phoenixfire

I’ve got the greens at work.  Like the blues, with nothing to do, but green: absent-mindedly skimming over niblets of information on ethical living and campaigning.  Currently I can’t write to my MP because it would just give me more work to do.

As is, I’m doing a hit on the charity shops/Homebase tonight with Greg.  I’ve had a wonderful weekend with Louise over in Bristol, with her Own Life well and truly set up and running - and I’m quite jealous.  Actually, I’m also moving into Adult Life ™ as of Thursday, when I pick up the key for my new room down on Mill Road; the area of town where Tescos are fighting squatters, the grocery is run by dreadlocks with people attached, and all tea is fairtrade.  Oh, it also has all the charity shops and drugs help agencies in town, too.  I get on well with the squatters on the proposed controversial Tescos site.  It’s a good start.

In order to move in, though, I sort of need to buy Things - namely all the doohicks and knobbular devices that make up Living, like maybe a saucepan and a pillow and maybe bedsheets or even a towel.  It is a funny thing, starting relatively from scratch - what, no duvet?  So I’ve been casing the Salvation Army for a while.  Logistically, though, living out of a bag in your boyfriend’s room with only a bike for freedom means that carting a double duvet from Mill Road to Oxford Road back to Mill Road is not so practicable.  And I realise that life will be more complicated without cutlery (Sally Ann’s does a big crate of old silver knives and forks for 20p a hit, though, so that’ll be sorted.)

Basically, I will be adding all my purchases up, both in cost and green-ness, and writing it all down here.  I’m optimistic that I can get, ooh, over 60% of my New English Life second-hand, recycled and ethical, before I even begin.

nafikiri kwamba dunia yangu imekuwa kidogo kuliko mbele; ni takriban Julai na marafiki wangu wataondoka Cambridge baadaye kidogo. Watu wote ila Charlotte, yaani. Lakini pia, dunia yangu ni kidogo zaidi kwa sababu nimemaliza schule hatimaye. Nimejitambulisha kwamba hii ni dunia kweli - watu hawawekana nyumbani, hakuna miradi bila inayofanya pekee yako, hakuna watu wanaokuambia kuenda kufanya vitu. Nahisi huru. Naipenda kuliko kuwa chuoni; sasa, najua kwamba nikifanya jambo, nimelifanya pekee langu, na siwezi kujiambia eti silifanyi. Nimetaka hii kwa muda mrefu sana, tangu nilikuwa na miaka kumi na tano; na sasa, nahisi ajabu kutafuta uhuru uzima.

si mbaya! Nina kila kitu kikubwa sasa, bila gari; nina kazi, chumba changu Mill Road, na vitu nitavyopata wiki ijayo vitakuwa vikwachu sana - vitu kwa chumbani changu, labda deski, vitu kwa jikoni, khadalika.

Ni siku shwari leo kazini - nimemaliza kazi yangu, na labda nitaenda Tesco’s kwa chakula. Kiswahili changu si mbaya sana leo, lakini sijafanya mazoezi mingi - labda nitaendelea na kuandika hapani kiswahili.

nina siku huru kesho - nafikiri nitaenda kupata nguo kwa kazi, labda nitaogelea, na halafu kuenda kutafuta deski kwa chumbani Salvation Army. Poa.

In that, I got some. I got the job I wanted: asylum seeker caseworker.

That is all, for there is a bottle of wine saying: I am merlot, tasty deep merlot, let me make your liver into fine brussels pate in celebration.

do you think three job applications in a day? enough? I think so.
I’ve done all the filing here, they can’t complain.

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My last full day on Zibbular, and I’ve spent most of it eating excellent food, reading PD James, doing my homework and talking to the Swarm O’Men ™ that haunt single white girls, probably in roughly the same numbers as mosquitoes.

I’ve had a fantastic two weeks.  Like any tourist destination, Z-Flangibule got me down after three days, and then has spent the rest of the time getting me up again.  From sussing out the posh hotels’ happy hours - it’s entirely possible, each evening here, to have an extremely happy 2 1/2 hours, if you know the route - to finding the best thali I’ve ever had, the best samosa I’ve ever had, and the largest prawn I’ve ever had.  Things are not just food-based (although I am in that respect a very happy girl) - I’ve taken my day trips to Matemwe and Kendwa, run about the island in a car, and gone on a mass tailoring binge, buying fabric from the market and using my tailor next door.

I hasten to add that everything has been done in Swahili.  I can actually speak it, relatively fluently and off-bat, without thinking about it anymore.  My speaking is as ever three paces behind my writing it, and my understanding it is still hampered by the speed at which people speak here - but I know that’ll get better, and that Zibb*ping*bar is known for fast swahili.  Nairobi, in retrospect, was a lot easier.  But if I can debate the European Union, explain social problems in England, and argue about Kenyan politics with my teacher, I doubt I’m so awful now.

