MARSABIT: THE CRADLE OF MANKIND (part 1)

Coming back to this town I tend to relapse into old ways and routines. Around me, boys sleep with the same girls and call it “zero grazing”; There are animated, khat-fuelled conversations in a shop, a khat base or a friend’s room – a cager. Life, in its laidback bubble, seems to lack both creativity and originality; it is a time-warped reproduction of the past.

Wedding parties, like karaoke nights, blast hits from the seventies and eighties, Ethiopian hits are replayed, tweaking old music on new guitars and still failing to match the metre of its past glory. Even so, I attend weddings, dance for hours around dusty amplifiers perched precariously on rickety chairs and loudspeakers mounted on trees; we dance with neighborhood girls, six boys to a girl.

Those who were born in the town, second and third generations, interpret it in their own images. One says “This town is a ship sailing on water”.  Another, with a mirthful chuckle, “This town is a midget carrying a 200 litre drum full of worries.”

Our grandparents still hold a fond memory of the colonialists. Some, even now, in the face of political anxieties, say that Kenya should go back to administration by white people. To them the current form of Marsabit is not what they conceived it to be eighty years ago.

To our parents, it was easy to see the despair beyond their nostalgia, easy to excuse their virtuosity, the airs of people who had lived in better times and better versions of the current Marsabit. Their past, with its drive and pride could be examined in black and white: pictures of impeccable young men in Afros and pressed suits, bell bottoms and platform shoes, or with beards rolled and hair parted in Victorian fashions. Their sepia toned memory, worldly knowledge and better English all regressed into another world; it was no longer needed. They sit watching the present unfolding, retired and tired of the confused momentum of restlessness. Even when they speak, no one seems. to heed their advice. But as time rearranges events and shapes the town, it is easy to be caught up in the nostalgia of older generations, to want to capture or re-enact the glory of the past – the pre-NGO days.

I walk around town, aware of scorn, treading with caution. I imagine the conditions necessary to map a new trajectory for the town. Growth for Marsabit portends the loss of purity, of being spoilt. People, whose love of the place is pegged to nostalgia, worry about a rural idyll being replaced with a congested, noisy and dirty place. They wish to protect Marsabit from the capitalistic restlessness of the outside world. They wish for it to remain the same: serene; pristine; secretly praying that the place will retain its old austere beauty. Effective for its needs.

In Marsabit, NGO signboards compete for attention on the few roundabouts. There is no newness to most of the buildings, or care; the structures stand there in the confusion of a hurried imagination. All the buildings bear a singular focus on retail frontage and pedestrian verandahs. Even the new storeyed structures, those that defied decades of worry that “this soil cannot support storeyed buildings” stand out sorely; out of sync with tradition and the symmetry of history.

The town has grown beyond its infancy, beyond its original plan. Filmmakers say that Marsabit has the best kept wildlife anywhere in Africa. But now even the old graveyard once on the periphery of the town is slowly becoming a central location. The old side of town with its vestiges of Indian architecture, high roofed corrugated iron structures and Somali names, only hint at the town’s humble beginnings.

Now, the iron shacks come as an inevitable appendage, an new story of overcrowding, of unemployment. The iron structures, khat bases, with loose door curtains fluttering in the wind and a blended scent of coffee and burnt incense coming from within, house miraa (khat) dens. Boys come out of their homes and chew their days away. Many of the iron shacks are run by divorced women, very coy. They know how to entertain, to keep a regular number always coming back.

There are no parking spaces. No public latrines. Every space was allocated to individuals in the 90s by flipping a coin or through a simple raffle of papers marked yes or no.

Hyenas come out of the forest every night from around 9pm. This is a reminder of the past; the hyenas have maintained a memory that it was only a few decades ago this town was a forest, a scavenging ground.  Even now they walk in packs to pick bones from its garbage and prey on stray dogs..

A hundred years of growing to become a town gave Marsabit a fragmented outlook; not as a monolithic space or cultural melting pot, but as single units of other places.

Facing Kenya, people still say “we are travelling down Kenya”.  Or, when you come back from other parts of the country, they ask you “how is Kenya?”

To be continued….