The Pursuit of Failure

Nairobi exists soley for the British folly of constructing a railroad from Mombassa on the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile, to thwart the French. Swampy Nairobi was a logistical choice. Its workers came from British India. Karen is a suburb of Nairobi named for Karen Blixen who wrote "Out of Africa."  It was her famous farm that was subdivided.  Her house there remains as a museum. In a few days I visit West Tsavo National Reserve where Robert Redford crashed his Gypsy Moth plane leaving Meryl Streep quite sad. West Tsavo is also famous for two lions that one hundred and twenty years ago devoured some thirty-five Indian railroad workers over a nine month period halting railroad construction. I hope to see hippos, rhinos, and elephants in West Tsavo while eating good food.

Just south of Karen is Kibera, the biggest slum in Africa. Kibera is what you see along the chinese funded Nairobi Southern Bypass Highway - end to end rusted corragated tin shacks, tumbling down scrawny hillsides, for a quarter million souls. The Chinese also funded rebuilding of the Mombassa - Lake Victoria railroad.  In her time, Danish Blixen spoke against English colonialism.  China is now the world's banker.  Hakuna Matata. 

Ernest Hemingway first arrived in Africa in Mombassa on December 8, 1933.  I will be in Mobassa on December 8th as well.  I just finished his "Green Hills of Africa." Its Part III of IV is "Pursuit of Failure."  It is a non-fiction book about people in unacknowledged conflict.  Hemingway tells us readers who he hates, including himself, on a Tanzanian safari.  It was not a critical success. He drank more.  Part of writing is that you get to tell a homily, a soap box to stand on for an interested audience. Here is Hemingway's homily in "Green Hills of Africa:"

"A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts. When he quits using beasts and uses machines, the earth defeats him quickly. The machine can’t reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he cannot raise. A country was made to be as we found it. We are the intruders and after we are dead we may have ruined it but it will still be there and we don’t know what the next changes are. I suppose they all end up like Mongolia."

The last few days the resort I am at within the Amboseli National Reserve has hosted groups from the World Health Organization and the International Fund for Animal Welfare.  One boring blow hard spoke forty minutes before his own camera crew about the good he was doing oblivous to contributions of other attendees.  It is easy to point out problems. Much harder to fix them.