Africa Refuses to Rise by Scott Warren
“I reflected on the “Africa Rising” narrative that the West so loves to focus on”
+++
I saw Nathan walking up the ornate, Village Market steps–his right arm using a cane to steady himself, his three children close behind, as if waiting for a misstep. In the three years since I last saw him, a brow had settled on his forehead. He looked many years older. I walked up to him. We both smiled as we shook hands. Not smiles in a way that high school best friends might smile when they see each other for the first time in years; smiles in the sense that we both thought we would probably never see each other again.
Nathan and his family, comprised of three children and his wife, were dressed in their Sunday best. I had just emerged from a 15-kilometer run, looking worse for the wear. I took stock of our surroundings - Village Market was one of the nicest malls in Nairobi, Kenya, and would be one of the nicest malls in the United States. An outside food court, buffered by flowing fountains and blooming flowers, offered Chinese and Lebanese and Italian; an Apple electronics store hawked the company’s newest watches; a health grocery store advertised its avocado-flavored smoothies. As we settled at our outside table, we seemed out of place. But Nairobi had become a perpetual exercise in seeming out of place.
Without settling for small talk, Nathan filled me in on the last three years of his life. Nathan had been my parents’ gardener for three years, in their second tour of duty with the U.S. State Department in Kenya, and had become their most dependable employee.
It is sometimes exhausting to pause and explain to friends and peers how, despite the seeming absurdity of a white family from America employing black Kenyans to clean and garden and drive,that it is incredibly common, and in fact, offers stable employment to Kenyans who might otherwise be jobless. Does that excuse the fact that the exercise potentially only perpetuates harmful colonialist-created inequality? Who knows.
Three years ago, Nathan was returning from his tribal home in a matatu, an undersized and overstuffed van that serves as public transit for the vast majority of Kenyans. The matatu rounded a corner and, attempting to avoid a pothole on the notoriously unkempt Kenya roads, crashed into a truck. There were eight passengers. Seven died. Nathan was the one survivor. He remembered the crash, and then he remembered waking up in a hospital, my mother looking over him, every bone in his body aching.
The doctors, Nathan told me, did not think he would make it. He had too many broken bones. His lungs were punctured. My parents were determined to do everything that they could. They made sure he transferred to the best hospital in Nairobi. They are not exceptionally wealthy, but they spent thousands and thousands of dollars to make sure that Nathan received the best care possible.
At this point in the story, despite the fact that I know many of these details, I could barely look at Nathan. Tears were welling in my eyes. Partially because of the personal hell he had suffered. Partially because of what his family endured–his three-year-old son, barely born when the accident occurred, oblivious to this story, was currently yelling out at passersby, smiling. Partially because Nathan was telling me of the type of benevolence that one hopes their parents possess, but rarely hears from the mouths of others. Nathan had tears cropping up as well.
Nathan told me that one day, after many surgeries, my parents came to the hospital to see him packed in a filthy room stuffed with six other patients, even though it probably could safely house only one. The conditions were so deplorable, Nathan says, that my parents immediately saw him, and began to cry.
I have seen my dad cry twice in my life - when his best friend died, and when our first dog died. Even the thought of him in tears produces a similar reaction for me.
My parents tried to get him out. At this point, Nathan said, the hospital had caught onto the fact that my parents have some money. After all, they are mzungus. They are white, so they must have limitless supplies of cash. At every visit, the officials asked for more. My parents vacillated between giving in to a corrupt system, and knowing that they were needed to save Nathan’s life.
My dad, potentially abusing his role as a Foreign Service Officer, took the case all the way up the chain of command to the Minister of Medical Services, a man named Peter Nyong’o. Peter’s daughter, now known in my country simply as Lupita, won an Academy Award the next year for her depiction of an American slave. But in this case, Peter was unsympathetic to the less fortunate. Nathan remained in the unsanitary room with six other people, wasting away while the hospital slowly decided the next course of action.
My parents then left Kenya, but not out of choice. My father faced mandatory retirement at the age of 65, and much to his frustration, left the country where they had lived for seven years, and left Nathan trapped in a hospital. They also left Nathan the equivalent of $3,000 to help with the dozens of procedures that remain. I did not know this.
Over the next two years, Nathan was in and out of the hospital, in and out of countless surgeries. First, they thought he would not survive. He did. Then, they thought he would lose his leg. He did not. Through it all, his hope never wavered, and his family never wavered. Nathan left the hospital, in tact, determined to make a better life for himself. For his family.
In August of 2013, two and a half years after the accident, my father received an email from a new U.S. Embassy employee who was interested in hiring Nathan as a gardener. This would be his first job since the accident.
My father replied to the email: “In 16 years living overseas, he was without doubt the best employee we had. I cannot recommend him highly enough.” Nathan was hired.
As Nathan finished the story, it was clear that he saw my parents as his saviors. Which, in my Northeast liberal arts education ways, seemed beyond problematic, since my parents were white westerners. The whole reason that Africa is in the plight that it is in, my education has told me, is because of white westerners. Africans need to save themselves. Yet, Nathan was right. He would not be alive if not for my parents. Problematize that.
+
Nathan is alive. But he is still a gardener, making menial wages. He has a difficult time supporting his son, Palmar, in university. Palmar wants to be an agronomist, he tells me with a smile, in order to support Kenyan farmers.
I get up to order two plates of fries. I go because I asked his family if they wanted food, and they told me that they wanted fries. But I also need a minute, or three.
I take a deep breath. I am in Kenya because I was exhausted running a non-profit in the United States, and I wanted to come back to the magical land that had been home for the formative years of my childhood. But this conversation is more emotionally exhausting than donor cultivation and team meetings and writing endless proposals. At the end of the day, however, I will go home, to New York City. To a good life. I will be fine. And what will come of Nathan and his family?
Three weeks after we got lunch at Village Market, Barack Obama visited his father’s homeland of Kenya for the first time as President, and gave a speech miles away from where we were sitting. He boasted of Kenya’s new crop of entrepreneurs and its impressive economic growth and how, with better governance, the country was poised to be the new breadbasket of Africa. Indeed, I looked around the mall, and I felt as if I was back in the United States.
But tell that to Nathan. To his family. To the millions of Kenyan families still wrestling with extreme poverty. In numbers strikingly similar to my country, the top 10% of Kenyan households control more than 40% of the wealth, while the poorest 10% control less than 1%.
As I walked back to the table, I reflected on the “Africa Rising” narrative that the West so loves to focus on as an antidote to the common Africa narrative of black people machete’ing each other to death. It is far too narrow of a narrative.
Africa is rising, only for the rich. Nathan, in post-surgery life, is still suffering.
We ate fries. I talked to his smiling children. We took a picture. They left in a matatu. I walked away, and went to a corner where no one could see me, and I sobbed. I didn’t really know why. Maybe it was guilt. Maybe it was mixed with some joy that Nathan is alive. Maybe I wished I could do more. Maybe I can.
My parents might have saved his life. But they cannot give him life. The happy ending to this story is that Nathan is still alive. He has a beautiful family. He is grateful. But I want him to thrive. To rise.
+ + +
Scott Warren is the Executive Director of the national action civics education non-profit Generation Citizen. He has also written articles focusing primarily on youth civic engagement, and African politics, published in outlets including the Christian Science Monitor, New York Daily News, Huffington Post, and San Diego Union Tribune.