Nusu-Nusu

Nusu-Nusu – Growing Up in Nairobi During the 1950’s

   Nairobi is right at the heart of East Africa

By Kenny Mann

a.k.a. Iki Mann

        On a pleasant evening in February, 1954, my father, the late Dr. Igor Mann, called me into the dining room.

“Come, Iki,” he commanded in his thick Polish accent. “You will see something you must never forget.” My eccentric father loved to dress up for parties as a “witch doctor”.

What could it be? I wondered. A liver fluke? A two-headed baby? He had said must never forget not will never forget. An important lesson, then.
A family reunion in Nairobi, 1974: together with the staff and some of our major pieces of African sculpture – also part of the family! From left to right: My mother, Erica; Mahenzere, the gardener; my sister Rhodia; Matefu; Malcolm; Daniel; myself; my brother OscarA family reunion in Nairobi, 1974: together with the staff and some of our major pieces of African sculpture – also part of the family! From left to right: My other, Ercia; Mahenzere, the gardener; my sister Rhodia; Matefu; Malcolm; Daniel; myself; my brother Oscar

        Two years earlier, we had moved to Nairobi from our modest cattle ranch at Athi River, where my siblings and I sniffed like baby antelope at the great African beyond. Now, with Papa’s new appointment as Director of Veterinary Services at Kabete, we had been transported to the great city where Mama had designed a large, Spanish style house on Crawford Road (now Milimani Road). Here, my imagination ran riot in the eucalyptus forest in our back yard, where my brother and I played imaginary games involving Sleeping Beauty, Queen Guenevere and blood-thirsty wolves. We could have been in the Dark Ages in England – hardly in Africa.

By the time I was ten, I was allowed on Saturday mornings to walk the mile-and-a-half past the pink Delamere Flats to “town,” or even to catch the Number 12 bus right outside our house which dropped me off at the Stanley Hotel, opposite the statue of Lord Delamere that commanded the view down his very own avenue. From there, I could cross the road to gloat over the cotton dresses displayed in the window of Deacons – the most fashionable store in the world, as far as I was concerned. Around the corner, I could order a strawberry ice-cream Parfait at the Penguin Café. Or I could spend my pocket money at the fabulous Woolworths on the corner of Delamere (Kenyatta) Avenue and …….. Oh, the delights of that store! Miniature sewing kits! Tiny pocket mirrors! Paper tubes of Sherbert, to be sucked up through a black liqourice straw!

If I crossed the road to the old Torr’s Hotel, I could visit my grandmother who was the head baker at the Café Vienna. Granny had survived the Holocaust in Bucharest and had arrived in Kenya a few years earlier. It was worth suffering her fussing over me to be treated to a heavenly slice of Dobosztorte a nutty, multi-layered cake with a caramel icing. The café was often filled with granny’s cronies – Germans, Austrians, Poles – refugees, drifters or business people who had settled in Kenya. Often, I met my friends at the Odeon Cinema, opposite the bus depot near the present-day Hilton Hotel, where they showed Disney cartoons, Doris Day comedies, or cowboy and pirate flicks. During the school term, I rode my bike a few miles to St. George’s Primary School, proudly wearing my navy blue uniform and carrying my lunch in a little brown suitcase dangling from the handle-bars.

I had even been to Europe. So what could my father possibly show me on this day in February, 1954, that I had not already seen?

I followed him into the dining room. On the table lay a rifle, as alien in our house as fish and chips. He picked it up and opened it, pointing out the empty cartridge case.

“There are no bullets,” he said.

Yes, I could see that with my own eyes.

“I will be patrolling Crawford Road from 6pm until 9pm.. You are not to leave the house for any reason because we have curfew. But I want you to know that I will never shoot anyone. Not a thief, not a murderer and not even a bloody Mau Mau! I am a pacifist! Understand?”

Curfew? Pacifist? I had no idea what he was talking about. But a cold chill traveled down my spine and fear entered my soul. Mau Mau. I had heard about them. Wild men who lived in the forest around Mount Kenya and wore animal bones through their cheeks and made people take terrible oaths that had to do with blood and raw goat meat and things I did not understand. They killed white people and wanted to take the country away from us. Now, I was sure, they had come to Nairobi to plunder our home and kill us. And if they did, Papa would not defend us! Mau Mau were Kikuyu. Our cook, Duncan, was Kikuyu.

