Jambo Bwana



A long and angry ramble.

Several people say this: that may be the right “tone” for the occasion…

I guess, in front of the alpha male, the beta wolf will retract his claws, bow down and whine, wag his tail in approval, and pretend to be a cub with no fangs, or brains or whatever.

Certainly Jambo Bwana is a very Kenyan ideology. We know that Jambo is a word that has travelled far beyond our shores, to that mysterious place of power that feeds our middle-class who are only asked to look at income statements and balance sheets and understand them and shut up about everything else and it will be alright. Occasionally, a drunken German tourist will encounter you, the accountant, walking home and she will misread you, and grab your balls, and you will freeze in terror and speak English and say;

‘Madam’, or ‘Pole madam, I am just the hotel accountant’.

She - free and happy, having smoked some good Mombasa dope, and having slept with a good muscular Mombasa traditional drummer of the beach, will ask you, with innocence in her eye, why you have lost your culture, why you cannot sing Jambo bwana - which is your culture. You will not know why you so fear her - you only know that you behaved well in Njoro High school, and you asked no questions and read the set book, and you are now an accountant who earns money in US dollars. And somehow, she, her innocent person can take it all away. If she was to walk into your boss’s office and make enough of a storm and suggest to her embassy that you may or may not have done something to her breasts one day there on the beach - all of it can go away, and you will end up a waiter in a restaurant selling maize and beans to peasant African traders.

Your boss may save you - if he is your cousin, from your village - he may send you across to Giriama Beach cottages - where no Germans go, this is an English place and you can begin again, safe. So, even if you are the accountant, and you pray to a God every week, in church, and you have never stolen one cent in your life, you will cover up every cent your own cousin steals, you will use that wonderful number mind of yours, that mind that has the ability to work anywhere, will be devoted to the service of your cousin who himself is free because he is the first from your village to be a big man - and so, if he is fired because he offended a German, he will run for elections and be voted in.

You used to think you had contempt for your cousin when you first got the job. After all, you went to Lenana, and he went to Kisumu High or Kiambu tech. You used to think your cousin was “home” - and that you would be promoted beyond him. One day, in 1997, you got twelve death threats on your phone and under your door, when people were being cut into pieces in the Coast province, and you went to Kisumu. And when you wanted to report for work, you were told; ‘Coast people only!’, and your cousin, who had long foreseen such circumstances, and had a Giriama wife, and could speak Digo, paid off a certain cleaner in the Swimming pool department - a man who you had never seen; a man whose cousin was a councillor, and whose grandfather a medicineman, and whose networks and intelligence are  invisible to any well drilled Lenana boy. This man saved your job, and greets you everyday now, with exaggerated politeness and appropriate respect, and you greet him back and say Mzee, and you laugh together, and give him five hundred bob.

You will vote for democracy, and even say in a poll that you want corruption to be eradicated, but you are stranded between your ethnic warlords and your colonial master. If democracy threatens any of these two things, you will abandon it in one minute.

I was a student in Mangu High school, and of my generation the most successful person, the most famous and visible, the guy who made it, in Kenya, among the 7000 students over ten years, each one of them the top student of their district, many of them who got straight distinctions and some who got straight A’s in university, the most successful Kenyan out of Mangu from the 1980s, was one Cyrus Jirongo.

There are doctors and lawyers and engineers and accountants - he is the only one who can fall, and never fall, can steal and never fall, can be utterly stupid, and never fall - he is the one who knows the secret to immortality in kenya. Once you have crossed the barrier, you are immortal.

This is Kibaki’s secret fear. If he uses his brain and his conscience to defeat the Jirongo in him - he will become mortal again.

The secret fear of all Kibaki supporters is that he is the best deal possible. He is an immortal - even when ten million wish him death, he can sleep through the night, and wake up still immortal. If you stand behind him, you are protected in his shade. He was welcomed into the land of the immortals, as a technocrat, a rare event. He was even given a constituency, and did not have to stupidify to get it. It was a gift. This means that he will not go around fucking schoolteachers, or building meaningless schools with money he does not have; and a curriculum that is not there - like Moi - who was an immortal who could only vaguely remember that his best human days were in school, and the little human goodness left in him proposed rivers of school milk and chewing gum for ten thousand schoolgirls.

