broken cloud less than four thousand feet below me.
The Ethiopian mountains rose in spectacular ridges up to ten thousand feet from sea level along that section and I was amazed to see telltale signs of cultivation on their upper reaches, almost always in cloud. What kind of people lived at those high altitudes?
The same impenetrable terrain was traversed by Sir Charles Napier, the British general, with an army of thirty-two thousand men in 1868. Under Queen Victoria’s directive, General Napier had been sent to defeat Emperor Theodore, the Abyssinian warrior king, whose outrageous defiance of the British Empire and her Sovereign Queen was considered intolerable. General Napier’s trek, complete with fifty-five thousand animals, including elephants shipped from India, took him across those mountain ridges below me, surely some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain.
A British emissary, Charles Cameron, held hostage by Emperor Theodore for five years, was the casus belli for that incredible expedition. Napier’s route from the coastal town of Magdala into central Ethiopia took almost six months, but the battle that followed lasted less than twenty minutes. Emperor Theodore lost the battle, his kingdom, and his life. The British recovered their emissary, their honour, and their reputation, leaving Ethiopia to sort out its own future through tribal warfare and natural anarchy—at a time before airplanes had even been invented.
At Mandera I flew into Kenyan airspace. After ten hours of flying I was closing in on my destination. Shards of sunlight pierced the towering clouds of cotton wool. The ground fell away from the mountains into forest clearings, spotted with thatched makutis (roofs) and the smoke of cooking fires whose wisps of smoke curled into the bluish haze of an African sky. The number of settlements multiplied, laced by red earthen paths through a patchwork of small farms with their bomas (thorn-bush corrals for herding goats). Corrugated tin roofs glinted in the sunlight, through the emerald-green baize of tea and coffee plantations. In the distance, the city of Nairobi rose faint against the murk of a polluted skyline. My heart beat faster.
The instrument approach into Wilson Airport, the smaller of the two airports servicing Nairobi, is linked to that of the larger, Kenyatta International Airport. Instructions on the approach plate for landing are confusing: midway through the procedure for Kenyatta Airport, the pilot is expected to break away and enter the approach for Wilson Airport—a most unusual arrangement and a lot to ask of a pilot after ten hours of flying at fourteen thousand feet.
My head ached from dehydration and the lack of oxygen. I had to rely on the controller’s limited patience as I stumbled through his instructions and eventually touched down on Wilson Airport’s Runway 07. I taxied the length of the field, crossed Runway 14 and pulled up in front of the Flying Doctors Service hangar.
A number of Flying Doctors Service pilots had gathered outside the hangar to watch as I cut the engine and swung out of the cockpit. Tousled, dirty, and lacking in sleep I could hardly make my legs work as they were stiffened from so many hours of flying. I approached the pilots, who were waiting at a respectful distance from the plane. So this was the consultant, come to help reorganize the Flying Doctors Service. At least they were impressed by my having flown from North America to Africa in a single-engine plane. That was a good start.
We shook hands and, after a brief discussion, I informed them that I needed food and sleep; their questions would have to wait for morning. They understood, offered to place my plane in the hangar, and helped me call a cab.
As the taxi careered and swayed along Milimani Road towards the city, my driver, who introduced himself as Michael, talked nonstop. He persuaded me to stay at the Nairobi Club, a perfect club for a gentleman from Canada, he claimed. He would vouch for it and for me—I had only to leave everything to him. What’s more, he would meet me the next morning in order to show me the city.
I gazed abstractly out the window at Nairobi, large and bustling under the white gold of a setting sun, and all very peaceful. I had flown eight thousand miles from Toronto to Nairobi in seventy-six hours’ flying time. The excitement of flying solo to Kenya to work on an aid project in Africa suddenly seemed less romantic, even mundane—but then I was tired, very tired. I needed sleep. Tomorrow, I thought, would be time to rekindle my spirits, to seek adventure in Africa, and whatever else lay ahead, over the next two years.
IREMEMBER the jacaranda trees. They formed my first impression of Nairobi—dotting the hills like puffs of blue smoke, presaging the rainy season—delicate blossoms, like fallen tanzanites sprinkling the blood-red earth every morning. The city sits five degrees south of the equator, a mile above sea level, basking under a brilliant sun by day, blanketed in liquid coolness at night. How can I ever forget those early-morning sunrises, the magnificent variegations of an African sky, spilling light across the city, or the majestic wash of violet when the sun falls into the Rift Valley at the close of day?
Nairobi must have been a beautiful city in its time. By the time I arrived, sadly, everything about Kenya’s capital required patience and charity. The city’s infrastructure had crumbled; roads, telephones, and government services had become unreliable, subject to sudden breakdown. Giant potholes pockmarked the crowded and dangerous roads. Poorly paid bureaucrats, dispirited and helpless, no longer maintained even the pretence of public service. Civil responsibility seemed a thing of the past, long forgotten. At night the downtown streets remained unlit; an invitation to loiterers, shifting gangs of hoodlums, prostitutes, and the homeless. Mounting heaps of refuse lay uncollected, a permanent part of the landscape. It was depressing to see this once-lovely city fallen into such neglect and decay.
Michael, my taxi-driver friend, had suggested I stay at the Nairobi Club the first night, and not having anywhere else in mind, I simply followed his lead. We pulled up to a large, rambling, grey, stone, white-pillared building sitting on ten acres of beautiful grounds on one of the seven hills of Nairobi. The club had been founded and built in 1921 by tradesmen, in opposition to the exclusive up-country white settlers’ Muthaiga Club on the other side of town. The two clubs represented separate classes during colonial rule, a strictly observed division that gave rise to much sneering and disapproval from both sides.
As I would discover, the Muthaiga Club was always the more chic of the two, with its golf course, squash courts, croquet lawns, pools, and ballroom. Built by Indian artisans from large blocks of stone, and with small Doric columns, it possessed a façade of grandeur. Polished floors and deep, soft armchairs covered in flowered chintz provided an air of English gentility that disguised the prejudices, scandals, and internecine squabbles of its members over some eighty years. Sunday lunches of curry and roast beef remained an enduring tradition. Members still behaved as if the British Empire existed and nothing was ever likely to change.
The Nairobi Club, in
