We arrived mid-October, in a comfortable heat and sunshine, with the jacaranda trees flowering brilliant indigo, the rivers starting to enliven again, the brush at times brilliant green, in other places still scorched and straw white. The magical trees, dotted across the landscape, interspersed with mud huts and dirt tracks, will never stop being an awe-inspiring reminder of this very special, and much scarred continent. This is a place where, perhaps, man was first formed; but more than that, it is a place where nature roams, endangered by the elements as much as by humanity's amoebic expansion, where everything is alive, where everything is important, no matter how small.
As an infrequent visitor to South Africa, I was struck - and I shouldn't have been - by the fact that there were very few white people. This is, after all, one of the heartland countries of sub-Saharan Africa, and supposedly untouched by the White Hand to the extent that Zimbabwe and South Africa have been. Yet while 99% of the inhabitants are black, it is clear that colony has played an important role in shaping the country, whether positive or negative. This is a very young and immature country, having achieved independence from colonial rule in only the late 1960s; unfortunately, initial observations show it to be in a permanent state of deterioration and division, as far as economic and class systems are involved.
In comparison, it is almost encouraging to be able to apply the race question to South Africa's disparate economic worlds, because it offers an explanation for the wealth divide, as unfair as it is. In Kenya, there is no such opportunity - there are simply capitalists and poor. Coca Cola adverts and mobile phone stands are omnipresent, even in areas where tribal populations are way in excess of the expanding city mass. Yet the Western influence seems ever expansive, and ever divisive; I commented that a can of coke costs only five pence just outside Mombasa, but five pence is a significant financial commitment to 90% of Kenyans who earn way below the poverty line. A country which allows, and perpetuates, this kind of division, has already stepped too far into a dangerous territory where its initial values of freedom and equality have been manipulated into a terrifying capitalist monstrosity of competition, where survival can only be assured by slaying competitors. In the heartlands of the United Kingdom or the USA, this is only to be expected, and can be very progressive; but this is only because the backbone of the system allows it - there is adequate financial aid, health insurance, and other provisions, which allow a level of risk to be afforded. In a new and bold country, not just the weak, but the moderately unsuccessful too, will fall by the wayside when the accumulation of wealth becomes the modus operandi. In comparison with the traditional values that still exist in all 42 of Kenya's tribes, one is saddened to realise that the erosion is inevitable, and that it's our fault.