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I just got back from Kenya last night, smuggling through customs into khartoum illicit alcohol and porcine products, flashing my UNLP and make believing that two passports make my life glamorous and full of glitter.
Being in Nairobi was a welcome break, on arrival I was picked up at the airport by Gerald, a taxi driver who knows Nairobi back to left to up to right to front. In his car, on the radio, a programme discussed sex and the correct way to tell if your lover was cheating on you and what to do about it. The minute I heard this and realised that in this country it didn’t matter if I had had sex before marriage and that my flesh was showing around my midriff (hussy) a weight seemed to lift from my shoulders. This was at least a week in which I didn’t have to conduct myself according to other’s standards.
It seems though that the trade off between nairobi and khartoum (an over-simplification obviously) is that in khartoum ideologically you may not be free to express yourself but social structure wise it’s miles ahead of nairobi. I can walk down the street in khartoum with a bag full of cash at night and not worry about what’s about to happen to me but in nairobi, wear an semi-expensive watch in your car and you’re shafted. (Usually with some sort of firearm.)
I was there visiting an old friend from university, my first ever flatmate in fact. He’s now married and running a carpentry shop in Nairobi, we swopped stories and hit each other on the back enthusiastically in the way you do when you’re so glad to see someone physical abuse seems necessary.
On the weekend I decided to indulge myself and admit I was nothing more than a bog standard tourist and go on a safari. I booked a plane to the masai mara park (the biggest game park in kenya) and settled down with the guide book to properly memorise the facial features of the big five. No point meeting them if you can’t properly introduce yourself.
The flight there was in a piddly little plane where the wings are superglued to the top of the plane, you can see the light through the joints and where the slightest turbulence brings an endless list of things you haven’t yet managed to do crowding panic-stricken into your consciousness. "Me!" they cry, "you haven’t managed to do me yet, you’ve got oh probably 0.5 minutes of life left to try and cross me off the list"
Fortunately I am fairly stoic and after a brief attempt at a handstand (I’m never going to manage one) I returned to my seat and, as we sailed over the safari park, coming in to land, I started to sing the Out of Africa theme tune to myself - and the people sitting in front and behind me (Karen Blixen’s dodgy politics aside you can’t help being nostalgic about the film) - they, obviously, loved it.
Being in a safari park is a strange experience, the animals don’t behave as they ought, which is in a segregated stationary manner behind bars. They march around you either curious or indifferent and slow down time to their rhythm which is something primeval and out of sync with the tens of jeeps that roam with them in automated herds. (The big white jeeps with more than ten people are females, the nippier green ones without roofs (ours) are the territorial males. They mate by winching). The way in which we cut through vegetation and roared around with our cameras and carbon trailing behind us made it all too clear that it’s them or us, these two rhythms of life just seem out of place and incommensurable when put together.
Visitors compete in the evenings at the camp bar as to who saw what, extra points are given for the distance of the sighting and unusual behaviour. Kudos is given to the lucky ones - "I saw three cheetahs kill and then an elephant suckle it’s young, shortly before a leopard fell out of a tree", shame and a beer alone in the corner is dolled out to those who came back with only photos of the mongeese hiding - "they kept ducking down everytime my camera clicked".
I was exiled to my tent with only a buttered roll and a tonic water for my story of the elephant that pratfalled over a tap-dancing cheetah troupe into a rhino tied to a hippo, thus ensuring the giraffe and secretary bird’s victory in the three legged race they were all engaged in.
Had I had some sort of photographic evidence of the fall at least I think I might have gotten away with it.
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