The Indian business-man next to me on the aisle seat wouldn’t stop talking.
He was dressed in shiny polyester, was clean shaven, and had a well barbered head set in a late 80s bollywood retro hairstyle. All the mid-air turbulence had upset him.
In between his sojourns to the latrine, he spoke animatedly, without any prompting, about himself.

He ran a bicycle importation business, and business was quite terrible.
Kenyan roads had been ravaged by heavy rain, brought upon by the El Niño planetary current. Bad weather meant more people stayed indoors. So, nobody wanted to buy his bicycles. “El Nino did this….”, he said with anguish, clutching my arm “…werrry bad, its all because of this El Niño…” taking another mournful sip of pepsi. The fizzy cola swished and popped inside his mouth when he said weerrrry.
Then, as if suddenly remembering his manners, grief momentarily forgotten, he brought out a catalogue with a flourish -- “I sell them only just in one color, bleck......with 100% steinless steel brakes…!!”

The aircraft banked, and the lights for the seatbelt and the no-smoking signs flashed on. Bursting through the clouds was the distant vision of a rainbow, and a giant icy square-topped massif. The border between Kenya and Tanzania runs almost in a straight line, except for a tiny indentation, the point where it meets the glaciated slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. During the scramble for africa in the 19th century, when the proverbial continental pie was being sliced up among the colonial powers, the German chancellor Bismarck had bargained with the British and ensured that Africa’s tallest peak remained within the German territories of Tanganyika.

Soon, I was in Kenya. It was overcast in Nairobi. The clouds were in fluid motion, and briefly a pulsing beacon of sunlight broke through the clouds and slithered over the wind-swept runway. A British Airways flight had landed at the same time. I waded through a throng of gap-year kids -- wearing GAP branded clothing, talking with shrill accents, clutching yellow fever vaccination cards and fanny packs. A head-count was on– Where’s Sean? – someone yelled; have you seen Sean? Seannn?? – with a bit of panic. A head was missing. Sean was missing.

Jomo Kenyatta airport lies in the middle of a savannah, once vast, now encroached upon by the outskirts of Nairobi. Leaving the airport, I saw a loping giraffe somewhere far away, fading, blending into the landscape.

The main highway leading into Nairobi, Uhuru (“freedom”) highway was bumpy and pock-marked, presumably the handiwork of El Niño. Packed minibuses, with crunched and bent passengers as if anticipating a crash landing, raged past at alarming speeds, driven by possessed men who didn’t seem to care.
There was a gradual slowdown. Shredded bits of pneumatic tire lay by the roadside, and a short distance away was a toppled fuel tanker.
No one seemed dead, but the tanker was still retching and fuming gasoline like some dying whale gasping a last oily breath. A man ran past, towards the stricken tanker, with a container on his head. A few seconds later, two other men followed, chattering with excitement, carrying steel buckets.

The accident story was to appear later in the East African Standard, buried amid the parody of shocker headlines (“Woman sets german shepherd on house-girl for eating too much Ugali!”, “Man sentenced for violating a goat”). There had been no casualties, but one man had been admitted to hospital with 2nd degree burns. He had accidentally set himself alight, smoking a cigarette, while pillaging petrol from the tanker.

A rash of fast-food signs marked the beginning of downtown Nairobi.

Nairobi baby, but cynical locals call it “Nairoberry”.

The rattled Indian bicycle salesman had told me all about it:
Catastrophic crime waves, bodies piled up on the streets, banks robbed by faceless Uzi totting gangsters, muggers swarming out of every dark corner, people walking on tiptoe in an inner city world of anxious glances. It was an apocalypse waiting to happen.
Nah nah, it’s a no go – he had said, shaking his head rapidly. A thick gold chain (with a heavy medallion that said “Jai Ambe”) had bounced ominously on his fleshy neck, if anybody asked you for your watch, you were to hand it over, otherwise they would most certainly lop your arm off – no doubt about it.

The papers were filled with sensational tales of mayhem, most of them centered in Nairobi.

A car had been hijacked.
It was a dull-grey Peugeot, the type used by the C.I.D, and the hijackers had discovered a walkie-talkie radio in the glove compartment.
They had concluded that the driver was a plainclothes policeman (he was a driver for a cement company). Taking him to a wooded area, they had made him strip, and forced him up a thorn tree. After taunting and threatening the driver the thugs had made off, after setting fire to the tree. The driver had survived the inferno and discovered the abandoned car a short distance away. While driving back (clad in singed underwear) he was mistaken for one of the gangster, and accidentaly mowed down by a "flying" police squad.

