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thatcrazycajunWednesday, 22 October • 3:11 PM
Sitting in the Westgate Centre, Nairobi's swankiest shopping mall, at a coffee shop with Net access. Taking pictures here, too, just so y'all don't get the idea that Kenya is nothing but tin shacks, dirt roads and Third World-level amenities.
Visited the Nairobi National Museum this morning, which is the flagship institution and home base of National Museums of Kenya, the agency that also runs the two sites we visited on the coast a couple days back, the Vasco da Gama Pillar (Malindi) and the Fort Jesus Museum (Mombasa). (These two also have links off the side menu of the page for the Nairobi facility.) The NNM has been in operation in one form or another for nearly a full century now, in three separate locations of which the current one is the largest. It just underwent a massive renovation over the past couple of years, and in front you can see the plaque where President Mwai Kibaki dedicated the refurbished facility in July of this year. The collection of stuffed and mounted birds alone could take days to examine and read the plaque for each one, and the "Hall of Kenya" and "Cycles of Life" permanent exhibits are also highly informative and interesting. I even got to play a traditional Kenyan xylophone! (Pics to follow; I tried to upload some to Flickr yesterday and yet again forgot that my digicam defaults to taking 300-dpi shots, which must be reduced to 72-dpi JPEGs for online display. Doing this and tagging and labeling each pic with a name and description is going to be hugely tedious and time-consuming; the full upload may have to wait until I get back Stateside.)
It occurs to me that I haven't said much about the cultural and political goings-on here during my visit; this is not a deliberate omission, but rather a function of limited time and too much else to write. The Songbird and I both read the Daily Nation, one of Nairobi's two daily newspapers (the Standard is the other, and I cannot tell which one leans which way politically yet) to see what's been going on in the world, as she does not have home access to local TV yet. (She has a Blackberry which the US government pays to keep hooked into wireless phone/Internet service, but she's so busy checking her work e-mail, making voice calls and putting out various fires there's not much time for online news browsing.) Both papers are in English, albeit "British English" of the sort that caused the late George Bernard Shaw to remark that the US and England were "two countries separated by a common language." Two of the nation's biggest patriotic holidays of the year have just passed: Moi Day, which celebrates former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi, and Kenyatta Day, which honors his predecessor and the "father of Kenyan independence," Jomo Kenyatta. Everyone got those days off, and there was much pageantry and parading and ceremony to mark the occasions...for those who didn't simply take the long weekend to get outta Dodge for a holiday. (Kinda like our own US Independence Day in that regard.)
You may recall the violence that attended the contested results of last December's presidential election here, about which I wrote in this space back in January. Not long after I arrived last week, two government commissions issued their reports on the uprisings, displacement and deaths and their causes. The most respected one, called the Waki Report for the head of its issuing body, Justice Philip Waki, comes to the appalling conclusion that some of the violence may actually have been planned in advance by certain high officials. A confidential list of those deemed responsible is now in the hands of former UN honcho and current peace-broker Kofi Annan, but Prez Kibaki has called for what sounds to some an awful lot like amnesty for the culprits. Controversy swirls, with some arguing in the paper's letters page that justice must be done to the accused ones to prevent recurrence and others saying that doing so would only disrupt efforts to heal the nation's polity and move on. There's also fear that criminal proceedings might damage the delicate power-sharing arrangement between the two dominant parties and their leaders, Kibaki and his (still disputedly) defeated opponent Raila Odinga, now Prime Minister.