Kibaki promises that the fragile little ecosystem the middle class lives on will survive unthreatened. He will never question it. In return, we are supposed to do two things:

1. Use our intelligence to manufacture an intelligent reason for his most opaque actions. If a choir is sent to Washington DC to sing Jambo Bwana at Obama’s inauguration, we must assume there is a good reason for this. We know this to be true, because for years, we laughed at Moi, thinking him stupid. And smart people with Big degrees challenged him and he broke them and the acts we saw as stupid came to ac quire an intelligence.

2. Understand that a dog can be voted president of Kenya and still defeat the PHD guy. For the dog inherits a process that designed the map of Kenya, named every district, built every Mangu and Alliance and pacified any doubts - and that process can continue to do what it does as long as its leader does not challenge it. A dog will bark and a series of actions will take place and a bridge will appear mysteriously in Muranga. It will bark again, and ten disgraced PHD people will propose a way to deal with the Opposition. A dog will bark again, and a man will appear, who knows every way to demolish the opponent the dog does not even know exists, and this Karume man once owned ten hotels and 5000 acres of former mzungu coffee, and he loves his kids and has a degree from Oxford, but will, today go out and do anything because he lost it all after Kenyatta died, and understands the power of Jirongo. He is an original Jirongo, who has aquired some petho over time, as Jirongo will do when he buys New Stanley and Marshalls and gets grey hair.

Our dean of students, in Kenya, was a Ugandan man called Kibuka. He was the best Geography teacher in Kenya. We had the best Geograpy results in Kenya. Everybody respected him more than any other person. He was overqualified for the job. Dedicated in a way we did not expect from the rest of the staff. He could not be promoted because he was not a Kenyan. He survived in his job because he was extraordinarily competent, and because he never once threatened any headmaster who stole or did anything. He just did his job.

So- and this is a true story; a few years ago, Kibuka finally gave in and retired. This man who had contempt for all stupid people in the world, who never once accepted a bribe for an exam, who did he go to see, of the thousands of doctors and lawyers and bankers.

Cyrus Jirongo, who organised a Kenyan passport for him. Jirongo helped Kibuka for no money (I am guessing). He helped Kibuka because Kibuka once insulted him. And nothing pleases an immortal than to be begged by an educated mortal. It gives them the biggest hard on in the world. That is why Moi kept sneaking off to Njonjo’s house for chats - it was like having your own British Governor General as a pet to love you.

Kibaki is the leader of immortals. Moi on the other hand, was abandoned because humans saw him for what he was, and the illusion of Kenya as a normal country, doing normal forward-looking things was broken. Kibaki was the perfect heir. He spoke International. He spoke enough local. He had never, once in his entire thinking life, threatened the power of the immortals. Even when they became utterly stupid and form four students and my five year old nephew could laugh at Moi, Kibaki did nothing.

It is his greatest strength.

The selection of Jambo Bwana is a very smart move. It is asking Obama;

‘Oh please, we will never say or do anything to mess with you. We are your children. Save us. Kenya will do your will’.

This is a familiar script. And from this sort of thing, George Bush waved his finger and gave Museveni millions of dollars for AIDS, which made Museveni properly rich. If your economy is based on the idea that the throwaway coins of America can make a small group of people powerful and rich, this is all they need to do.

I was invited last year, to a meeting of five African presidents by the president of Germany.  With the exception of the president of Nigeria, every single one of those people had a Master’s degree. Some of them had more education than Obama. One of them had worked in a senior position for the world bank. The Ashanti King was there. We sat in that room, a group of about forty people, some social scientists, and we talked about the “problems of Africa”

Now, the presidency of Germany is a ceremonial position. His job really is to be the good face of Germany. This is why there were five African presidents. Chancellor Merkel is too busy to meet such people. The only four countries’ presidents she would meet at any time are:

1) Congo

2) Angola

3) Nigeria

4) South Africa.

