For my last post here, I thought I’d write a piece on this place I’ve been staying for the last month. Eldoret is unlike most places I’ve visited in my life in that it seems unable to make up its mind about what sort of settlement in wants to be. As I walk through the markets and neighborhoods here, I am continually struck with the impression that Eldoret is more like a sprawling village that accidentally collided with the modern world than an actual city.
This perception is not, historically speaking, inaccurate. The city sprung up out of a number of villages in fairly close proximity to one another. After the area developed, there was what amounts to a constantly-expanding and shifting cityscape in the midst of a sprawl of huts, shacks, shambas, and rural markets that keep their villages in contact with each other and the rest of the world. The whole place is a comedy of juxtaposition, a study in the way the rest of the world works now, and the way it used to be.
There are low-level artists and craftsmen who market traditional goods to the locals alongside souvenirs for the few tourists who make it out to Eldoret. Markets populated by farmers in traditional dress with fruit rotting in the street huddle in the shadows of international banks and businesses. The city is becoming an educational center in Kenya, the Athens of this part of Africa, full of colleges and universities offering dozens of IT classes and introductory course to professional careers. Yet these are crammed into dingy old malls that they share with clothing makers and butchers who hang goat carcasses in their windows.
Surrounding the city proper are neighborhoods of mud huts and sheet metal shacks just across the manicured walls from the brick-and-concrete mansions of doctors, bankers, foreign buisnessmen and government officials. People ride donkey carts in the streets past SUVs and security guards armed with cheap automatic rifles. Street vendors roast ugali and maize just outside new spas and cafes. Tribesmen sell livestock or crops from carts in front of currency exchange firms. What is this place?
It seems to me that the people of Eldoret, and of most of developing Kenya for that matter, have a culture that is inclined to live on as it always has, while borrowing the little conveniences and necessities of modern business and industry wherever they become available. And the more I see it, the more I like it. It’s rugged, even in a developing city. It’s robust and determined. It reminds me of the outer world spaceports in sci-fi movies where all the less-refined aliens carry on in all their cool alien glory amidst the barely-holding-together government of whatever human overlord race is playing the role of the modern Western society metaphor.
I've seen this bizarre blend most clearly in the combination of outdoor life and indoor space. Kenyans at least and, I would guess, most Africans living in similar climates, simply do not observe the same stark delineation between inside and out that we Americans do. Now, much of this can be briefly explained by the excellent weather here, which exhibits only small divergences from a comfortable temperature the great majority of the time. Typically, the weather falls little below room temperature at its coolest, and does not climb above seventy-five or eighty degrees in the shade at its warmest. Therefore, any space with a roof to cover it and walls sufficient to block the worst of the wind remains entirely comfortable all day or night. The most one desire in temperature control on a given day would be a low speed fan.
Yet the openness of structures and living space, I think, should not be attributed entirely to pleasant weather. While that may explain the reason that Kenyans do not take any special course to alter the atmosphere of their houses, and therefore the reason they are not quite so careful to keep them closed off to the outside, it ignores the equally strong weight of the value that Kenyans put on a world where the natural environment is enjoyed on its own terms and welcomed into all life, including into the home.
Now, I’m not trying to make a case for the Noble Savage here. Kenyans blend outdoor and indoor largely out of necessity, and they certainly do not live in some utopian state of perfect balance between natural and man-made. Still, there is a definite style, an attitude and a distinct intentionality, to the way in which Kenyans live in their environment. Houses, instead of being air conditioned, are built with holes in the walls of every room. Only a bit of screen in the middle of this hole then separates the interior of the house from the exterior. Moreover, during the day, windows are opened to further let the breeze pass through. Alongside that breeze comes all the sounds—and smells—of the outside world, from livestock to people talking and shouting in the streets, to the cacophony of thuds, squeaks, and rumbles that a city emits to let everyone know that it’s still alive.
Some houses are even less set apart from the world outside of them, with a sheet, or nothing at all, to serve as a door and cracks left unpatched lining the walls. Here it is that we see perhaps the most striking example of the traditional, basic, open lifestyle of the Kenyans swallowing at will desirable elements of our modern millennium. Even in these most rugged of huts, left open to the elements and the thousand intrusions of nature and life, families keep a television, a DVD player, an fast-boiling electric kettle, perhaps even a computer. Amid dirt floors, with the sounds of the small family herd drifting in through the open doorway, they can watch American Idol and check Facebook. The scene is unlike anything one could see in the modern West, a world truly its own. In this way, the city of Eldoret seems less a modern metropolis and more a super-village, dominating its part of the East African plain and deciding for itself at every turn how it will employ the twenty-first century to its liking, and how it will simply continue blissfully along as it has for thousands of years.
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