Being a guest in this country, I shall refrain from taking a view one way or the other (at least until I get home) out of politeness. But it should be understood that Kenyan politics is much more personality-based than party-based, despite the outward trappings of democracy. I am reliably informed that most voters here will vote for one person because they like what s/he has done or their general demeanor, regardless of party and with next to no consideration for whatever platform of policies the person or his/her party may have in place. This is known as the "big man" theory of politics, and I understand it is not solely confined to this one country on the continent. Tribal loyalties play a big part as well, and the President's being of one tribe and the PM of another of the two dominant peoples here does not help matters. For now, conditions remain stable, and at least one woman member of Parliament has already announced her intention to run for the job of Kenya's first female President in 2012. There is even talk of rewriting the country's constitution (itself not even half a century old) to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
Being that one of our own two major-party candidates for President has family here, the US elections, now a bare two weeks away, are being watched avidly and closely by media and citizens here. I even spotted a "Barack Obama - President 2008" bumper sticker on a car here today. The Songbird tells me Obama is "like a rock star here," and I can believe it after seeing the news coverage and the plethora of books about and by the Illinois Senator for sale in bookshops around the country. (It doesn't take a whole lot of time to traverse a country only barely smaller than Texas, at least by air or the better roads. The lack of distance is more than made up for by the poor condition of many roads, though, as you may have noted from how long it took us to get from Mombasa to Nairobi a couple nights ago.) Obama even visited here early in the campaign, as you may have heard, and was mobbed by adoring throngs. There is also some coverage of the congressional races, with recent reports indicating that the Democrats may pick up as many as 60 seats in the Senate and two dozen in the House. (Dare we hope for the filibuster/veto-proof majority at last?) SB is giving me her absentee ballot to hand-carry back to Georgia, just to make sure nothing happens to her vote.
Kenyans are as sports-mad as the rest of Europe and Africa, of course, with what we Murkins call "soccer" and the rest of the world calls "football" taking precedence. There's lots of coverage not only of Kenyan and other African teams, but British ones as well (I did mention this used to be a Brit colony, didn't I?) and fans of Arsenal or Manchester United are not at all uncommon here. One of the dailies actually has a comic strip about a fictional team called the "Supa Strikas," sponsored by a leading petrol company, in its pages once a week and in a bound comic-book supplement once a month. The players are suitably multi-cultural, but naturally, a black Kenyan is the star player.
Enough for now; we expect to have a house guest for dinner tonight and I have to do other stuff first.
Sitting in the Westgate Centre, Nairobi's swankiest shopping mall, at a coffee shop with Net access. Taking pictures here, too, just so y'all don't get the idea that Kenya is nothing but tin shacks, dirt roads and Third World-level amenities.
Visited the Nairobi National Museum this morning, which is the flagship institution and home base of National Museums of Kenya, the agency that also runs the two sites we visited on the coast a couple days back, the Vasco da Gama Pillar (Malindi) and the Fort Jesus Museum (Mombasa). (These two also have links off the side menu of the page for the Nairobi facility.) The NNM has been in operation in one form or another for nearly a full century now, in three separate locations of which the current one is the largest. It just underwent a massive renovation over the past couple of years, and in front you can see the plaque where President Mwai Kibaki dedicated the refurbished facility in July of this year. The collection of stuffed and mounted birds alone could take days to examine and read the plaque for each one, and the "Hall of Kenya" and "Cycles of Life" permanent exhibits are also highly informative and interesting. I even got to play a traditional Kenyan xylophone! (Pics to follow; I tried to upload some to Flickr yesterday and yet again forgot that my digicam defaults to taking 300-dpi shots, which must be reduced to 72-dpi JPEGs for online display. Doing this and tagging and labeling each pic with a name and description is going to be hugely tedious and time-consuming; the full upload may have to wait until I get back Stateside.)
It occurs to me that I haven't said much about the cultural and political goings-on here during my visit; this is not a deliberate omission, but rather a function of limited time and too much else to write. The Songbird and I both read the Daily Nation, one of Nairobi's two daily newspapers (the Standard is the other, and I cannot tell which one leans which way politically yet) to see what's been going on in the world, as she does not have home access to local TV yet. (She has a Blackberry which the US government pays to keep hooked into wireless phone/Internet service, but she's so busy checking her work e-mail, making voice calls and putting out various fires there's not much time for online news browsing.) Both papers are in English, albeit "British English" of the sort that caused the late George Bernard Shaw to remark that the US and England were "two countries separated by a common language." Two of the nation's biggest patriotic holidays of the year have just passed: Moi Day, which celebrates former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi, and Kenyatta Day, which honors his predecessor and the "father of Kenyan independence," Jomo Kenyatta. Everyone got those days off, and there was much pageantry and parading and ceremony to mark the occasions...for those who didn't simply take the long weekend to get outta Dodge for a holiday. (Kinda like our own US Independence Day in that regard.)