She would meet South Africa publicly. The rest, secretly. So for three days, the Nigerian president said nothing. Sometimes he smirked when another African president said something. Several times, the German president (and former head of the world Bank) - asked him to say something, and he shrugged.

For a day and a half, I was confused about why we were all there. Why was he wasting his time on all this? He said he cared about Africa, because he worked for the World Bank, and this was an opportunity to give something back. He also said that he had met the Ashanti King and was flabbergasted, and excited to see something all so royal and dignified and stuff. These are all good reasons. But you and I know, that to spend all this German taxpayer money, to hire a castle where this event takes place? Do you know how many hundreds of security guards were there?

Germany, which counts every receipt of every citizen, does not waste money just because the president loves Ashantiland. Only an African president can pull off such a vanity. In fact, the best dressed people in that room were all African presidents. And their security details were the most amazing, as were the cars they came in, complete with a contempt for the food we were eating.

After day two it became clear why we were all there, when social scientists and others started to ask why we are all so interested in China. ‘What is China doing that we are not? how can we pay better attention to you?’.

These questions were not hidden, they were asked quite directly. And the answers were all the same, with the exception of the Mozambican president, who said a few intelligent things. Every single one of the other repeated, over and over again;

‘Give us money’.

At some point, the German president made a statement, saying he has no authority over money and wanted to talk about governance. And each of the presidents continued. It was comical, and stupid and as base as Jambo bwana.

By day three, the presidents were sulking; the Nigerian president was still silent. The Ashanti King seemed very happy and dignified. During the last session, the President, once a senior man in the World Bank, was asked a question he refused to answer. Then, just as the session was about to close, and the moderator, a Ghanaian Political Scientist, closed the session, the guy - the Benin President - burst out, in very posh French;

‘Mr. President, I have a question for you…’

His eyes were burning. We knew the question- it was about money. The moderator said the session was closed. The German president said he was willing to talk to the man in private. The man continued to ask the question. The Nigerian president started laughing, while the moderator kept his voice civil and firm. One German journalist turned to the Benin president, and told him the session was over. The man continued to shout. Eventually, he turned to the moderator, as we were all standing up to go, and said;

‘But…but, I am a President!!!’

And we left the room.

Every educated Kenyan knows all this. We only pretend we don’t because we fear the truth so much, we will make any sacrifice to avoid it. This is why most people don’t care that Jambo Bwana will be sang. This is why Kenyan teachers will not strike when Kenya looks like it may fall to violence, but will when their salaries are threatened. Secretly, we all prayed that the immortals will save us again, from the anger of human Kenya, so our strategy was not to refuse to work or pay taxes, until the immortals stopped the violence, which they could have at any time; our strategy was to plead with the immortals to agree between themselves.

So Mamdani, great old marxist warrior, has given up. He proposes, in the East African, that we let the immortals be. And we, in this forum, propose that we let Jambo Bwana be. And Philip Ochieng, another old warrior, who has been through some immortalities of his own, suggests that we cannot control our rogue parliament.

One simple action can give us what we pretend to want, but do not really want. If we stop working for five days, parliament will do as we say. But - here is the unvarnished truth: nobody, not us, not them, not the international community, not the peasants of Kenya - nobody trusts the educated class of Kenya to ever do anything to build a moral and accountable state. The only people who will act with resolution for Kenya are those peasants who have nothing to lose; and the immortals - when they have everything to lose. They are best friends and worst enemies.

We are, as a class, useful for nothing.

We thrive in Australia and London. We are the most meaningless people in Kenya. If our boss is good, we do good work. If he is a thief, we turn his theft into clean accounts. We are the person that was designed to get education by a colonial master who needed us in a very specific way. We cannot manufacture anything because we were trained to maintain the designs of others. The only way to become an entrepreneur is to steal from the public, or become a Kirubi - you buy companies already working and then hire good cheap Kenyan and Indian and even mzungu skills to make more money for you.

As Kantai said, Kenya is a vampire state. This is the most profound instinct of leadership and power in Kenya. Even people who know better find themselves playing this game because it is so extraordinarily successful.