There are at least three Kenyas in my mind’s eye. The Kenya of my romantic imaginings is an Out of Africa kind of place. You glimpse it out the window as you land at Kenyatta, approaching over the plains of Nairobi National Park, dotted with lonely giraffe and sprinkled with sprinting herds of gazelle. You sense it in the panorama of the blue Ngong hills rising over the trees surrounding Karen Blixen’s home and savour it over a cup of tea by the watering-hole at Sweetwaters Camp, the sun rising behind Mt. Kenya. You feel it by the roaring fire after a night safari, chasing hyena eyes as they lead you to a lion kill and drink it in along the pink-fringed shore of Lake Nakuru, as thousands of flamingo take flight.

Another Kenya, the Kenya of my nightmares, is found down twisting backroads south of Nairobi; along bone-jarring, pot-holed streets of dust, winding past newly built apartment complexes and multi-storied mansions. Here is the advance guard of urbanization – the dynamic margins of the ever-expanding urban organism that, like an unstoppable flow of lava, encroaches, engulfs, consumes. The homeless, unemployed, the poorest of the poor are pushed farther and farther from economic and political power to the outskirts of the city and the margins of the mind. For today, they have this field, wedged between the barbed-wire-topped walls of the rich and the fence of colonial Wilson airfield. And they have built their village, Mitumba village, again – discarded people living in dwellings of discarded scraps of plastic, paper, and cardboard. No running water, no sanitation, no access to electricity, no access to real power.

But in the midst of this nightmare, I witness another Kenya, a new “Mt. Kenya” – not a geological landmark but a political and psychological one. I see a two-room school built by the people of Mitumba with the help and support of a local NGO, Save The Children. This is the Kenya of my dreams, of my hopes. But it is not the building that houses these hopes, it is the children: hand-holding, shirt-pulling, knee-grabbing; laughing, smiling, singing, hoping; determined, proud, dignified. Their energy pulses through your hands, their hope inspires your heart, their singing warms your soul! They are charmers and dreamers, inspirers and singers, and they are the faces of Africa’s future.

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Millsaps Magazine  |  Millsaps | Last Edited April 23, 2001