Kenyatta Day

Today was Kenyatta Day - Kenya's independence day.  So that meant no meetings for us, just working out of the hotel lounge (with yet another Member of Parliament who was being interviewed).

The holiday is named after Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta.

You may think Kenya was named after him, but the country was actually named after it's highest mountain, Mount Kenya.  In turn, the mountain was named (Kenia) in 1849 by a German missionary who was the first European to see it.  The etymology isn't clear, but he derived the name from the local tribes' names, which included Kirinyaga (white mountain), Kirenia (mountain of whiteness), and Kiinyaa (the mountain of the ostrich). 

This was the first European to climb the mountain, and I'm only including the picture because if I was in the US for Halloween this year, I would be dressing up as him.

Kenyatta himself actually had a bunch of names throughout his life (including "Kamau wa Muigai", "John Peter", "Johnstone Kamau", and "Diddy") and the conventional wisdom is that he changed it to Kenyatta for political reasons while he was attending graduate school in London.

Everybody still considers him a great president who is largely responsible for Kenya becoming a relatively stable country.  Unfortunately, the goons who came after him took to rolling back his progress and effectively turned the country into a dictatorship.

Tonight the city was more bustling and hectic than ever.  Not far from our hotel is an area where a lot of locals shop and work, and the primary mode of transportation here is a massive fleet of private taxi vans and busses (matatus) that are covered with photos of American celebrities, are just as likely to be packed with chickens as humans (who are often hanging out of the windows and doors for lack of space / ease of harassing us), and seem to be exempt from Kenyan law (if there is traffic, they just pull into the oncoming lanes, shutting them down by fiat).

While the matatus are exempt from Kenyan laws, it appears their waiver doesn't apply to the laws of physics.

The chaotic scene we walked into was like the worst you could imagine in somewhere like Vietnam, only everybody was driving on the wrong side of the rode (once again I stepped out into the street after thinking the coast was clear, only to have a beat-up Toyota approach at warp speed, horn blaring, trying to get the bonus points for hitting a white person) and there was lots of music blaring from the matatus, whose drivers were advertising by trying to yell through the fog of diesel fumes (in violation of another new law against noise pollution... I think that's how they sold the bill since it was really aimed at the matatu drivers).

It would have been a priceless video, but I've learned the trick is to walk around acting like you live there, and nobody harasses / kidnaps you.