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Spending a portion of June in the equatorial country of Kenya one gains an essence of the people who live on this warm, wide continent. In the June of 2004, there was a hussle of figures powdered along outside a clinic in the Great Rift Valley. Guilelessly, they sat on benches and on the cinnamon-brown earth of Africa, carrying somewhere in their hearts the promise of medicines and surgery. They were in the town of Nakuru, a hundred miles from the capital, and would be reached by a road shaded by the overhangs of acacia and casuarina trees. Close to Nakuru, the liquorice road thins out to shards and fritterings of a tarmac battered for decades by clanking lorries from Nairobi, the capital of the Republic of Kenya.
As with many zones of Africa, much of the blindness in Nakuru is caused by diseases which tarnish the front of the eye. One man had brought his boy on a heavy-framed bicycle and cycled for about a week to reach the clinic. The boy was in miserable spirits, eyes glisteningly scarred, rubbed to smithereens, half-blinded by the irritative disease which is common in the aridness of open hot grasslands. But it would be a misportrayal of Africa and its people if Nakuru were to be painted as another locale of poor-world desperation. Here, the people sport a smile worthy of toothpaste advertisements. The women have names like Charity and Grace and the young men are a Flashman or a Goodluck. Their lips coiffure into a smile with only the tiniest persuasion. For visiting doctors, they are a joy to know, priming the workers with a breakfast of Spanish omelette on two castings of perfect toast and a beaker of good strong tea from the Kenyan highlands. However, the tea and the lily-white eggs and the loaf of bread in clear polythene were bought daily for the volunteer doctors as a mark of respect. The hosts themselves were round the corner, sat on a cement floor, shyly mouthing through a salty biscuit with a small cup of left-over tea. A weighty breakfast is valuable for a ten-hour day of operating on the eye, but it was indescribably humbling to experience such a welcome. It creates a sense of inadequacy in the one who walks away digesting the meatier breakfast.
Nakuru is one of the rural towns along the nation-crossing Rift Valley, a furrow of mythical size when the eastern half of Africa is viewed via the telescopy of a satellite. The Rift runs down a stack of countries with the geographical presence of a river like the Nile or the menacingly fast Zambezi. Two continent-sized slabs flank the fault-line that is the Great Rift. An English-fluent local tells the curious that the Rift is fracturing at a few millimetres per year and should this bifurcation continue the result will be a new ocean, welling up from betwixt a cracking of the African landmasses. He had learnt all this via satellite television and was not coquettish about divulging the source of his thick-seamed knowledge. In 2004, satellite television was exciting technology for some, but now even the bucolic mid-west of Kenya is more drawn to the international network of computers.
To the outsider, the maize-fringed Nakuru seems peaceable, two hours by truck from Nairobi, a capital which fifty years ago was relinquished by the British as the empire exhaled its valedictory sigh in a nation which is home to the big-maned Serengeti Lion. The first statesman of modern Kenya was Jomo Kenyatta – reverentially "Mzee" (elder) – who now sits as a statue clad in full African regalia inside a capital with old smoky skyscrapers. In a gesture of benevolence, the statue was made by a British sculptor and sent across by slow-boat sometime in the 1970s. It was not a slap-dash lump of artwork : the artist had even ensured that a birthmark was etched on the embronzed visage of the inaugural president of the republic. President Jomo Kenyatta persists in the mind as a figure from yet more complicated colonial history and physically as a pyramid of bronze lashed by the wet season of equatorial East Africa.
Not so far from the clinic of Nakuru is the most astonishing conglomeration of birdlife arranged in a flintscape of water the size of a large town. At its peak, Lake Nakuru is the grazing ground of two million flamingos and at low-water the number contracts to a still spectacular twenty thousand of these long-legged, curvy-beaked waders. On the dullest imaginable day, Lake Nakuru becomes a sheet of aluminium over which languidly flap and glide the smaller sprays of herons, pelicans and avocets.
Back in 2004, at the time of the eye camp, the ecosystem of the lake had been strangulated by industrial effluence from the nearby Nakuru township. The host doctor was discussing these tragedies as well as the pugnacity of tribal conflict in the backlands of Kenya. Farmers had been busy warring with machete-knives and the food-growing earth had once again been besmirched with blood. It reminded one of how countries and societies always function on two levels, the superficial and the lurkingly subterranean. For rich Britons, the superficial Kenya is the Africa of safaris, game lodges and a paradisal coastline which is sanded so thickly and has billowy palm trees as far away as the eye can resolve. The nauseous realities of Kenya are blissfully missed. For the American in London, Britain can be simplified into Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament and a likeable musical accent in the fancy shops. For a Britisher in New York, America can be shorn of its complexities and naively reduced to the pretty sensationalisms of The Big Apple.
Ten years have flown by since the eye camp of 2004 and Lake Nakuru has, professedly, recovered most of its former health. It is heartening to know that the most voluminous birdlife spectacle on the planet has not been unalterably annihilated by human activity. Elsewhere in the realm of humanlife, the political health of Kenya remains familiarly irregular – this is an unstable continent where nations can easily spin into full-out civil war. And healthcare in rural Kenya was summarised by the Luo tribesman to whom it was asked, “But what happens if you fall ill out here?” Expressionlessly, the old man replied, “You die.”
