This post is going to be totally diarrheic and blonde. I don’t have anything groundbreaking to write about, okay, at least I’m not in that frame of mind. So yes, this is going to be very random.
My hustle dictates that I do a bit of travelling. I frequently contribute to a publication whose readership is the AB1; business suits who drive Range Rovers and take single malt whiskey. Apparently – according to my editor – these folk although have some mad disposable income don’t know exactly where to spend it on holiday in Kenya. So they go to Olei Polos to eat meat. Or Nairobi West to beer-up while they talk shop….or politics. Or they use their money to buy some girl a Nissan Duet.
Here is where I come in. I “discover” these luxury haunts, go down and experience them and write something that hopefully will inspire these demographic enough to leave Nairobi West. Sometimes it works. Other times they show me the finger.
But the thing with luxury establishments like Lion Hill is that it’s full of white folk. You know touristy types who love nature and the outdoors. I mean folk who genuinely get so excited at seeing a Zebra. A Zebra for chrissake! These are the same fellas who lug serious cameras that go for something like $3,000 (minus the lens!) and all they do is take pictures of monkeys and Dik Diks. It kills me. Although I can’t say I don’t enjoy staying in most of these resorts, I’m always made aware of my skin color because more often than not we are always very few black faces around- not counting the staff. And this becomes very apparent during meals when everybody congregates to stuff their faces in the restaurant. And being the only black face is not a good thing fellas because you stick out like a sore thumb (I was tempted to make a racy joke here and say you stick out like the thumb of God, but I won’t, I’m not Fizzle Dog).
At Sarova Lion Hill for instance, we were like three miroz (that’s slang for blacks, yee foreign readers who aren’t up to speed with Kenyan lingo). The rest were Caucasian…and a poodle, which I suspect was white as well. Anyway the white folk smiled a lot at me next to the lamb chops at the buffet table and said “Jambo rafiki”. I can never get over that, you know when a tourist calls anybody “rafiki” or when they say “hakuna matata”. It’s a phony but innocent attempt to assimilate themselves into the Kenyan culture, and when you think about it, it’s somewhat endearing, even if in a slightly naïve way.
But being the only few black faces in the room is a good thing; it attracts a lot of mystery. I look at the faces of the diners and they seem to fear me. I swear I terrify them! They always seem to have questions swirling in their heads. Who is he really and how is he paying for this? Is he the truant heirloom of a Zulu paramount chief? Is he a drug dealer? Or perhaps he’s a human trafficker..or worse still, a Nigerian! Maybe he doesn’t exist, you know, maybe I’m seeing things…I was told Africa does that to you. But can he really use that fork? What if he throws it at me? Honey, doesn’t he look like that guy in God must be crazy?
I love it.
But that aside I have also been to places where waiters are not as enthusiastic to serve me, maybe because they imagine black folk don’t tip. Those are the places I love because it gives me a chance to drop in a very barbed one sentence in my copy when I sit down to pen it. The kind of sentence that make heads roll. I love to nurse my vindictiveness.
But Lion Hill was swell. No white guy mistook me for any character in a movie, and the waiters were very kind and helpful and didn’t try to whisper in my ear “Always start from the outside of the cutlery, and work your way inside.”
At night they had this Maasai dance, complete with a bonfire which had flames leaping into the dark night. A whole horde of tourists sat before this expedition, totally enthralled. I felt like laughing. Not because the Maasai’s weren’t putting up a good gig, but because the tourists thought those guys were actually Maasai’s. They weren’t. They were Kikuyus because later I had one dancer telling the other, “eeh ni uonire thuruari yakwa?” which I think roughly translates to “Have you seen my underwear?”