Nairobi to the Mog, we still cry the beloved city

By Charles Onyango-Obbo

Posted  Saturday, April 20  2013 at  12:37

IN SUMMARY

• You may never really restore the traditions and glory of an institution, city, or a country. It seems equally difficult to fully inherit it too. Perhaps every generation has to marshal its energies and create its own glories.

And so last Thursday at the Louis Leakey Auditorium in Nairobi, two sons of East Africa were in “conversation”: The younger writer Binyavanga Wainaina and the older, accomplished hand, Somali author Nuruddin Farah.  

Eventually, the questions came round to whether Nuruddin thought Somalia would ever get back on its feet again. Yes, he was optimistic that Somalia would in time be physically rebuilt.

But there was something that not even 20 million African Union troops, Amisom, or anyone could bring back to the capital Mogadishu. What had been destroyed, Nuruddin argued, was the city’s cosmopolitanism.

In its day, Mogadishu was a city for traders and travellers from all over the world, even from as far as Afghanistan. The residents of Mogadishu were professionals, poets, and musicians and traders. Today, in part because of the “fiction” of clan, and the divisions brought about by the 20-year civil war, that Mogadishu is no longer possible. It will take generations, if ever, to recreate.

The striking thing about this is that it is not just the story of Mogadishu. Other East African cities have failed to escape the prisons of their unhappy histories, and to recreate the idyllic lives to which they aspire.

Because for many years Nairobi, even the central business district, was dark and blighted by violent crime, today many people still live in that past city. There are foreigners who work in Nairobi for years, never daring to go downtown or stray out of their gated communities in the suburbs. Some just won’t be caught dead outside their homes after 7pm.

Then, murderous soldiers and gangs besieged Kampala in the years before President Yoweri Museveni took power in 1986. For their safety, city residents took to building prison grade metal grills on their doors and windows.

That terrifying phase of Kampala’s history lasted about 15 years. For 25 years, 10 years longer, it has been quite a safe city. But the metal grills remain, and the walls around homes have become more robust.

Fear, it seems, is a more forbidding tyrant than hope and reality.

But I sensed Nuruddin was holding back. For example, when African nations got independence, their elites soon moved into the neighbourhoods once preserved for the British colonial class and took over their clubs.

It seems, however, that today more East Africans go to the golf clubs to drink beer than to play golf. I have been to a few of these clubs. Some still have the reading rooms and libraries, but they no new books and clearly no one has borrowed the old classics for years.

So, maybe you can never really restore the traditions and glory of an institution, city, or a country. It seems equally difficult to fully inherit it too. Perhaps every generation has to marshal its energies and create its own glories.

Perhaps then the question should have been if the present generation of Mogadishuans has it in them to build a cosmopolitan capital. And the answer, reading from Nuruddin, is no. And from the polite and guarded comments by both Binyavanga and Nuruddin about Kenya’s recent election, neither does Nairobi.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com. Twitter: @cobbo
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