For two or three years, fear of Mau Mau was a tangible entity for me, even though I came to understand their struggle better and to realize that my parents supported the battle for Kenya’s independence. One evening, left alone in the house, I could not find the key to the upstairs veranda door. Influenced by our neighbors, the Seventh Day Adventists, I prayed fervently to God for the first and only time in my life. Dear God, Please let me find the key so the Mau Mau don’t get me. Please don’t let them get me! I promptly found the key on the play-room floor, locked the veranda door and rushed into to bed. For the moment, I had been saved. But I did not feel safer. Rumours abounded at school of the “up-country” sisters whose parents had been buried alive by Mau Mau. The girls were sent off to England and never seen again. Duncan, the cook, was arrested on suspicion of being a Mau Mau collaborator. Papa promptly paid bail for him and he was cooking dinner as usual the very next day. Was he a Mau Mau spy? Would he poison our food?

By 1956, the Mau Mau “Emergency” was almost over. The British army had bombed the forest hide-outs and in 1957, Dedan Kimathi was hanged. Papa had thrown out his rifle and life in Nairobi was on a tremulous upswing. Our house had become a veritable salon where coffee and cake were served at 4.30pm every day to a marvelous collection of people from all over the world and the conversation flowed in several languages at once. I met Joy Adamson, the young Tom Mboya, Miriam Makeba, as well as all manner of foreign aid individuals, diplomats, artists, writers, politicians, African and Asian friends, famous and infamous, known and unknown. In our house there was no color bar and everyone was welcomed to a meal and a bed, if necessary.

Mama was a red-haired beauty in her early forties and she and Papa made a charismatic couple, always plotting the next fun event. It might be a picnic on Mount Longonot or a costumed ball on the theme of “Dr. Dolittle”, which required weeks of preparation and attracted hundreds of guests to the rented hall. It might be a fund-raising walk for Freedom From Hunger, of which Papa was Chairman, and skilled at persuading the prettiest young women in Nairobi to volunteer for his pet cause. Or Mama would be upstairs at the sewing machine, fashioning exquisite miniature costumes for the puppets used in opera performances at the Nairobi Arboretum.

By the time I was 14, I was fully immersed in Nairobi’s rich cultural life myself. I saw foreign movies at the Alliance Francaise and the Goethe Institute, and watched lengthy Indian movies at the Shan Cinema, at the Thika Road junction. I was deeply involved in school theatrical productions, sometimes worked as props lady for the Donovan Maule Theatre, and performed in amateur theatricals at the National Theatre. I took piano and ballet lessons, participated in national competitions and sat for the English examinations. I spent hours at the MacMillan Memorial Library, reading or doing my homework, and spent many Saturday afternoons at the Nairobi Museum, poring over the insect collection and slightly revolted at the dusty stuffed animals.

Along with my sister, I now attended the all-white Kenya Girls High School, affectionately known as the “Heffer Boma” and ruled with an iron hand by the English head mistress, Ms. Stott. Our rigorous schedule of classes ended at 4pm, after which there was “tea” and then obligatory sports. Dressed in cumbersome grey knee-length “shorts” I flailed my way around the hocky pitch or never shot a goal in netball. No, I was not athletic at all. My real interest was in boys.

My best friend Avril and I were always on the look-out for potential “boyfriends” whom we called tutsoncs – a distorted version of the word conquest spelled backwards. So, in the search for tutsoncs, and unbeknownst to our parents, we spent our weekends riding all over Nairobi on our bikes. We thought nothing of pedaling the 20 miles past the Drive-In Movie Theatre on the Mombasa Road to the farm at Athi River, which my father still maintained. I could easily ride the ten miles to Avril’s house on Brookside Drive, and together, we would set out for Nairobi Dam, off Ngong Road, where I had a canoe and we could eye the school boys showing off their water skiing.

Up until then, our lives had been more or less restricted to Nairobi’s “white” urban areas. Now we roamed down River Road, through Eastleigh and Mathari Valley, streaking through African slums with fear and amazement. This was how they lived? We free-wheeled through Parklands, staring into windows to glimpse Asian families at their meals. We circled the Khoja Mosque, lit up every night with thousands of bulbs. Amazing! Nairobi had Muslims! And we rode slowly along Muthaiga Road, marveling at the mansions and lush gardens that bespoke the untold wealth of their white inhabitants.

