To Nairobians, the fact of dust in the city exists with an indisputable finality.
It is a reality to which Nairobians are resigned, to the extent that they are likely to be more stimulated by an argument on whether the sun will rise tomorrow than about dust in Nairobi.
There is lots of dust in Nairobi, roses are red, violets are purple. End of conversation.
Nothing to intellectualise, moralise or agonise about. Hegel, Hountondji, Nietzsche, Senghor, Marx, Aristotle, Cabral, Plato — they never said anything meaningful about it and no knowledge about Nairobi’s dust can be gained from the work of any of these philosophers.
The intellectual silence on Nairobi’s dust by no means disrupts its fact. Rather, it is the silence that shouts the apparent refusal of Nairobians to engage with dust beyond their banal struggle to banish it.
As with any war, the tone is set: the enemy is the enemy, intellectual talk is irrelevant and opening a reasoned conversation about the enemy might lead to the wrong, even seditious, conclusion.
So shut up, put up and get on with it. Most Nairobians oblige. Nothing attests to this war better than the arsenal of weapons the city has amassed for combat.
Your taxi driver in Nairobi is certain to have a shoebrush somewhere in his car, an instant antidote to dusty shoes.
Ask for one and it is casually pulled from the glove compartment. Chances are that if you walk into a house with a carpet, the owner will politely expect that you take off your shoes; the point being to protect the carpet from the dust.
In every supermarket you will find a corner in which brooms, brushes and mops stand conspicuously, much like a military parade: a reassuring arsenal for Nairobi’s anxieties about its enemy.
There exists an army of cleaners across the city — mercenaries for the middle class. It is an army broken into regiments: the car-cleaning regiment, the house-cleaning regiment, the broom-selling regiment, the mechanised vacuum regiment, and, ultimately, the shoe-shining regiment, which is by far the most organised, respected and exemplary.
For around the city’s CBD, there is an army of shoe-shiners whose daily work is to shine the shoes of those who cross from the dusty frontiers of the city to the occupied territory, where dust has been conquered, however partially.
The palms of these soldiers attest to their intimate, if violent, rapport with the beast — collateral damage, if you will. Perhaps when this Orwellian war is won, a monument of stained hands could form the most spectacular of memorials.
To think so, however, is to jump the gun, for it is the simplest of follies to accord to an ordinary banality the high form of art. After all, art evokes the sublime, the transcendental, the extraordinary and even the magical — the very antithesis of dust’s mundane existence in Nairobi.
Dust in Nairobi cannot be notionalised to these soaring heights. It is stuck within the mundane. You just have to live with it.
What dust fails to evoke in matters intellectual or artistic is compensated for elsewhere. Dust is so compellingly inscribed in the city’s sociology that it is an easy analogue for social hierarchy.
Dustiness and dustlessness mark the extreme points of the city’s sociodemographics — the spread of poverty, disease, homelessness, crime, overpopulation, number of children per family, level of education and police-officer-per-capita-per-squaremetre directly correlates to the intensity of dust particles in the immediate sky. Unless it rains.
To put it in simple terms, the less the dust, the more the chance of being run over by a Range Rover. Stretch this logic further and you see why a Nairobiesque heaven would be dustless.
Now this is the point that the fathers of the city do not get. Stop the war on poverty or crime or illiteracy. The war on dust is more compelling.
Officially declare a war on dust, sell a vision to make Nairobi dustless by 2015, sell hope, make people believe they can, titillate their nerves and see how you tantalise this city.
And by the way, the current marketing tagline, “Green city in the sun”, does not wash, literally. It inspires none. It sounds staid. How about “A worldclass dustless, wireless African city? If all else fails, stick to what sings now — “Nairobi: The city of dust”.
Godfrey Chesang lives and works in Nairobi