibela, or they would even answer with their ethnic origin. I heard that the mobility in this slum is quite high. People come, live temporarily, and go. No wonder they do not identify themselves as Kibera people. No wonder people kill the next door in the next block, even in the same slum area. They are separated in the name of the area name or origin name. They solely kill somebody from different species.

(Kibera from above)

Koch slum-its official name is Korogocho, is located in the east side of Nairobi, slightly smaller than Kibera, 4th largest slum in Nairobi. I was lucky to meet up with my old friend for the first time in 2 years in Nairobi. She started up the music label which release some talented young artists in Nairobi, and during my stay in Nairobi there was a Christmas live held by this music label, and held in Koch.

Driving through the middle of the slum heading for the live show, Koch slum seemed at first just like the other shanty areas like Kibela. Roads were narrow and dirty, noisy and overpopulated. Blocks that separate was invisible that time, but I guessed there were. Women baked corns on the street and this smell of baking made me hungry.

The live show was really cool. Much more stylish than I had expected. It was held in the church hall, open air. They played hip-hop, rap and pop for 3-4 hours on end. They sang and danced, involving everybody at the hall. Audience was so charged up. So was I. It was such an exciting moment. Time flied.

It was only in the after party when I knew that those artists who played that day were all from Koch. My friend, a music label owner said that Koch is full of enthusiasm with talent. This was the place she came for the master thesis and since then she has been chasing the opportunity with Koch youngsters.

‘Why was it Koch?’ I pitched her a question which she must have been pitched thousands of time.

‘It was Koch from my first sight.’ She answered. ‘There was a sense of thirsting for music here, and more importantly, a sense of unity to heap up the town with their voice, rhythm and music.’

It might be the identification, I felt. In Koch slum, people live longer for a few generations. This is not a temporary area of living. They take root up here and as a ‘Koch citizen’, they try to sing and live.

(sing and dance in Koch)

Co-existence, I felt. Or compartmentalization. It means to live side by side with somebody different. It already implies the difference of identities of the ones who live together. Lions and a hippo. Luo tribe and Kikuyu tribe.

But the scope of this somebody can either stretch or shrink. Very easily. Depending on their identity. Either animals or humans.

(Masai, let's go)