It’s definitely been a two weeks of tiny successes; a lot of reading, some nice dresses, being able to say “despite being a developed country as people say, England has some gun crime, drug problems and homelessness”, home-cooked prawns, and no Mills and Boon.  Nothing desperately earth-moving, but I’ve been very happy.

Now, I have a lesson soon - I think my last, and then I’m going to the tiny Omani restaurant I found, and having a glass of cold white by the sea.  Tomorrow I head back to Dar, whenever I’m ready - afternoon, I think - and jump about in excitement due to Louise’s arrival on Friday morning.  After that, I don’t know.  I’m not making the plans.

I’m just going to rewrite my Znamularian first post.  I am trying never to spell Zann*gonnng* the same way twice, which is proving exciting.

So, it’s my sixth day on Zzuuuup-lar,or specifically Unguja.  It’s hot here, especially in the alleys where the breeze doesn’t reach.  I’m on friendly terms with most of the guys down the main tourist tread, except the pushy few, and have set myself up cosily in my room in a flat (for directions see title.)  I’m having two hours of lessons every morning with Mohammed at SUZA, who is a very good mwalimu, and I think I’m being an alright mwanafunzi, too.  Sitting at sunset every evening doing my homework, reading with a rum and ice, and I’m going swimming most afternoons after the hot bit.  I’ve bought prawns in the market and tomatoes from the shop, and tonight I don’t know whether to treat myself to dinner out or batter some aubergine pieces and whack them in the pan at home.  I also found a brilliant thali restaurant last night, and ate all their chutney.

So, salaama tu hapa - a peaceful existence.  On monday I met a great guy called Gene, who I spent all yesterday with driving about the island - now pretty determined to rent myself a vespa and get down south, where we didn’t manage.  I obviously have a lot of time to think here, and am gradually making myself a map of sudan history/politics from my bevy of overly academic beach reading - that’s a fun little project.  (I’m playing “spot the Maadhiyya,” “hunt the slave,” and I haven’t even got to Gaddafi yet.)  I’m going to have to make up little projects for myself, especially since I have lessons over the weekend - I think Sunday I’ll go to church (a usefully free way of getting past the entrance fee otherwise) and tomorrow, I’ll wander about looking at the outsides of mosques and watching the people about.  I’m hardly bored, just aware that if I spend all my time on the beach cultivating freckles, I’m gonna run out of new body parts to collect them on.

I should not travel on my own, I create a monologue.  Currently, in my mind, I am a pirate.  d-ARRR.

I’m in Dar, yes, after the longest bus-ride in the history of bleh.   I was also a little post-tipsy from Yolana’s birthday party at simmers, which was enjoyable until my alarm went off at 5am.  But I’m here, I have a hotel room, I’ve discarded the damn lonely planet and am currently wandering the town practicing my “ASK DIRECTIONS” lesson.  I am working my way through my vocabulary - cathedral, bank, internet cafe, cafe (”na air conditioning” was an interesting phrase, it’s stupidly hot here, why is it this hot? make it stop.)  I am excited, I have a flat in Zanzibar, swahili lessons, and sunscreen.  I also have a safari booked to Ngorongoro, Ulduvai and Manyara, and both lodges have swimming pools.  No!  The hedonism!

Right, I’m off to the museum.  makavazi!

I visited Kibera yesterday, to see Peter, our friendly BIEA security guard.  The joys of his tiny one-room house, which he shares with his cousin, pictures of his fiancee Edina, a JSTOR mousemat (I kid not) and soda-fuelled picture-taking.  Then we went for a walk, to see the graffiti.  I was not necessarily prepared for the burnt-out petrol station, the burnt church, and the rows and rows of houses, entirely burnt.  We went to the market, which is being rebuilt very fast - people have left the Kikuyu area, Peter says for when they come back.  Peter is not necessarily the most Kikuyu-friendly person, which is why he’s still living there - there are no Kikuyus in Kibera.  I’m usually relatively good at asking intelligent questions, but I lost all handle on the situation when I saw the church and houses.  (Me: why was the church burnt? Peter: because Moi used to pray there.  Me: were people hurt?  Peter: no.  Me: Were those Kikuyu houses?  Peter: yes.  Me: Were people hurt?  Peter:  yes.)

Anyway.  Exhausting in a lot of ways.