Competing interests:
No competing interests
10 June 2014
Jagdeep Singh Gandhi
Consultant Ophthalmic Surgeon
Worcester Royal Eye Unit
Worcestershire Royal Hospital, Worcester, UNITED KINGDOM
Re: Accounts of Equatorial Africa
Spending a portion of June in the equatorial country of Kenya one gains an essence of the people who live on this warm, wide continent. In the June of 2004, there was a hussle of figures powdered along outside a clinic in the Great Rift Valley. Guilelessly, they sat on benches and on the cinnamon-brown earth of Africa, carrying somewhere in their hearts the promise of medicines and surgery. They were in the town of Nakuru, a hundred miles from the capital, and would be reached by a road shaded by the overhangs of acacia and casuarina trees. Close to Nakuru, the liquorice road thins out to shards and fritterings of a tarmac battered for decades by clanking lorries from Nairobi, the capital of the Republic of Kenya.
As with many zones of Africa, much of the blindness in Nakuru is caused by diseases which tarnish the front of the eye. One man had brought his boy on a heavy-framed bicycle and cycled for about a week to reach the clinic. The boy was in miserable spirits, eyes glisteningly scarred, rubbed to smithereens, half-blinded by the irritative disease which is common in the aridness of open hot grasslands. But it would be a misportrayal of Africa and its people if Nakuru were to be painted as another locale of poor-world desperation. Here, the people sport a smile worthy of toothpaste advertisements. The women have names like Charity and Grace and the young men are a Flashman or a Goodluck. Their lips coiffure into a smile with only the tiniest persuasion. For visiting doctors, they are a joy to know, priming the workers with a breakfast of Spanish omelette on two castings of perfect toast and a beaker of good strong tea from the Kenyan highlands. However, the tea and the lily-white eggs and the loaf of bread in clear polythene were bought daily for the volunteer doctors as a mark of respect. The hosts themselves were round the corner, sat on a cement floor, shyly mouthing through a salty biscuit with a small cup of left-over tea. A weighty breakfast is valuable for a ten-hour day of operating on the eye, but it was indescribably humbling to experience such a welcome. It creates a sense of inadequacy in the one who walks away digesting the meatier breakfast.
Nakuru is one of the rural towns along the nation-crossing Rift Valley, a furrow of mythical size when the eastern half of Africa is viewed via the telescopy of a satellite. The Rift runs down a stack of countries with the geographical presence of a river like the Nile or the menacingly fast Zambezi. Two continent-sized slabs flank the fault-line that is the Great Rift. An English-fluent local tells the curious that the Rift is fracturing at a few millimetres per year and should this bifurcation continue the result will be a new ocean, welling up from betwixt a cracking of the African landmasses. He had learnt all this via satellite television and was not coquettish about divulging the source of his thick-seamed knowledge. In 2004, satellite television was exciting technology for some, but now even the bucolic mid-west of Kenya is more drawn to the international network of computers.
To the outsider, the maize-fringed Nakuru seems peaceable, two hours by truck from Nairobi, a capital which fifty years ago was relinquished by the British as the empire exhaled its valedictory sigh in a nation which is home to the big-maned Serengeti Lion. The first statesman of modern Kenya was Jomo Kenyatta – reverentially "Mzee" (elder) – who now sits as a statue clad in full African regalia inside a capital with old smoky skyscrapers. In a gesture of benevolence, the statue was made by a British sculptor and sent across by slow-boat sometime in the 1970s. It was not a slap-dash lump of artwork : the artist had even ensured that a birthmark was etched on the embronzed visage of the inaugural president of the republic. President Jomo Kenyatta persists in the mind as a figure from yet more complicated colonial history and physically as a pyramid of bronze lashed by the wet season of equatorial East Africa.
Not so far from the clinic of Nakuru is the most astonishing conglomeration of birdlife arranged in a flintscape of water the size of a large town. At its peak, Lake Nakuru is the grazing ground of two million flamingos and at low-water the number contracts to a still spectacular twenty thousand of these long-legged, curvy-beaked waders. On the dullest imaginable day, Lake Nakuru becomes a sheet of aluminium over which languidly flap and glide the smaller sprays of herons, pelicans and avocets.
Back in 2004, at the time of the eye camp, the ecosystem of the lake had been strangulated by industrial effluence from the nearby Nakuru township. The host doctor was discussing these tragedies as well as the pugnacity of tribal conflict in the backlands of Kenya. Farmers had been busy warring with machete-knives and the food-growing earth had once again been besmirched with blood. It reminded one of how countries and societies always function on two levels, the superficial and the lurkingly subterranean. For rich Britons, the superficial Kenya is the Africa of safaris, game lodges and a paradisal coastline which is sanded so thickly and has billowy palm trees as far away as the eye can resolve. The nauseous realities of Kenya are blissfully missed. For the American in London, Britain can be simplified into Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament and a likeable musical accent in the fancy shops. For a Britisher in New York, America can be shorn of its complexities and naively reduced to the pretty sensationalisms of The Big Apple.
Ten years have flown by since the eye camp of 2004 and Lake Nakuru has, professedly, recovered most of its former health. It is heartening to know that the most voluminous birdlife spectacle on the planet has not been unalterably annihilated by human activity. Elsewhere in the realm of humanlife, the political health of Kenya remains familiarly irregular – this is an unstable continent where nations can easily spin into full-out civil war. And healthcare in rural Kenya was summarised by the Luo tribesman to whom it was asked, “But what happens if you fall ill out here?” Expressionlessly, the old man replied, “You die.”
Competing interests: No competing interests