“Man, I saw that one Asian guy hanging out with this hot African chick.” Do you picture a Russian guy hanging out with an Egyptian lady? No, you picture some variation of Jet Li with Aaliyah in 2000's Romeo Must Die. Same game over here in Kenya. When I say Kenyan, I mean black guy. When you say Asian, you mean Indian guy. Mzungu means the guys with the sunburns.
The Kenyan you know is probably working his ass off to join the middle class. The Indian is probably working his ass off to make the upper class. And the mzungus—be they relentless capitalists working their asses off or family-subsidized navel gazers who haven’t really worked off much ass at all and still have a good amount of ass left—are usually already on top.
I bring this up because I’m reading a book in an Indian-owned, Indian-dominated restaurant called MAD ABOUT BOOKS!, and you couldn't find a place that embodied middle class life more in a book of Norman Rockwell portraits. The radio is mostly Top 40 American, currently Destiny's Child (note: whenever I hear this song about Destiny's child all I can think about are kittens in berets playing the xlyophone. I don't know, why but for me this is the pinnacle of animated coolness). The walls are covered with quotes from famous brains—Thomas Jefferson, Malcolm X—about how reading is the highest use of the mind, the key to yanking your bootstraps up. It’s a restaurant/book store, which is weird, but a place where you can sit down at three, order a latte, read for four hours, order dinner, eat, and then read for two more hours staying in the same comfy chair. Right on.
Drawback: as the local living embodiment of middle class tastes, it has TV's. Big freaking TV's that sometimes usually emit perfectly tolerable background noise (cricket matches, local news) but occasionally blare WWE Smackdown. Tonight is the latter. I waste an hour pretending to read over the “I’ve been announcing sports entertainment events for nearly thirty years, and I’ve never seen such a display of guts and courage” announcers.
On my way out I ask a Kenyan clerk from the bookstore half of the building if they have any books about the anticolonialist Mau Mau rebellion of 1952. It’s like Kenya's Boston Tea Party.
“Mau Mau?” Note to self: they pronounce it Mao Mao. “No, we don’t have any books on Mau Mau.” He says it with a smile. Which is absurd in Kenya, and I tell him so. He just smiles. But it turns out that in order to get a good book on the Mau Mau, you have to go to a bookstore freuqented by mzungus. A good Kenyan bookstore? Haven't found it yet. Will keep you all posted.