You may recall the violence that attended the contested results of last December's presidential election here, about which I wrote in this space back in January. Not long after I arrived last week, two government commissions issued their reports on the uprisings, displacement and deaths and their causes. The most respected one, called the Waki Report for the head of its issuing body, Justice Philip Waki, comes to the appalling conclusion that some of the violence may actually have been planned in advance by certain high officials. A confidential list of those deemed responsible is now in the hands of former UN honcho and current peace-broker Kofi Annan, but Prez Kibaki has called for what sounds to some an awful lot like amnesty for the culprits. Controversy swirls, with some arguing in the paper's letters page that justice must be done to the accused ones to prevent recurrence and others saying that doing so would only disrupt efforts to heal the nation's polity and move on. There's also fear that criminal proceedings might damage the delicate power-sharing arrangement between the two dominant parties and their leaders, Kibaki and his (still disputedly) defeated opponent Raila Odinga, now Prime Minister.
Being a guest in this country, I shall refrain from taking a view one way or the other (at least until I get home) out of politeness. But it should be understood that Kenyan politics is much more personality-based than party-based, despite the outward trappings of democracy. I am reliably informed that most voters here will vote for one person because they like what s/he has done or their general demeanor, regardless of party and with next to no consideration for whatever platform of policies the person or his/her party may have in place. This is known as the "big man" theory of politics, and I understand it is not solely confined to this one country on the continent. Tribal loyalties play a big part as well, and the President's being of one tribe and the PM of another of the two dominant peoples here does not help matters. For now, conditions remain stable, and at least one woman member of Parliament has already announced her intention to run for the job of Kenya's first female President in 2012. There is even talk of rewriting the country's constitution (itself not even half a century old) to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
Being that one of our own two major-party candidates for President has family here, the US elections, now a bare two weeks away, are being watched avidly and closely by media and citizens here. I even spotted a "Barack Obama - President 2008" bumper sticker on a car here today. The Songbird tells me Obama is "like a rock star here," and I can believe it after seeing the news coverage and the plethora of books about and by the Illinois Senator for sale in bookshops around the country. (It doesn't take a whole lot of time to traverse a country only barely smaller than Texas, at least by air or the better roads. The lack of distance is more than made up for by the poor condition of many roads, though, as you may have noted from how long it took us to get from Mombasa to Nairobi a couple nights ago.) Obama even visited here early in the campaign, as you may have heard, and was mobbed by adoring throngs. There is also some coverage of the congressional races, with recent reports indicating that the Democrats may pick up as many as 60 seats in the Senate and two dozen in the House. (Dare we hope for the filibuster/veto-proof majority at last?) SB is giving me her absentee ballot to hand-carry back to Georgia, just to make sure nothing happens to her vote.
Kenyans are as sports-mad as the rest of Europe and Africa, of course, with what we Murkins call "soccer" and the rest of the world calls "football" taking precedence. There's lots of coverage not only of Kenyan and other African teams, but British ones as well (I did mention this used to be a Brit colony, didn't I?) and fans of Arsenal or Manchester United are not at all uncommon here. One of the dailies actually has a comic strip about a fictional team called the "Supa Strikas," sponsored by a leading petrol company, in its pages once a week and in a bound comic-book supplement once a month. The players are suitably multi-cultural, but naturally, a black Kenyan is the star player.
Enough for now; we expect to have a house guest for dinner tonight and I have to do other stuff first.
