There is an evocative Italian documentary on a colonisers’ departure from Africa, Africa Addio. It has a memorable scene.
The setting is a country club in Kenya not too far from Nairobi. The main characters are English settlers.
As it opens, the characters are having drinks. What follows is a spectacular chase by a pack of foxhounds, followed by red-coated horse riders, after something that could be taken for a fox.
In fact, the “fox” is a piece of meat being pulled on a string across a plain by a teenage-looking boy.
The end of the scene somewhat hangs; the “fox” is safe in the hands of the teenager who is now sitting on the fork of a not very big tree, a metre or so above the dangerously agitated foxhounds below, which are barking up the tree. Why the teenager is holding on to the meat is not quite clear, but the movie moves on.
In empathy, one can read the scene generously. The settlers are right in the middle of an existential crisis. Strangeness surrounds them; the soil is red, the natives, their language, their lifestyle, how they sing and dance is absolutely whack and they live too close to animals.
The climate is clinically insane, the sun inebriatingly sizzles throughout the year but still manages to keep a strangely regular routine, rising and setting at seven in the morning and evening. It is like a train! Even the frogs croak differently. Still, the settlers remain English.
Managing to remain English becomes a challenge that needs some memory aids. Any item that even faintly evokes the familiarity of home — a padlock, a key holder from Kent, a flower vase from London, a buckle from an old shoe bought in London, a notebook with a London address, a rose flower, a letter, an old suitcase, a book and, yes, a horseshoe — assumes a special nostalgic premium.
A fox hunt, then, is a totally out-of-this-world experience. It is like 10-million déjà vu moments in rapid sequence over the period of an hour or, over an hour. Through this ritual, the settlers reconstruct an absorbing nostalgia of home and normalcy is momentarily conjured.
In a different century symptoms of a similar existential crisis are so rampant in Nairobi that the distinction between nostalgia and aspiration fades. Much like in the fox-hunting days, the country club continues to be the temple for performing Anglophile rituals.
Here, the country club’s ambience is a shrill refrain — “when I grow up, I would like to be London”.
Most are now grown up and old, but far from being London. Rose flowers, bougainvillea, jacaranda trees, tea in china cups (not Fong Kong, the real thing), usually red-tiled roofs, white walls, sprawling lawns, servants donning the fez, khakis, a moustache here and there, a charcoal suit, Victorian-style furniture, the occasional daffodil on a lapel, the ubiquitous safari boots, almost certainly a set of pearls, the picture of a lion, a zebra print and a Land Rover — by no means an exhaustive list — are some of the signifiers of place that tell you that you are in a mid-20th-century Out of Africa milieu.
The country club forces a specific convention. A moustache or sideburns might be dated, but still more proper than the irreverent T-shirt. A side-parting of hair à la JFK and Mandela, although ridiculous, is still OK.
Sports jacket and the suit-and-tie convention and combed hair is pro forma. The lower hem of jackets is measured to the thumb, long trousers end where the sole begins and, God forbid, no half-masts.
The dress code must still reflect a pathological fear of colour; shades of grey, black and blue define the standard. Furniture, and just about everything else, is also properly calibrated. Coffee tables, dinner tables and dinner seats are measured to standard, respectively 18 inches, 29 inches and 18 inches. Air conditioning is set at 20°C and what would be a full-hearted guffaw is, out of habit, calibrated down to a polite laugh.
Formality defines social propriety. Titles assume a premium — Madam, Sir, Mister, Bishop, Doctor, Professor, and especially Mrs — so it is heresy to refer to Mrs Kuloka as Daisy, when she should be addressed as Mrs Dr Hon Ophelia Daisy Kuloka, EGH, EBS, ACCA.
At some indefinable point, formality subtly drifts into pomp. The telephone breaks. Highfalutin gains currency as a descriptor of the quotidian. It becomes improper to wear shoes, caps, live in a house, drive a car, or declare that you are in Nairobi for the first time.
Neither do you become a hippie. Rather, you demurely comport yourself linguistically — you don headgear, arrange footwear, reside in a residence, operate an automobile and pronounce on your inaugural visit to Nairobi.
“Call me Mrs Kuloka. I bought this Nigerian headgear in London,” and you immediately know it is an Afro-Saxon losing it, again.
Of course this existential crisis does not stop at the country club. It diffuses into the city, flawlessly inscribes on to its ambient realities and blends with other influences, including the urban and Indian aesthetics, the weather and the city’s own debris.
Its drama begins to fade, until at Christmas time, when there is cotton wool, as white as snow, seemingly dripping from any Christmas tree you look at. Who says Nairobi does not have snow? An air-conditioned woollen suit begins to make sense for Nairobi’s 27°C in December.
Perhaps a replica of the London Bridge on the Nairobi River and fire engines whose sirens are tuned to a grown-up version of London-Bridge-is-burning-down might just eventually actualise the city; perhaps a knighthood, too. Lord Nairobi, MBE, I presume.
Godfrey Chesang lives in Nairobi