My new buddy, a Kenyan reporter for the People's Daily met me downtown on his day off. First we went to a big old if-you-can't-find-a-stool-then-you-stand-and-eat chicken shack. We got half a chicken and two bags of french fries. Kenyan fries usually are about the size of Wendys' but with the grease quotient of Mickey D's. Tiny sacks o' cholesterol. The chicken was as nicely roasted as the chicken in my old Dominican neighborhood in NYC, which was my favorite in the city.
"Not as good as Kentucky Fried Chicken," the Kenyan told me. I told him he was crazy. He asked me if I wanted some Kenyan sauce. I gave him a quizzical look. He disappeared and came back with a big plastic bowl of chum. Not really: but he worked the stuff onto our fries like Roy Scheider off the side of a boat. When I said stop, he passed the bowl and plastic community spoon to someone else. It's a liquidy sauce with enough peppers to be something like salsa: pretty good stuff. No, not as good as Heinz.
After that we got a drink on the second floor balcony of a a bar and watched people. It's a god awful day: hazy enough to cough on smog, drizzling every five minutes. While we watched Kenyans in suits dodge through traffic he told me that he and other reporters like to drink on this balcony and talk politics, because they can look down the road and see Nyayo House.
"Nyayo House. I know I've read this, but I can't remember. Which-"
"Down there at the end of the road. The tall orange building. It has a big basement-"
"Okay. Now what happens in Nyayo house? It's a parliamentary building or something?"
His turn to give me a quizzical look. "Oh no. It has a very elaborate basement, and that is where they used to torture people. It was designed to torture people." Ha! Close, John.
Across the street, guys are putting banners across other second-level balconies in preparation for tomorrow's Independence Day celebrations. "That's another leftover from KANU," he says, referring to the coalition that governed for twenty-plus years. "Policemen used to go around to businesses, and if you weren't hanging a flag they called you unpatriotic and arrested you."
I asked him if journalists from other newspapers hung out at this bar. He said they came here and another place down the street. "There's another place up the road called Simmers, where the older guys hang out. But it's really sleazy. Lots of go-go girls." What a god-awful name for a place. What a god-awful place to drink. We laughed at the old guys.