No wonder everyone seemed paranoid.

Downtown was in fact a lot of pretentious high-rises; the shiny ones – all plate-glass and smelling of money; and the grimy ones, with peeling plaster and shattered windows reeking urban poverty. There was a sparkle of late model imported cars -- some basking in the dull gleam of giant advertisement hoardings, others driven by trendy Africans hidden behind gold-rimmed ray-bans. Specks of red Nairobi dust darted about in the sun’s rays, bouncing off the garish colors of cheap plastic-ware peddled by loud hawkers. And into a shimmering puddle of rain water, where glistening children splashed around playfully without a care. A couple of youngsters reposed on the tarmac swigging glue from old mineral water bottles; one of them barefoot and in a ragged t-shirt that said:“tar heels – university of North Carolina”. A man in a white doctor’s coat grilled sausages on a push cart (“Smokies”), turning them over with surgical attentiveness using forceps.

It’s a city of dazzling contrasts.

No bloated bodies littered the streets, no gunshots, no urban holocaust, just lots of pedestrians – regular black folk wearing weathered suits and colorful dresses, going shopping, going to the park and going to church. A girl, no more than eighteen, wearing a glittering blue dress and high-heels swung past self-consciously, oblivious to the wolf whistles and trashy front-row smiles of the bus drivers.

A couple of street vendors caught my stare, and came running up, almost tripping, as they stepped over human flotsam slumbering on the median. Anxious smiles, snappy wristwork and promises of free satellite TV; they were selling television antennas, and tiny brass padlocks from China. I shook my head, and they abruptly left, walking away slowly, on the prowl for another vehicle.

The FM radio drummed out a flow of hits and self-conscious DJs with sham accents. We left downtown in a blur of INXS and Tears for Fears.

Nairobi started as a milestone -- mile no. 327 on the famous Lunatic Express railway line connecting the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa and Lake Victoria. Just beyond lay the gaunt escarpment of the Great Rift Valley; a giant fault system that runs like a scar all the way from Jordan in the middle-east to Mozambique in Southern Africa.

Mile 327 was bleak and swampy, and teeming with wild animals, but the railway workers and engineers pitched their tents on the slushy black cotton soil– as they plotted on conquering the steep slopes of the rift valley.

The tented camp soon became Nairobi – ‘the place of cold water’ – as the local Maasai tribesmen called it. After spending five million pounds in old money, the railway was found to be a financial disaster, so someone needed to pay. The British decided they quite liked Nairobi and the nearby fertile highlands. The territories and its people were declared res nullius. The city grew out of the nondescript railway yard. The local Africans were forced to pay a “hut tax”, and to do so they had to live and work in the chilly hovels of Nairobi.

And so, began the era of the white settler, the establishment of large scale farms and ranches. The settlers created an illusory “Happy Valley”, where they led self absorbed and unsettled lives -- glamorized in novels like “Out of Africa” and “West with the night”.
It was a Kenya where you were more likely to come in to contact with ladylike “Lulu” – the remarkable gazelle, rather than people – who were distorted, mere caricatures in a supporting cast of gun-bearers and coffee pickers.

A hundred years on the city was still a bit like the trading post town, populated by squatters, migratory workers and hanger-ons. Now it was a sprawling dormitory town, which had turned big and ugly. Western town planning principles had been applied to Nairobi – but these were out of place in Africa. Here was a functional subsistence economy made up of farmers, craftsmen & small-scale industries – all this didn’t really depend on government or big capital. So the city had to improvise and adapt to its population.

Nairobi was now violet, with the jacarandas in bloom and a lush carpet of petals on the sidewalks. Vervet monkeys (with purple and blue bottoms) squabbled in mid-air leaping among the branches. Flocks of starlings screamed and wheeled against the ochre sunset, as if pulled on an endless bungee rope. The askaris, armed with clubs, huddled around their fires and crackling radio sets.

An Equatorial sundown is fleeting and sudden. Bright one moment, and then, the light of day drained in long draught down to its last pitiful dregs. The city turns dim.
I nod at a zebra striped van full of earnest wazungu tourists, pointing and clicking with their guide-books and kodaks. Time to drift.