THE CHANGING PEASANT: Part VIII: The Hunter-Warriofs Heirs

by Richard Critchfield

1982INo. 6 Africa [RC-1-'821

Kenya's capital city, , is at once a squatters' camps and shantytowns gleaming center for the exchange of that spread like fungus in the out- capital and consumer goods and a skirts. Except for the occasional chaos of grinding poverty that jeop Maasai, naked under his blanket, ardizes progress being made in villages. even the poorest Africans look well- The need for positive attitudes toward dressed in suits, tweed jackets, and farming is central to healthy social as sweaters, or high-heels and cotton well as economic and political devel- frocks; much of this clothing comes, opment. secondhand, from markets supplied by the Salvation Army. Nairobi is Africa's archetype of what A traveler in a half century ago anthropologists call a heterogenetic was asked by Kamba tribesmen, city, an urban center that came into "You Europeans know so much being only in the twentieth century more than we, have you found the as a colonial market for exchange of edge of the sky?" He told them the coffee, tea, and other local produce sky has no edge and that it nowhere for Western capital and consumer touches the earth. They didn't goods. Its people are concerned believe him. with the market, producing goods, expedient relations between buyer Some of this stubborn faith persists. and seller, ruler and ruled, native Nairobi, with just under a million and foreigner. Priority is given to people, has become black Africa's making money. prime showplace of what the West can do. It is the center for its banking, At the open-air Thorn Tree restau- multinational corporations, United rant of the New Stanley Hotel, Nations organizations, jet travel, and swarming with bush shirts and the tourist industry (400,000 a year). leopard-skin-banded sun hats of Skyscrapers, many built just since -bound tourists, everything the 1977-78 coffee boom, rise to 28 imaginable-currency, narcotics, stories. Herds of Mercedes and women-can be bought and sold. Peugeot sedans roam the streets. As the young American drifter, hair Color television sets and the many lank and shoulder-length, skin newsstands offering the Paris leathery from the sun, in shorts and Herald- Tribune, Paris-Match, or the sandals, can tell you, "Money talks Daily Telegraph add to the cosmo- in this town." Or as the Reagan- politan ambience. Among at least appointed American Ambassador 120,000 Europeans in Kenya on any told the group of chuckling busi- given day, there is an enormous nessmen at a recent lunch, number of Western experts on every- "Gentlemen, there's money to be thing from man's origins to re- made." combinant DNA. Kenya has an essentially free market New glass-and-concrete towers, economy, which makes it the main gracious colonial architecture, and African testing ground for President parks ablaze with red and purple Reagan's development philosophy, bougainvillea, lilac jacaranda, and expressed in his famous remark: orange flame trees obscure "No American contribution can do more for development than a grow- the White Hunter to the Mau Mau, settled agriculture, the plow, and ing, prosperous U.S. economy." from Born Free to "she did not hear the production of maize as the new Western capital, which flooded in him for the beating of her heart." staple food. It is the speed with after independence in 1963, has Without Louis, Mary, and Richard which this has happened that per- dropped from a share of 59 to 42 Leakey, and the Kenyan family's dis- haps most ails black Africa today. percent of ownership in manufac- coveries in Olduvai Gorge and Lake turing and tourism, yet three-fourths Turkana, we wouldn't know that it In Kenya, change has come of both sectors are still managed by was in Africa that man first diverged quickly-in barely two generations. foreigners. The Kenyans want from the apes between four and The old tribal