The other day I visited Eastleigh, the first truly 24-hour suburb in Nairobi, in search of the best rates for changing a few United States dollars into Kenyan shillings. It then dawned on me that the global financial crisis is not quite global.
This little enclave of the city is bubbling and bursting with life. Numerous shopping malls have sprung up, each one named plaza this or plaza that.
Eastleigh is the most densely populated part of the city, the majority of the residents being people of Somali descent. Sellers advertise and cajole in thickly accented Swahili and broken English. The rest are Kenyan shoppers like me, looking for bargains as they try to fend off the global crisis.
But Eastleigh remains unaffected. Even Kenyan banks, some of them international brands such as Barclays, have set up shop in the suburb, right in the middle of the murk and the traffic chaos. They, too, have realised that the money is in Eastleigh — and they want a piece of the action.
Everything is available here — designer goods, electronics and jewellery. But you have to be wary of the sweet deals or you could end up with “Kalvin Clein” jeans, a “Sonny TV”, a “Nokkia” handset, a “DMX” bike — or fake currency.
With this caveat in mind, I jump over the stream of sewage outside Garissa Lodge and squeeze my way into the bustling building. I pass by buibui-clad women, their faces hidden behind the ubiquitous hijab, who are sitting on the ground with bowls full of gold jewellery.
I almost lose myself in the narrow corridors trying to follow the directions someone gave me, but I know I’m on the right track when I see many men holding shillings in one hand and US dollars in the other. I choose an old man with a lush but brown beard (what do they paint them with and why?). I figure he’s less likely to give me fake currency because he’s old. And he operates from a shop, so I can find him again if redress becomes necessary.
I change my dollars and leave with a lot of shillings — terrified of being robbed in the thick throngs of people. But thieves give Eastleigh a wide berth: the Muslim influence means that although sharia law is not practised here, criminality is frowned on. (Puzzlingly, though, you can also purchase a gun at very competitive prices in Eastleigh.)
Eastleigh, you see, is the capital of the Somali diaspora. The mix of nationalities can be perplexing, as a Somali can claim to be a Kenyan Somali, an Eritrean Somali, an Ethiopian Somali — or a Somali Somali. There are even Canadian Somalis, American Somalis and many more.
When — as often in the 1990s — they were arrested without proper ID, they’d claim they were being targeted for their race despite being Kenyan citizens and Kenyan Somali MPs would cause an uproar. So the government has long given up and left Eastleigh to its own devices.
The suburb has always done economically well for itself, but now it’s boomed — courtesy of piracy money. It is said that those millions of dollars are finding their way into Eastleigh because Somalis feel it’s safer to invest here than in their own country, where warlords and al-Shabaab insurgents threaten their financial security.
Because the Somalis pay top dollar, property prices have shot up by more than 500% — though not only in Eastleigh. Piracy dollars have found their way into some other parts of Nairobi that have sizeable Somali populations. South C, where I live, is one of them. Each time a ship is hijacked off the Somali coast, the value of my house goes up another notch. Long live the pirates! Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.
As I’m writing this, a Greek oil tanker, the Maran Centaurus, has just been seized by you know who off the Seychelles en route to Mexico from Kuwait and is chugging back towards Kismayu. We can confidently predict that Eastleigh’s economy will soon be boosted by another ton of greenbacks, some of which will trickle into my neighbourhood, further appreciating the value of my humble property.
Every cloud has a silver lining — or a green one.
Evans Kinyua runs a television and radio production company in Nairobi