Please take your holiday in Kenya this year

 Rift Valley

Many of my British tribe fled Kenya around independence in 1963 because they believed there was no future. Gerald Hanley, an Irish novelist who knew the country, forecast ‘a huge slum on the edge of the West, Africans in torn trousers leaning against tin shacks, the whites of their eyes gone yellow, hands miserably in their pockets…’ For sure, poverty here is an awful, destabilising reality. But Kenya’s past 51 years is a story of hard work and enterprise in which there has been real social mobility and countless stories of rags to riches. In everything from finance to farming, Kenyans are Africa’s most successful capitalists. Still, for a middle-class person to come good in 1963, all you needed to do was buy a Nairobi house for a few quid from one of those fleeing colonials and do nothing else except drink a bottle of gin a day, and you’d have made a lot of money. People have been predicting my home’s imminent demise for 51 years. In 2000 Blaine Harden, a top American correspondent once based here, wrote of the ‘decline of nearly everything in Kenya’, which previously had been ‘a celebrated exception to the rule of misrule in sub-Saharan Africa’. Meanwhile a dynamic, complex economy and society has been building up. In 25 years I have seen half a dozen generations of foreign correspondents and diplomats come and go. Many arrive full of beans and hope, in chinos. They buy bark-cloth wall hangings, sample maize meal, say liberal things. Some stay for the rest of their lives because they’ve found their place. Others — four years later they’re like Kurtz up the river. The roads, the cops, the stuff they see daily just gets to them. They write about the ‘formerly stable Kenya’. As they jog for the departure gate to new international postings, their parting shots are full of doom.