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There was an embarrassed silence. Eric stared at me agape. The Sudanese with the giant gold epaulets had stopped blinking. Somewhat apologetically, he replied, ‘I am the President.’
It’s 11 July 1989, and we are belted in as the Kenya Airways flight taxis for the runway. We’re homeward bound for Nairobi after the military coup in the Sudan. We’re tired and dirty after an eighteen-hour delay out of Khartoum due to sandstorms followed by a technical hitch stopover at Addis Ababa’s Bole airport. The aircraft is half-empty. Eric is next to me and across the aisle is Julian, pulling on a fag after the no smoking lights have come on. The three of us barely know one another, but what’s about to happen will bind us together forever. This moment is when it all really begins. This is why years later I like to fancy that the people who make up my story, even the ones who are not on the plane that day, fill all the vacant seats. And so I look down the aisle and see, half turning to look at me, the faces of Jonathan, Buchi, Hos, Dan, Afrah, Carlos, Bald Sam, Shafi, Lizzie. And among them are dozens of other ghosts and fellow travellers we met along the way.
Our Boeing 707 accelerates and lifts off. Within seconds it becomes clear that we are failing to gain altitude. Julian rests his head against the seat in front of him and exclaims dolefully, ‘We’re not going to make it!’ The aircraft banks in a tight circle. Through my porthole the wing is vertical, skimming peasant huts and fields. We hit the ground halfway down the runway. The jets scream in reverse thrust. Overhead compartments crash open, spilling bags and tubes and yellow masks. We spin, tilt, the wheels give way as the fuselage torpedoes down a mountainside. The port wing buckles and rips away. Din of turbines, tearing metal, electronics and then silence.
My panic is over before it even had a chance to begin. In the hush that follows we crouch in the brace position, like churchgoers. Eric cackles, ‘Are we home already?’
Across the way, a passenger with zigzag tribal scars across his forehead points out of his porthole and yells, ‘It is burning! We are burning!’
Orange flames billow from the smashed portside wing. The passenger cabin fills with fumes and black smoke. I begin to choke as I struggle to rip off the safety belt. We are all suffocating.
Julian heads downhill towards the aircraft’s nose. Instinct tells me to vault up the steep incline to the starboard rear emergency exit. I can see through the smoke that Eric has the same idea as he moves up ahead of me. At the exit, a flight attendant blocks our path. His skin has gone a tinge of green. ‘Take your seats!’ he yells. He is rooted to the spot, as if paralysed.
Eric punches the flight attendant in the face and pushes past. He turns the emergency handle and wrenches open the door, causing the inflatable chute to billow out to the hillside below. Both of us grab the steward and push him out of the plane headfirst, then follow ourselves. The whole scene’s in slow motion as I slide down. I see black smoke, red flames, a fountain of white foam lathering up over the prone aircraft. Walking up the gashed muddy slope I see, in amongst the debris of orange life jackets and clothes and paper cups, an old man moaning, clutching at his bloody leg out of which sticks a jagged bone. Stretcher crews are skidding down the hill. Off to one side, the Ethiopian soldiers are using the butts of their AK-47S to keep back a crowd of peasants in rags intent on looting the crash site.
We regroup back on the tarmac apron, where an airport bus is waiting for us. ‘Bloodyfuckinghell’ we all agree and light up our fags. Once out of the airport, we rush to file our stories. Only when we talk to our desks do we realize that our harrowing experience in the heart of Africa is not news. It means nothing to anybody but us, yet the crash brings us together as comrades, in a way that no pleasant experience could do.
