Seven hours between flights at Nairobi airport and nowhere to smoke. So I bought a ten-dollar transit visa, left the airport precincts and headed for the nearest bar. It was called The Pub. The white-shirted, bow-tied waiters saw me coming and greeted me with a chuckle, as if they were thinking, ‘Here comes another nicotine addict on his ten-dollar transit visa.’
I hadn’t been settled at my outside table for more than a minute with a Tusker and a fag when a brisk, unshaven man asked if he could share it. He was on a three-hour stopover between Kinshasa and Dubai (final destination Pakistan). He’d smoked four cigarettes already, he said: two in the transit-lounge toilets immediately after disembarking the plane, and two on the short walk to The Pub. He’d lived in Kinshasa for 16 years. He was a groceries wholesaler.
One day I hope to go and live in Kinshasa.
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