see us I let my eyes wander out to the horizon, watching as the buildings got smaller and smaller and the smokestacks rose higher and higher above them.
After a fifteen-minute wait, we were let in to see the Director, Samuel Alexander, a white American dressed in a T-shirt and faded blue jeans. His office looked like some kind of African museum – from the artwork to the thick jungle plants – but he seemed very happy to see a fellow American, and for a few minutes he spoke about the things that he missed the most: McDonald’s, fifty-two TV channels with nothing on them, high-speed Internet and the roads. ‘By God, do I miss the roads,’ he cried. ‘The roads here are shit.’ He had a point there, I concurred.
‘So, gentlemen, what can I do for you?’ Samuel Alexander finally asked.
I explained we were looking for information on Joshua – anything that might help us with an investigation we were conducting.
‘About that white girl?’ he asked. ‘Courtesy of CNN International,’ he added, seeing the look on my face.
‘Yes,’ I answered.
‘The man is a
fucking
hero,’ he said, stressing the word. He then asked us to go with him to a conference room and there we found several large posters of Joshua hanging on the wall covered with slogans like
You can be a hero too – give
and
I saved hundreds – so can you
. There were some brochures on the desk that also had his face on them. Joshua was their poster boy – his face helped them raise money, Samuel explained. It wasSamuel who had recruited Joshua shortly after the genocide to help with raising money for the Refugee Centre. But that was the extent of their relationship.
‘Did you meet him here, in Nairobi?’ I asked him.
‘Yes, several times. I gotta tell you though, Joshua is a gentle African … He would never harm anyone,’ he answered.
Finally, I asked Samuel Alexander if he knew of any Rwandan refugees or genocide survivors that we could talk to, but he told me that it would be a privacy breach to give us such information.
As we took the lift back down to the ground floor I was happy that we had at least placed Joshua in Nairobi. Beyond that we had nothing, but it didn’t matter, we were rattling the bushes.
Later, as we ate a lunch of fried chicken and fries, O told me that he had an idea of where we could find some Rwandan refugees. He suggested we leave his Land Rover in the city – in his car we would be easily made – and take public transport to a place called Mathare.
After we were done eating, O flagged down a small rainbow-coloured Nissan matatu that had Tupac’s ‘Dear Mama’ playing at full volume. We got off in Mathare – a slum area – and stood on the side of the tarmac road, trying to decide which of the muddy footpaths that wove in and out of the endless rows of shacks we should take. It was as if I had stepped into one of those infomercials with the stream of skeletal children, too used to the flies crawling over their faces to shoo them away. And the smell – it was a surprise. In spite of the open sewers and the thousands of barely clothedsweating bodies milling around us it wasn’t a bad smell. Yes, it had several layers to it – sex, shit, cheap perfume, bad breath, booze, weed, sickness – but the sum of these parts wasn’t bad, and though it settled in my throat like thick smoke, it didn’t make me cough.
O explained that Mathare was sectioned off into various ethnicities – you had the Luo, Kikuyu and Kamba sections. And then you had the refugee section, itself sectioned off according to nationality – Sudanese, Ugandan, Congolese, et cetera. This was a land of suffering, an inverted Tower of Babel that descended into hell instead of rising to heaven.
We made our rounds – O, with his spare frame and bloodshot eyes, almost fitting in; me, with my American baby fat, sticking out – until we found the Rwandan section. ‘We are from the Refugee Centre and would like to talk to you,’ O would
After a fifteen-minute wait, we were let in to see the Director, Samuel Alexander, a white American dressed in a T-shirt and faded blue jeans. His office looked like some kind of African museum – from the artwork to the thick jungle plants – but he seemed very happy to see a fellow American, and for a few minutes he spoke about the things that he missed the most: McDonald’s, fifty-two TV channels with nothing on them, high-speed Internet and the roads. ‘By God, do I miss the roads,’ he cried. ‘The roads here are shit.’ He had a point there, I concurred.
‘So, gentlemen, what can I do for you?’ Samuel Alexander finally asked.
I explained we were looking for information on Joshua – anything that might help us with an investigation we were conducting.
‘About that white girl?’ he asked. ‘Courtesy of CNN International,’ he added, seeing the look on my face.
‘Yes,’ I answered.
‘The man is a
fucking
hero,’ he said, stressing the word. He then asked us to go with him to a conference room and there we found several large posters of Joshua hanging on the wall covered with slogans like
You can be a hero too – give
and
I saved hundreds – so can you
. There were some brochures on the desk that also had his face on them. Joshua was their poster boy – his face helped them raise money, Samuel explained. It wasSamuel who had recruited Joshua shortly after the genocide to help with raising money for the Refugee Centre. But that was the extent of their relationship.
‘Did you meet him here, in Nairobi?’ I asked him.
‘Yes, several times. I gotta tell you though, Joshua is a gentle African … He would never harm anyone,’ he answered.
Finally, I asked Samuel Alexander if he knew of any Rwandan refugees or genocide survivors that we could talk to, but he told me that it would be a privacy breach to give us such information.
As we took the lift back down to the ground floor I was happy that we had at least placed Joshua in Nairobi. Beyond that we had nothing, but it didn’t matter, we were rattling the bushes.
Later, as we ate a lunch of fried chicken and fries, O told me that he had an idea of where we could find some Rwandan refugees. He suggested we leave his Land Rover in the city – in his car we would be easily made – and take public transport to a place called Mathare.
After we were done eating, O flagged down a small rainbow-coloured Nissan matatu that had Tupac’s ‘Dear Mama’ playing at full volume. We got off in Mathare – a slum area – and stood on the side of the tarmac road, trying to decide which of the muddy footpaths that wove in and out of the endless rows of shacks we should take. It was as if I had stepped into one of those infomercials with the stream of skeletal children, too used to the flies crawling over their faces to shoo them away. And the smell – it was a surprise. In spite of the open sewers and the thousands of barely clothedsweating bodies milling around us it wasn’t a bad smell. Yes, it had several layers to it – sex, shit, cheap perfume, bad breath, booze, weed, sickness – but the sum of these parts wasn’t bad, and though it settled in my throat like thick smoke, it didn’t make me cough.
O explained that Mathare was sectioned off into various ethnicities – you had the Luo, Kikuyu and Kamba sections. And then you had the refugee section, itself sectioned off according to nationality – Sudanese, Ugandan, Congolese, et cetera. This was a land of suffering, an inverted Tower of Babel that descended into hell instead of rising to heaven.
We made our rounds – O, with his spare frame and bloodshot eyes, almost fitting in; me, with my American baby fat, sticking out – until we found the Rwandan section. ‘We are from the Refugee Centre and would like to talk to you,’ O would
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