The flight to Nairobi next day feels like the safest I’ve ever taken. I’m buoyed up and borne along by the laws of probability on my side that I couldn’t be in a plane crash two days in a row. Ever after, Julian’s way of coping with air travel is to start talking very loudly just before takeoff about the time he crashed in Africa, until the stewardesses come to ask him to desist because he’s frightening the other passengers. Eric claims he has no fear of flying. ‘Doesn’t bother me in the least,’ he says. ‘In fact, I feel blessed by the great airline gods, which is why I think I’m always getting bumped up to business or first class.’ I walk away and forget for years how afraid I am. But on a takeoff hundreds of flights later, every second of the crash comes back to haunt me. I am transformed into one of those unsettling passengers next to you: palms sweating, bare-toothed with fear and possessed of a high-altitude belief in God. And so it is with many of my memories.
At the end of the nineteenth century the British constructed a railway from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria. The project acquired the name the Lunatic Express, being hugely expensive and built for no ultimate reason other than for the vague objective of securing the headwaters of the Nile. The most challenging section of this incredible feat of engineering was to cross the Great Rift Valley. On the last staging post before the precipitous Rift escarpment, the British ordered their workforce of Indian coolies and soldiers to pitch their lines of white tents in neat rows on the black cotton soil. Here the flat plains, which teemed with wildlife, suddenly rose up like a wave to break over the Rift near the Ngongs, a ripple of volcanic hills that looked like a giant fist. The staging post quickly became Nairobi, named for Ngare Nairobi, or the Cold River, which snaked across the plains. Having built a railway, the British had to justify its cost. The bureaucrats arrived in Nairobi. A stone magistrate’s court was constructed and the trading houses and banks that followed went up along muddy streets wide enough to allow a wagon and eight span of oxen to turn a full circle. The Africans were ordered to pay poll taxes to the bureaucrats. To do this, the Africans came to work and live in shanties. The white settlers arrived to establish plantations and ranches so that the railway would have something to transport. And so the foundations of modern Kenya were laid, created by white men, then worshipped by the mission-raised blacks after they took power following their independence.
I was born within sight of Nairobi’s railway terminus, at the Mater Misericordia hospital in the Industrial Area. The midwife Sister Assunta delivered me and cooed over me for my name, Aidan, was that of the saint who had converted the heathens of the Western Isles of Scotland. My mother gave the hospital a jacaranda tree that grows in the garden to this day. My birth came just after Kenya’s independence from Britain in 1963, when postcards showed a city with lush gardens and wide, tree-lined avenues with only the occasional car travelling on them. ‘Jambo from the Green City in the Sun’ said the postcards and the tourist brochures. Even in the Technicolor memory of my childhood, I remember Nairobi was still small enough for people to say hello as one strolled the pavement.
If you live in a place you hardly notice the changes. You have to return after a long absence, as I did in 1989. In the gap since my boyhood, Nairobi had been transformed into a dirty, crime-ridden place, surrounded by slums. I heard that when it rained in the shantytowns, the poor people’s shacks slid down the muddy hillsides. Nobody knew what the population was except that it was rising. The hacks nicknamed it ‘Nairobbery’ (derelict Dar es Salaam was ‘Dar-Is-the-Slum’ and Uganda’s war-devastated capital Kampala was known as ‘Kampothole’). But with the crowding and danger came a vibrant urban atmosphere as fizzy as a chilled Tusker with its cap popped off.
I remember walking into the Chester House press centre on Koinange Street for the first time. Downtown was still defined by the little grid of streets from the colonial era. Concrete structures rose around me, nosing up through the slum smog: ministries, multinationals, agencies of the United Nations. From a street corner, I watched the teeming scene: office workers in their frayed shirt collars and cheap suits stepping over beggars, shoeshine boys, vendors selling spreads of newspapers. Drum magazine splashing the headline ‘Luo Girls are Best in Bed.’ The white plutocrats in their short sleeves, the youngish European females we called leatherettes because the tropical sun had ravaged their white skin, the hippies, the Kenya Cowboys, the Somali café crowd, Asians in their banks and trading houses, the young black middle-class kids in their baggy trousers and wet-look coifs, the Big Shiny Men in their air-conditioned BMWs, or the processions of tourists in khaki safari hats, window-shopping for taka taka souvenirs