Pride

Mercury is a nicer bar than I ever went to in the states. Softly curving upholstered walls. Marble bathrooms. The spirits geometrically laid out on a backlit glass wall. Outside, in the parking lot I ask the guard if it will still be possible for us to get a matatu. It is, after all, almost 9p.
What we actually get on is a bus. I’ve traveled this route during rush hour: matatus packed full of uncharacteristically thorny Kenyans, fleeing city center back to slums at the edge of the grid. This is the same, but the silence is permeated with exhaustion of a more physical kind. It’s unlikely that these people started work any later than those I crammed in with this afternoon. These are ‘night jobs’; they start before it’s light and finish only once it’s dark again. The bus is dark and the street lamps bring an intermittent brightness, like a passing search-light, that lengthens and then shortens the shadows over their faces.
Tired though they may be, the entrance of three whites onto a bus already filled to standing room leaves a sudden sinking silence in the air. As though we’ve caught them doing something improper followed – in the same breath – with a realization that they aren’t the ones out of place.
The first quiet comment comes across my right shoulder.
Muze keti chako. Sell him your seat.
I turn. Sitaki kuketi. Si mbali. I don’t want to sit. It’s not far.
Thinking of being in New York before I left, it’s always astonishing to me how immediately people here will drop their barriers. It’s a tribute to the social nature of everyday life in Kenya, to the extent to which people interact and connect easily, continually. In this case it’s also a shameful reminder of how little effort whites have ever needed to make to adapt to the culture and life of people for whom this is not an adopted home. To find a white person who speaks even a little of the language that has grown and developed and lived in this place for a millennia is a novelty that’s usually taken as a compliment.
We talk a bit. He hands me a card: a smartly creased and clean version of the same political fold-outs that litter the sidewalks and streets here in the face of the approaching election.
Unmajua? Mtu na nguvu. You know him? A man with strength.
I wait for the pitch that always comes when someone mentions a politician to me. The fact that I can’t vote seems to make my support more desirable than is logical. An outsider, with no personal bias, makes a clear sort of moral victory when swayed to your side.
He holds out his hand. I return the card and he carefully places it back in his front shirt pocket. Getting off and walking back towards our hotel, it occurs to me that I don’t ever recall experiencing something like that before. Not here, not at home: never.
Democracy. A system where people are represented in a manner that broadens their dignity. Where they feel proud of those who carry their voice and those who work for them are honored to be chosen for such a task. I have often thought about whether a representative is chosen to act their conscience – to stand above the passions of their constituents and do what seems right for all – or to stand squarely with their supporters, to act their voice above all else. But I’ve never really considered that a politician might function to unite their supporters; to bind them together by becoming something that each person is proud of.
Sitting in a quiet darkness of a mutual exhaustion. Tired, sore from twelve hours of work. The same tomorrow. But tucked into your front pocket, a small warm piece of pride. A sense of being a part of something bigger, stronger than this quiet dark and a chain of equivalent tomorrows.