It’s Our Turn to Eat. Michela Wrong

beyond which duties of kindness, generosity and personal obligation no longer apply? I was raised in a household where my parents drew them in totally different places, according to their very different characters and backgrounds.

      As an Italian, my mother grew up in a country whose government had given birth to Fascism, formed a discreditable pact with Hitler, and launched itself on a series of unnecessary wars which left Italy occupied and battle-scarred. There then followed a seemingly endless series of short-lived, sleaze-ridden administrations. The experience left her utterly cynical about officialdom. Although she dutifully voted in every election, the malevolence of the system was taken for granted, and she would happily have lied and cheated in any encounter with the state had she believed she could get away with it. But no one worked harder for her fellow man, for in the place of the state she maintained her own support network. An instinctive practitioner of what sociologists call ‘the economics of affection’, my mother had a circle of compassion drawn to include a collection of needy and lonely acquaintances. She visited their council flats bearing cakes, sent amusing press cuttings to their prison cells, queued at the gates of their psychiatric hospitals. Hers was a world of one-on-one interactions, in which obligations, duties, morality itself, took strictly personal form, and were no less onerous for it. The glow she radiated was life-enhancing, but its light only stretched so far, and beyond lay utter darkness. Protecting one's own was vital, for life had taught her that the world outside would show no mercy. She was not alone in her ability to get things done without the state's involvement. ‘Il mio sistema’ Italians call it: ‘my system’. Italy is, after all, the birthplace of the Mafia, the ultimate of personal ‘sisteme’, and my mother's mindset was instinctively mafioso.

      My father, in contrast, was typical of a certain sort of law-abiding, diffident Englishman for whom a set of impartial, lucid rules represented civilisation at its most advanced. He was raised in a country which pluckily held out against the Germans during the Second World War and then set up the National Health Service in which he spent his career, and his trust in the essential decency of his duly elected representatives was so profound that he was shocked to the core by British perfidy during the Suez crisis, and believed Tony Blair when he said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. When, as an eleven-year-old schoolgirl, I mentioned – with a certain pride – that I usually managed to get home without paying my bus fare, he explained disapprovingly that if everyone behaved that way, London Transport would grind to a halt. Remove the civic ethos, and anarchy descended. A logical man, he saw this as the only practical way of running a complex society. It also, conveniently for an Englishman awkward with personal intimacy, enabled him to engage with his fellow man at a completely impersonal level. Not for him my mother's instinctive charm, the immediate eye contact, the hand on arm. He felt no obligation to provide for nieces and nephews, and had a cousin come up for a job before one of the many appointment boards on which he sat, he would have immediately excused himself. Nothing could be more repugnant to him than asking a friend to bend the rules as a personal favour. What need was there for a rival, alternative sistema, if the existing arrangement of rights and duties already delivered?

      My father's world view was typically northern European. My mother's characteristically Mediterranean approach would have made perfect sense to any Kenyan. In an ‘us-against-the-rest’ universe, the put-upon pine to belong to a form of Masonic lodge whose advantages are labelled ‘Members Only’. In the industrialised world, that ‘us’ is usually defined by class, religion, or profession. In Kenya, it was inevitably defined by tribe.

      Western analysts have remarked on Africans' ‘astonishing ambivalence’ towards corruption,¹⁰ but it is not so surprising. Under the colonial occupiers and the breed of ‘black wazungus’ who replaced them, the citizen had learnt to expect little from his government but harassment and extortion. ‘Anyone who followed the straight path died a poor man,’ a community worker in Kisumu once told me. ‘So Kenyans had no option but to glorify corruption.’ In a 2001 survey, Transparency International found that the average urbanite Kenyan paid sixteen bribes a month,¹¹ mostly to the police or the ministry of public works, to secure services they should have received for free. Added together, kitu kidogo – supposedly ‘petty’ corruption – accounted for a crippling 31.4 per cent of a household's income. Those paying out no doubt saw themselves as innocent victims of oppressive officialdom. But while chafing at the need to grease palms, ordinary Kenyans were also playing the system with verve. Which of them could put their hand on their heart and swear that they had never relied on a ‘brother’ for a bargain, a professional recommendation or a job? Who had never helped a distant ‘cousin’ from upcountry jump a queue or win special access? Aware of their own complicity, they hesitated to point an accusing finger.

      Moral values can become strangely inverted in a harsh environment. ‘In Nairobi, around 50 per cent of the population is either unemployed or underemployed – they're selling shoelaces or picking up rubbish, not earning enough to survive. But this country doesn't have soup kitchens, and you don't see hordes sleeping rough,’ says Professor Terry Ryan, a veteran Kenyan economist. ‘That's because a senior civil servant or CEO typically picks up the school fees and hospital bills of roughly fifty of his kinsmen, while a headmaster or low-ranking civil servant will be supporting twenty-nine members of the extended family in one way or another.’ Propping up such vast networks made bending the rules virtually obligatory. The man who abided by the rules and took home no more than his salary seemed to his relatives a creep; the employee who fiddled the books and paid for his aunt's funeral, his niece's education and his father's hernia operation a hero. In a poor country, ethnic marginalisation does more than blight life chances. It can actually kill. A 1998 survey found that Kalenjin children were 50 per cent less likely to die before the age of five than those of other tribes, despite the fact that most lived in rural areas, where life is generally tougher.¹² The statistic makes perfect sense. Under Moi, Kalenjin areas benefited from better investment in clinics, schools and roads. A worried Kalenjin mother would head for a well-stocked nearby clinic, child in her arms, along a smoothly tarmacked road. Her non-Kalenjin equivalent was likely to be tossed for hours in the back of a matatu struggling along a rutted track, only to eventually reach a clinic with nothing but aspirin on its shelves and watch her child die.

      Researching this book, I repeatedly asked Kenyans for examples of how ethnic favouritism had personally affected them. ‘Oh, every Kenyan has a story like that,’ I was always told. Yet few volunteered details. It was easy to guess why. If they had lost out because of tribal patronage, they risked looking like whiners; if they had benefited, they'd be admitting to collaborating in a system that fostered incompetence.

      I'd seen one example myself, at a Kenyan newspaper where I briefly worked as a subeditor. The East African Standard was being revamped after many years in the doldrums. The details of its ownership had always been kept deliberately murky, but the fact that the Moi family quietly pulled the levers was widely known, and had alienated readers, while management's habit of giving jobs to barely literate Kalenjins was blamed for a general collapse in standards. Now a new chief executive was poaching talent from rivals, with promises of an imminent takeover by a South African company. After my first few weeks at the paper, I went for lunch with one of the senior writers.

      ‘So, what do you think of the staff?’ he asked.

      I ran through my various colleagues. Some had better training than others, some were more enterprising, but the goodwill was undoubtedly there. With one exception. The man in question, I said, turned up late or not at all, lounged at his desk playing music while the others hammered at their keyboards, and was often rude to his fellow workers. Robert – let us call him – was one of those rare, dangerous subeditors who could take a perfectly decent story and insert fresh mistakes. When I'd pointed one of these out, he'd given me a look of such astonished contempt that I'd realised criticism was something he rarely heard. In a surprisingly short space of time I'd come to detest him, and it was clear to me that many staff felt the same, although they were strangely mute in his presence. The man should obviously be fired.

      The journalist gave me a long look, enjoying his moment.