Still in Nairobi, just got back to town from the YMCA pool, where I sat with my old-school swimming costume and read my sudan books and notes.  Gosh, I’m cool.  (or “street”?  I’m trying to work out what that means.  maybe “real”?)  a quiet weekend before Yolana comes back on Tues, after which follows Y’s birthday and my leaving for Tanzania on Friday.  Eeesh!  It’s all going very fast.  After grumbling about being stuck in Nairobi for six weeks last year, I’m now in shock that I only have… under two weeks in total left here.  I love this city, the hawkers that won’t leave, the mungiki marches, the slap-happy police, the sun, the matatus, the old ODM dude that wanders around saying ‘Odinga!’ and giving people the thumbs up… all of it.

Quite looking forward to Tanz, though.  Bit worried about my swahili prowess and how the Zanzibar teaching shall go, but really, where else to be bad at swahili but on a beach south of the equator?  I am tempted to become a beach bum, get dreadlocks, call myself Captain Monster Crab, buy a dhow and get a white tourist girlfriend to keep me in cash.

I spent two weeks in Sudan, first in Rumbek making a survey of an 18-century slaving fort and then in Juba making contacts with the University and local ministers, and looking at the mess that is the archive.  It was around 40 degrees the entire trip, so I’m a bit behind on sleep, and also behind on thinking through everything that happened and was seen there - however, I have already got a goody-bag of PhD ideas from Justin and am making myself a reading list of Sudan, migration, human rights, political diaspora stuff: hopefully come December I’ll be applying to somewhere among Oxford or IDS for a PhD on some of those ideas.

So!  That’s what I wanted to get out of the BIEA placement ultimately, and it’s happened.  And, if I wanted a challenge, researching in a country that will probably (or according to the EU, church and UN people we met, definitely) go tits up in style in 2010-11 - when I might be researching.  Not to mention the logistical nightmare that is South Sudan.  I was already thinking Kenyan research might be a bit formulaic and hard to find something new to do on in political activism areas, so - Sudan, then.

This is all very good.  I also am seeing the end of living in Nairobi and working for the BIEA, despite Justin continuing to offer me projects and trips well into May/June - which is in itself flattering.  But I had a mental list of things I wanted from this trip, and I’ve ticked off all of them where the research and experience and ideas are concerned.  So, I think I’m heading to Zanzibar in a few weeks (and I think I’m ruling out a trip to Rwanda, because of distance and money and not really being that big a “traveller”, due partly to knee, hip and back problems on buses.)  ZUSA have said they’ll give me intensive swahili lessons for two weeks, and it’s a fantastic place to practice and have some down time.  So I’m getting excited, and will spend this week planning, rebooking my flight home, and looking at buses and Zanz/Tanz plans for the visiting troupe in April.

Have to go to a cafe and write my hadithi husu kila kitu kwamba mimi hufanya - I have lessons on my own this week and have to crack down on these blasted noun classes.  Although I now can translate most of the choruses of the hip hop on the matatu ghetto blasters, so there’s progress.  My vocabulary is expanding regarding hos, sex, jewellery and guns.

Oh, and just in Kenya-news, this place is tame after Juba.  Everything will be fine.  Personally, I want Annan to force Kibaki’s hand towards the unchanged 2002 constitution (not the bastardised Bomas one that was voted against in the referendum of 2005) and agree to ODM’s now relatively reasonable concessions and demands.  Get the 80-year-olds out of power and into gardening and bridge.  Think Moody Awori has gone today, which is great.

I thought I’d do it over lunch, instead.  I mean, Nairobi ain’t a hotbed of things to do on a Sunday unless you fancy buying Primark tops from the street hawkers or bawling hymns from speaker systems.

I could write a blow-by-blow account of what’s been happening to me over the last month, but the newspapers do on-the-spot interviews so much better with people that actually matter and have terrible stories.  The only thing I can think of that would be maybe interesting for my small audience on this site is some kind of recap of things I’ve thought about in the past few weeks.

Point One. The elections were like elections in Kenya have been for the last ten years - swung by electoral boundary politics, local violent protection and interest groups like Muungiki, fiddled by electoral officials from the ballot box to senate house, and modified by a constitution that desperately needs to be changed without the 2005 ‘alterations’.  That is the background sum and total.  What made these elections different - which in many ways they were not, from the main contestants being the same old faces for the last forty years to the same old tricks and issues used for bargaining in the run-up - were massive media pressure, Steadman and others’ opinion polls, the maneuvring of ODM and the split of ODM-K creating blocs that necessarily reflected the social, economic and geographical divides in Kenya - reflected in the ODM rallying call of Majimboism, and the fact that the election was going to be incredibly, incredibly close.  Since I arrived in Kenya, every newspaper was announcing the latest opinion poll, putting Kibaki and Odinga head to head with 1% difference every time; this served mostly to make everyone particularly nervous, create astronomically high turnout rates, and make everyone with a power stake in the outcome -

sorry, I just had to look out the window.  Another demonstration is being broken up, just a group of youths (or ‘inciters’ as many of the hawkers call them, I watched hawkers beat up an inciter who’d tried to bring his demonstrators onto their ‘patch.’  The hawkers need to work, and they need peace to do it, so they guard their territory in blocs.  It’s interesting watching.)

