My friends and I were driving home through downtown last summer after a touristy day at the Giraffe Center, Elephant Orphanage and Carnivore Restaurant. As we approached the roundabout near the University of Nairobi, I noticed the cars in front of us behaving strangely. Some were pulling off to the side of the road. One sped directly toward us.
I am used to strange driving practices in Kenya. In fact, I have rather enjoyed learning to drive offensively in the 4x4 truck we call “Tembo” (Swahili for elephant) because of its wheezing horn. “He’d better move,” I told my passengers as the wayward car came closer. “Larger vehicle has right of way.”
But from the corner of my eye, I saw pedestrians rushing toward us, too. The terror on their faces set off alarms in my head. I knew then what was happening: the students at the university were rioting. Fueled by adrenaline, I cut across two lanes, rumbled over the median and headed the opposite direction. We were several blocks away before my body downshifted out of survival mode.
Riots at the University of Nairobi have become almost commonplace in the last five years or so. There’s no single issue of protest; grievances have ranged from campus power outages to government corruption under the dictatorial rule of former president Daniel arap Moi. This time, it was the funeral of David Silva Kimuyu, a 24-year-old anthropology major who died in July at the hands of Nairobi’s police. The police claimed he was a drug dealer; the students claimed it was police brutality. Both were probably right.
The pattern is tragically familiar. Students pour from their dormitories and apartments into the city center, looking for something to destroy. They tear down street signs, loot shops, throw stones at passersby. The city council has attempted to protect traffic lights near the university by enclosing them in steel cages. The day after the Kimuyu riot, we saw that the cages had been torn open and the lights shattered anew.
The desire to protest is not uniquely Kenyan, of course. Nor is the desire to destroy. In American urban settings like Watts, Detroit and Cincinnati, riots have been driven by people burdened with aching poverty and institutional racism. The Nairobi uprisings, however, are not carried out by the city’s expanding slum population. These are students, at the preeminent university in their country.
Why would they spend so much energy on destruction? Driven by debt, debilitated by corruption, fractured by tribalism, Kenya’s economy has stagnated in recent years. With scant hope of building a productive future, students at the university face a bitter absurdity: the pursuit of higher education, often with state support, may do little more than delay an empty adulthood.
Kenya’s unemployment rate is more than 40 percent. Hiring practices are notoriously nepotistic and rarely based on merit. Although there is a burgeoning demand for technical skills in Nairobi, the university produces a glut of job seekers who have no technical training. Even first-rate students will struggle to find satisfying positions if their degrees are in the liberal arts. And in any case, driving a taxi in Mombasa or a safari van in the Masai Mara would pay far more.
Third-world countries today are euphemistically called developing nations, implying growth. For educated Kenyans, however, “growth” has come to mean leaving home. Their rush to pursue work visas in the United States and the United Kingdom has further deprived Kenya of qualified and visionary leaders.
Many, however, have seen a glimpse of light with the inauguration of a new president in January. Opposition candidate Mwai Kibaki won the first peaceful multiparty elections in the country’s 39 years of independence; and Moi, in office since 1978, stepped aside without incident. All my Kenyan friends now talk of a coming prosperity. And the student riots, for the time being, seem to have lost some of their momentum.
Ten years from now, what will be the fate of the protesters who caused my abrupt detour? If the old regime had maintained its stranglehold, they would almost certainly remain stuck in the despondency that oppresses much of the continent. But the democratic victory of a reform-minded president has brought new optimism here. In 10 years, the graduates of the nation’s leading university just might be at the forefront of an African renaissance, leading a “Kenyan lion” economic boom.
It’s worth hoping, at least.
Josh Flosi, ’95, MA ’96, and his wife, Laura (Savage) Flosi, ’97, teach at Rosslyn Academy, an international Christian school for grades K through 12 on the outskirts of Nairobi.
