Shining a light on the ‘Jewel of Africa’

“We prefer foreign currency…” The smirk accompanying the statement says it all. We are back in Africa. I have asked if I can pay for our visas to enter Kenya with Kenyan Shillings and the guard has left me in no doubt that I cannot and so without papers, I enter Kenya for the first time in order to go and exchange all the money Helen had spent four days organising before we left Scotland.

In the end, I have all but destroyed our spending money to buy $150 back from the bureau de change in the airport. Róisín, at eight-and-a-half months, has her first visa marked in her faintly ridiculous passport but it has come at a crippling cost. Stripped of our potential wealth, we enter the nation of Kenya, this time with official papers to back us up. Because we are not staying in Nairobi we have to make our way to the transit point, where we can catch our flight to Mombasa. In staggering heat we lug a bag stuffed with the effects of a western childhood through a churning and boisterous mass of people all struggling and staggering either to enter the security queue or sell help to weary travelers.  We wrestle our way through security scanners and make our flight with a pleasing 25 minutes to spare.
We are in Kenya to meet with some researchers and discuss the possibility of
Helen coming to carry out some research of her own. Our announcement that we would be making the trip met with mixed reactions. To some friends  it was viewed as a treat, a holiday in the sun and an indulgence. To others it was a hair-brained excursion into a danger zone fit only for the more properly lunatic new parents.
In truth it has been a bit of both. The rainy season is approaching fast so the daily temperature is hovering around a solid 31 with 80% humidity or thereabouts. This makes it difficult to move without shedding a considerable amount of bodyweight in sweat. This has not been an issue for most of the people we have encountered on our trip however, as they are chasing the yellow orb and little else.
Because we are new parents and only have our own experience of Africa to go by, we are more than a little terrified by the prospect of any harm befalling Róisín. As a result, our gung-ho former approach to travel been replaced by a new and all consuming concern for her welfare. With this as our guiding light, we checked into an all-inclusive resort hotel in Mombasa, where we were guaranteed the mosquito defences were top of the range. They were and for this we were thankful. The downside of travelling in this way is that, initially at least, the nation in which you are staying remains a foreign and distant land. In our first three days in the country we met only wealthy Kenyans and Western tourists.
The aforementioned groups were both engaged in what amounted to the modern equivalent of a Roman orgy with food, drink and entertainment on tap. Although we were aware of what existed outside the heavily fortified gates of the complex, we had not seen enough to convince ourselves that this was the nation we had been researching. Was it really so different from West Africa, where we cut our teeth in this much-maligned continent?
Our trip up the coast to our final destination tells us in no uncertain terms that some things are very much the same, with mud huts, emaciated people and cows littering the ‘highway’. Unlike The Gambia, where the dictator Jammeh retains his stranglehold, Kenya is possessed of a livid and vibrant politics. In 2008, post-election violence left 1,350 dead  and 650,000 displaced. The cost to the economy was estimated at 100 billion Kenyan shillings. (€1  = 108.696 KES) elections are once again due to be held and the air is thick with intrigue and speculation of a very concerning nature.
Reports have been carried in the major national newspapers in the last few days of a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister Raila Odinga. This is accompanied by internal party wrangling and political upheaval that makes anything in Europe seem like child’s play. From an Irish point of view, this political cocktail will be added to a significant dose of intrigue in the coming years with the discovery of oil by Tullow Oil.
A local lecturer has stated in a locally published column, “Tullow Oil will take 80 per cent, 60 per cent, 40 percent and 20 per cent of the oil money in the first, second, third and fourth years of production respectively, before the government can fully inherit the wells. ‘Stripper wells’ could be just what Kenya is left with five years after the extraction of oil.” When Kenya’s oil has been stripped it will be interesting to see where the politicians and businessmen involved in the deal have settled themselves and their families.  
Added to this heady cocktail is the threat of extremism along the Eastern coast where we are staying and where the majority of the tourism is to be found. In the city of Mombasa, hardline Muslim activists are regularly lobbing grenades at selected targets in the last few weeks. Since we arrived, the body of the “Muslim cleric” Samir Khan has turned up dead in a forest along the Nairobi-Mombasa Highway. Various reports say he had been genitally mutilated when his body was found. It has been widely reported that the police were involved in his abduction and murder. “We call it extrajudicial killing,” I am told by an informant as he sips a beer in a Mombasa hotel. “The court process takes too long, you know?”  
The police are dealing with a real problem. In the northeast of the country there have been kidnappings and the murder of Western tourists. In 2002, the Kikimbala Hotel in Mombasa was bombed and as far back as 1998 hundreds of people were killed when the US embassy in Nairobi was bombed.
Despite the staggering inequality between what happens inside hotel walls, where mirrors check the underside of cars for bombs before allowing access and what lies metres from their gates, there is a real case to say that tourism must be protected in Kenya as a vital source of income to local people in many areas. In a planned devolution of power to local counties in the coming years, the areas along the coast where people flock from all over the world and the places they travel too to see what could be described as the “classic” African safari will seed money to the areas of the nation where poverty, malnutrition, HIV, refugee influx and the other ‘classic’ scourges of this continent are a pertinent and persistent threat to the welfare of millions.
This ‘Jewel of Africa’ is on the cusp of something major and how it plays out will have implications not only for the continent but for the world.