anyway - like landlords, local community leaders, businessmen with tenders to buy, and all the others who use the centre-heavy Kenyan power structure -  interested in making sure power falls into the right hands.  Kenyan politics is weighted towards a Presidency with vast central powers for allocation of resources and opportunities (I could reference to this to Frederick Cooper and de Waal, but that would confirm that I am actually writing an undergrad essay here, and I’m pretending I’m not).  By December, everyone who needed to be worried about the elections were worried, because a lot of interests rode on making sure the outcome was ‘right’.

So, the elections were rigged, at all levels, from intimidation to abuse of illiterate voters to obstruction to forging papers and ultimately fiddling numbers at the high end.  I’m not making a call about which party did more - PNU definitely has the money, from state coffers and from a powerful overseas business community - but everyone was party.  Initial violence was, I think, partly over the ridiculous non-organisation of the ECK, who released the results as they came in, which was ODM areas first and PNU areas second, giving Odinga an initial lead out of proportion with realities (central valley has a lot more people to count, and that’s PNU); everyone was surprised when finally Kibaki took it after two days of people saying that Kenya has “rais mpya.”  Because partly of regional voting, those people in areas that voted overwhelmingly for ODM - the coast and western provinces mostly, the heartland of the Odinga family - obviously assumed mass PNU rigging, which coupled with their natural anger and frustration turned into immediate violence - helped along by Kibaki’s swift and obvious televised swearing-in only hours after the winner was announced.  That the ECK chairman Kivuitu then u-turned and said he was pressured into the announcement and that signs of rigging were obvious added fuel.

However, the violence isn’t about the winning of PNU necessarily.  Violence is often very useful for people, as a cover for making local coalitions, gaining local power and at a basic level settling ‘old scores’ - invented or not - on land, ethnicity, money and inequal access to resources.  Violence after a few weeks turned into a useful lever, including for Odinga, with his series of rallies in Nairobi turning the main roads around Kibera into running battlegrounds and the centre of the city into a haze of teargas.  Odinga’s main weapon in negotiations is his ability to mobilise violent gangs and mass demonstrations, and he’s not going to give it us as an option when his opponents can be forced into concessions for fear of the city shutting down again.

So that’s about it.  I have lots of takes on what is happening and what could happen, but there’s so much speculation here at the moment I don’t want to add to it.  A very interesting aspect of this, for us removed from it by nationality and the safety of a middle-class guarded compound, is media/church/MP reactions - forming peace coalitions, fundraising drives for the IRC camps, and broadcasting constant peace songs, petitions for calm and prayers for peace.  I also transcribed some of the government (read PNU) radio adverts calling on ODM to “stop violence” (like it’s just ODM supporters fighting, it’s everyone who has a stake) and “prove that the elections were rigged” (something everyone knows cannot happen, since the results are absolutely in doubt with everyone and carry no sway anymore, and since both PNU and ODM are implicated in rigging.  From December there have been thousands of SMS hate messages against both sides circulating, as well as emails (again, ones I’ve had come my way, I’ve saved - including a special one comparing Odinga to Hitler in bullet point fashion, complete with terrible cartooning).  The rumour mill is amazing - I heard on the 3rd that Kibaki had fled to Germany, someone else heard he’d gone to Ethiopia, and yet another person heard that he’d fled to France - and nobody really knows what’s happening, whether it’s safe to go into town to work, whether another MP has been shot, or what.  The major experience of people in Nairobi is insecurity and lack of reliable information.  We’ve been hunched around the radio some nights, trying to figure whether what is happening in Nakuru will spread to Eastleigh in Nairobi thus meaning our matatu route into town will be dodgy - and whether this means we should risk it or not.

Basically, personally I’ve been very safe - other than being teargassed twice and making a run for it from the archives one day, under the wing of Dr Willis.  I walked along Uhuru park yesterday and took a bus down Ngong Road, both showing a few bullet holes and a lot of riot police.  I have no idea what will happen, really.  Admittedly, this means my kiswahili vocabulary is very interesting - I know “tear gas”, “rioters”, “to be shot”, “to be burnt,” and my favourite, “the leaders all cheated and lied.”