Read Online A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) by Jonny Steinberg - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jonny Steinberg
Ads: Link
colonial cities. It was set a safe distance from the districts in which white expatriates lived, and white people seldom went there. Yet neither did it house black workers. The people who first settled in Eastleigh were largely Asian. They owned property there, but often had no title deeds, only verbal agreements and shared knowledge. They traded, but much of their trade was off the books. It was a place where business is transacted under the eye of legal officers but is nonetheless not regulated by law, where the rules are unwritten and the nature of commerce is a little opaque.
Somalis began to settle there in small numbers long after the British left, sometime in the 1970s. By then, most of the original Asian occupants had abandoned Eastleigh for more secluded suburbs, and the Somalis’ landlords were generally Kikuyu businessmen. It was a natural place for undocumented immigrants to settle, for one could do business and trade or work for another without too many questions asked, a place where one could figure out a modus vivendi with the agents of the law.
When the Somali civil war broke out in 1991, the number of Somalis in Eastleigh soon swelled. The footing they established in Nairobi was precarious. Kenya had accepted Somali refugees with great reluctance. Their legal status was kept ambiguous, partly because of bureaucratic inertia, partly because ambiguity leaves all options open. Somali refugees who lived in camps were legitimate, while those who made their way to places like Eastleigh lived in a zone somewhere between illegality and unofficial acceptance.
Among Asad’s most vivid memories of Eastleigh is the role Somali children played in mediating between their parents and the police.
“The children ran around all day,” Asad tells me, “and they would come home with Swahili phrases. They would learn from the talk around the kiosks, from the Kenyan children, from the taxi drivers. The children realized that this was very useful, to speak a language their parents did not, so it became a thing among them that they must know Swahili.”
Somali children learned Swahili in order to keep secrets from their parents. But in the end, their new language was put to other uses, too. Periodically, large groups of police would descend on Eastleigh, move at leisure through the streets, and arrest anyone and everyone they saw.
“You would have these bunches of fifteen chained Somalis out on the streets,” Asad says. “Then the negotiations begin. The police only allowed the children to interpret: if anyone else tried to interpret, they would be arrested. You pay; they let you go. You don’t pay; you go to the police cells. To get out of the police cells, you pay much more. Everyone paid at some point. That was the only route out. You pay. You go back to Islii.
“But we children always had this special role. The police arrest someone: people say, ‘Call the kids.’ ”
Now much has changed. When Asad passed through Eastleigh in 2004, after an absence of almost a decade, he could barely believe what he saw.
“There was so much money in Islii,” he says, “Somali money. There were paved streets, beautiful new shopping centers, buildings much taller than any that had been there before.”
In this twilight world, with one foot in and the other outside the law, Somalis had established a transnational banking system, a network of global trade links, and a marketplace for all sorts of commerce. Many of its residents remained dirt poor, living off others or on cheap, informal work. But alongside them were Somalis who had grown rich. By 2004, Eastleigh’s Somalis were purchasing electronic and white goods and fresh food so much more cheaply than anyone else in Nairobi that they were wholesaling to the rest of the city. Eastleigh had become the center of Nairobi’s consumer-goods economy, despite remaining all but invisible in the city’s deeds office.
—
But back then, Somalis were new and barely had a
Somalis began to settle there in small numbers long after the British left, sometime in the 1970s. By then, most of the original Asian occupants had abandoned Eastleigh for more secluded suburbs, and the Somalis’ landlords were generally Kikuyu businessmen. It was a natural place for undocumented immigrants to settle, for one could do business and trade or work for another without too many questions asked, a place where one could figure out a modus vivendi with the agents of the law.
When the Somali civil war broke out in 1991, the number of Somalis in Eastleigh soon swelled. The footing they established in Nairobi was precarious. Kenya had accepted Somali refugees with great reluctance. Their legal status was kept ambiguous, partly because of bureaucratic inertia, partly because ambiguity leaves all options open. Somali refugees who lived in camps were legitimate, while those who made their way to places like Eastleigh lived in a zone somewhere between illegality and unofficial acceptance.
Among Asad’s most vivid memories of Eastleigh is the role Somali children played in mediating between their parents and the police.
“The children ran around all day,” Asad tells me, “and they would come home with Swahili phrases. They would learn from the talk around the kiosks, from the Kenyan children, from the taxi drivers. The children realized that this was very useful, to speak a language their parents did not, so it became a thing among them that they must know Swahili.”
Somali children learned Swahili in order to keep secrets from their parents. But in the end, their new language was put to other uses, too. Periodically, large groups of police would descend on Eastleigh, move at leisure through the streets, and arrest anyone and everyone they saw.
“You would have these bunches of fifteen chained Somalis out on the streets,” Asad says. “Then the negotiations begin. The police only allowed the children to interpret: if anyone else tried to interpret, they would be arrested. You pay; they let you go. You don’t pay; you go to the police cells. To get out of the police cells, you pay much more. Everyone paid at some point. That was the only route out. You pay. You go back to Islii.
“But we children always had this special role. The police arrest someone: people say, ‘Call the kids.’ ”
Now much has changed. When Asad passed through Eastleigh in 2004, after an absence of almost a decade, he could barely believe what he saw.
“There was so much money in Islii,” he says, “Somali money. There were paved streets, beautiful new shopping centers, buildings much taller than any that had been there before.”
In this twilight world, with one foot in and the other outside the law, Somalis had established a transnational banking system, a network of global trade links, and a marketplace for all sorts of commerce. Many of its residents remained dirt poor, living off others or on cheap, informal work. But alongside them were Somalis who had grown rich. By 2004, Eastleigh’s Somalis were purchasing electronic and white goods and fresh food so much more cheaply than anyone else in Nairobi that they were wholesaling to the rest of the city. Eastleigh had become the center of Nairobi’s consumer-goods economy, despite remaining all but invisible in the city’s deeds office.
—
But back then, Somalis were new and barely had a
Similar Books