We never did find any tutsoncs, but while we were familiar with various areas of Nairobi, we had taken for granted the strange triad of Europeans, Asians and Africans living parallel but largely separate lives in this City in the Sun, as it was called. Our awakening was slow and confused. Why was it that the only Africans we “knew” were our servants, and even then, only by their first names? Why was it whispered that Harriet, a school-mate, was a “tramp” because she had been seen with an African boy? Why did we avoid the glances of Asian boys on the streets? Why was I so afraid of Victor, the “half-caste” boy who actually talked to me at the bus-stop – broke the unspoken taboo that divided us all?

These were vague questions in my otherwise untroubled life. I was an avid reader and loved the outdoor news stand near the Post Office, where one could buy almost any magazine or newspaper from almost anywhere in the world. Time, Life, Better Homes and Gardens, The London Times – the world was at my finger-tips and I was hungry to explore it. I was a “beatnik” wearing full skirts and sloppy sweaters, my eyes ringed with black eye shadow. I thrilled to the delights of Bazaar Road, where I bought silk stockings and fabrics that Vera Brablik tailored into pretty dresses. Mama bought me my first high-heeled shoes at the Italian shoe-store near the New Stanley Hotel. I soaked my net petticoats in starch to make them even fuller.

I was mad for the BBC radio dramas that were broadcast from London at 2:00am. I was mad for the British Top Ten Pop Charts, broadcast by the British Forces Broadcasting Network in Nairobi every Friday night. And on Saturdays, I could rush down to Assanand’s, the music store near the Kenya Cinema, to buy the latest hit by Connie Frances, the Everly Brothers, Helen Shapiro or Cliff Richard and the Shadows. And when – oh amazing bliss – The Shadows actually performed in Nairobi, my friends and I thought that the three guitarists, singing their bland harmonies with a step forward, a step back, were the sexiest thing on this planet. From then on, our frequent Saturday night dances became raucous with rock ‘n roll, the hand-jive, and the twist, our minds always tuned to the latest fad in England or America.

We spent our weekend afternoons flirting at the Nairobi Club swimming pool – unaware that this bastion of anti-Semitic British colonialism had refused my own father membership some years earlier. We went on safaris, camping in the bush where we were more familiar with the picturesque tribal people than with our African urban neighbors. But racial barriers in Nairobi were slowly crumbling. With some older boys, I began to frequent the forbidden Sombrero Club, near the Nairobi Market, where African and Asian youths hung about drinking Tusker Lager. We eyed each other curiously.

As a teenager I was oblivious to local politics, but even I could feel the rumblings that rocked Nairobi’s party atmosphere in the years before Independence. Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga led rival political parties. Jomo Kenyatta had been released from prison. Duncan, our cook, told me that after Independence, my little Fiat 600 would be his. Every week, friends – including Avril – left Kenya for good, their families terrified of what they believed would be a blood-bath. Now our parties were to say farewell as boys and girls from the Duke Of York, the Prince Of Wales, St. Mary’s , Loreto Convent , The Boma and other local high schools flew off from Embakasi Airport or boarded the train for Mombasa at Nairobi Station, heading for the ships that would take them back “home” to England or away to South Africa and Australia. My parents – Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe – had firmly made Kenya their home and had no intention of leaving. I studied hard for my “O”-levels and passed in 1962 with flying colors. Only two more years to the “A”-Levels, I thought, and I too would leave Kenya for good.

On December 12, 1963, my family attended the Independence celebrations in an outdoor arena. There were very few other whites present. At midnight, the Duke of Edinburgh lowered the British flag and the Kenya flag was raised to a triumphant roar from a hundred thousand African throats. Just when we thought it was over, the last Mau Mau appeared in the floodlit arena – gaunt men with matted hair and ravaged bodies who had been living in the Mount Kenya forest for some ten years. They laid down their arms before President Jomo Kenyatta. And with that gesture, I knew that I, too, was liberated. There was nothing more to fear. The Freedom Fighters had won and I was free to stay or to go, to leave or return. Kenya would find its own path, as I would mine.

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Tags: Africa, Asians, Athi River, Boma, British Forces Broadcasting Network, Cliff Richard, Colonialism, Connie Frances, Duke of York, East Africa, Eastleigh, Erica Mann, Freedom From Hunger, Helen Shapiro, Igor Mann, Independence, Jewish refugees, Joy Adamson, Kenya, Kenya Girls' High School, Kenyans, Loreto Convent, Mau Mau, Miriam Makeba, Mount Longonot, Nairobi, Prince of Wales, Rhodia Mann, The Shadows, Tom Mboya