by Philip Briggs
Edition 33: Winter 2005/6
The first night of my African travel career stays vivid in my memory. It was February 1986, and I touched down in Kenya fresh from two misplaced, miserable years in London, buoyant at the prospect of returning to the continent where I’d grown up, and fuelled with heady images of East African icons such as Zanzibar, Serengeti and Kilimanjaro.
What a let-down that much anticipated first night turned out to be! Well out of view of the snows of Kilimanjaro, I found myself holed up in a sleazy
budget dive in Nairobi’s notorious River Road, unable to sleep thanks
to the combination of vociferously rutting neighbours, thumping music
from a bar down the road, and the incessant blaring horns and revving
engines from a nearby taxi park.
Things improved rapidly thereafter. But still, those taut first 24 hours of any given trip rank as one of
my least favourite aspects of African travel. In part, that’s thanks to
the bureaucratic ordeal associated with getting from plane to lodging ‐
customs, immigration, taxi hustlers, money changers, the nagging worry
that the hotel I’ve directed the taxi driver to won’t have a room
available… But most of all, it is because international airports tend
to leave you stranded in large cities, and large cities in Africa tend
to be disconcertingly seedy and chaotic on first exposure.
Of course, not all Africa cities lack charm: Cairo has its pyramids and
Cape Town its mountain, while Entebbe’s rustic setting on Lake Victoria
is genuinely enchanting, as is Zanzibar’s seafront Stone Town. But the
sprawling outskirts of Bamako or Lilongwe, even Johannesburg or
Nairobi, seem to epitomise all that is depressing about concentrated
humanity without possessing any of the overt cultural attractions
associated with the great capitals of Europe or Asia.
What’s more, many African cities nurture a low-key culture of crime or
con-artistry to which fresh arrivals are particularly vulnerable ‐
reason enough for canny travellers to move on from the capital as soon
after arrival as possible, even on the same day if it can be arranged.
And yet, paradoxically, it is also my experience that the most initially off-putting of African
cities gains a surprising sheen of sophistication when approached from
within the country rather than by air.
Or maybe that’s not so strange. The last thing that any normal tourist
wants upon arriving in Africa is to spend the night in a squalid
guesthouse in downtown Nairobi ‐ or, for that matter, watching
satellite television in a formulaic city hotel in Dar es Salaam or
Lusaka. Different altogether after a dusty fortnight in the safari
saddle: suddenly, that that same bland monolith ‐ the one with
television, and hot baths, and that menu ‐ looks like paradise on
earth. And after a month or so backpacking around any given African
country, I start to actively crave the adrenalin charge of a real city,
not to mention the nightlife, the international cuisine, the fast
internet access, the book shops…
So, yes, I still remember that disappointing first night in Kenya, but
I must confess that today I’m rather fond of Nairobi, as I am of Dar es
Salaam, Addis Ababa, Accra, and all those other cities that so
intimidated me on first exposure. Were I fly into Kenya tomorrow, I’d
still do my utmost to get to somewhere like Lake Naivasha on the day I
arrived. But only in the knowledge that after a week or two I’d be back
in the capital, ready to embrace the energy and chaos of urban Africa! |
