(7 of 10)
Kenya's urban population, typically, doubled between 1969 and 1979. In August 1982, many Kenyans were jolted into recognition of the new reality when an apparent coup attempt by a handful of air force noncoms and some officers, assisted' by university students, degenerated into a mindless rampage through Nairobi. Youngsters smashed windows and shot up the lobby of the Hilton Hotel, a ready symbol of Western affluence. After taking over the radio station, the rioters were unable to find suitable martial music for the occasion. They ended up broadcasting the lilting strains of Bob Marley's Caribbean reggae.
Surveying a street scene in Nairobi, Trinidadian Author Shiva Naipaul (brother of V.S.) was struck by a sense of unreality among young city dwellers. In his book North of South: An African Journey, Naipaul describes meeting a modishly dressed student who claimed he was studying literature, but declined to name a favorite author. His reason: "I don't care much for reading." Jn another encounter, an aggressive shoeshine boy tried to charge him $6 for "deluxe special" treatment. Wrote Naipaul: "The tribal world was real. The new world, lacking definition and solidity, fades away into the dimmer reaches of fantasy. The greed of my shoeshine boy did not ... recognize any limits. He had lost touch with reality."
Reality may be closer for the approximately 75% of Africans who have remained in smaller towns and villages. But their awareness of their economic plight is sharp. Joshua Kweka, 28, earns $100 a month as a clerk at a small factory that manufactures mosquito-repellent coils in the Tanzanian town of Himo (pop. 5,000), just across the border from Kenya. He shares a room near the factory with his sister, while his wife and child live with relatives on a five-acre farm 6,000 feet up the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. Kweka and his sister usually eat ugali, cooked maize meal, for lunch and dinner. Only rarely can they afford to add tomatoes, which cost $1 per Ib. With stewing beef at $1.50 per Ib., they are lucky if they can afford to eat meat once a week.
For recreation, Kweka listens to his transistor radio, unless the batteries die. Then, he says, "you have to wait until there are batteries in the shop." That can take several months. On weekends he exchanges gossip and talks politics with friends in one of Himo's bars. He drinks locally brewed banana beer rather than factory-produced lager, mainly because at 50¢ a pint it is one-quarter as expensive. Occasionally someone at the bar will produce goods smuggled in from neighboring Kenya and sell them for five times the Kenyan price.
Kweka and his family are the victims of a well-intentioned experiment that has gone awry. Tanzanian President Nyerere was one of the few African leaders who recognized early that agricultural development was the key to economic growth in Africa. In the late '60s and early '70s, he nationalized farms in an effort to boost agricultural productivity. But his socialist approach failed,