Westgate

Posted: September 29th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 1 Comment »

Hi readers,

Yes, I’ve been slow to blog.

Got some nice emails to make sure I’m okay, and a call from Mom (“My email must not be working! Because I haven’t been getting your blog.” Oh, and thanks Mom, for the puzzle and coloring books. The kids love ’em).

Just been busy. Our team is plugging away on academics — curriculum and teacher training/selection — plus how to measure the whole shebang. But the pace is dizzying.

Then last Saturday afternoon, I saw an email from my colleague Lauren:

For those who haven’t yet turned on the news, there is an ongoing terrorist attack in Nairobi. I just got in touch with Lisa and she and Steph are OK. They haven’t yet been able to account for everyone, but so far, all of our colleagues appear to be all right. Chris’s roommate has been taken to the hospital. Alex and Josh are currently on the plane back Stateside, so they are all right.

Chris’s roommate is okay. Story here.

This weekend, a few of my friends pointed me to this column in the New York Times, written by a correspondent they know.

Jeffrey Gettleman writes:

After we had kids, we’d take them to Westgate for shopping and ice cream, and it’s where my son Apollo, born and raised in Kenya, rode his first escalator. Westgate, actually, was where I interviewed my first real live Somali pirate (by phone). He was bobbing on the bridge of a hijacked tanker in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I was sitting at a cafe, drinking a banana smoothie.

On Sept. 21, at 11:30 a.m., on a typically bright and pleasant Nairobi morning, Islamist militants with military-grade weaponry stormed into Westgate, turning it into an abattoir. The first of the more than 60 people who were gunned down were sitting at that same cafe where I used to do my interviews, and the steps that I used to trot up holding my son’s hand are now smeared with blood.

For the past seven years that I’ve lived in Kenya, I’ve been following two very different story lines that represent what’s happening in contemporary Africa and that collided that fateful day in Westgate.

The first is of the dramatic expansion of Africa’s middle class, now more than 300 million people, and perhaps there’s no better place on the continent to watch this than in Nairobi, where new office blocks are rising above the tin-shack slums, new bistros are popping up all over the place and taxi drivers are getting on Facebook. It’s essentially Africa joining the world.

When I first came here more than 20 years ago, the difference between life in the States and life in Kenya was enormous. There were barely any malls, for instance, and they sold things like yellow plastic jerrycans and roughly machined pots. Now you can get everything here — the latest Macs, frozen yogurt, Old El Paso taco mix — and at Westgate, it was all under one roof.

But at the same time that I’ve been chronicling this rapid, almost dizzying development, I’ve become a specialist in despair. Sub-Saharan Africa is still home to some of the poorest, most violent countries on earth: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, South Sudan, the Central African Republic — places where the government is a ghost and civilians are stalked, raped and killed by men with guns.

Read the whole thing here.

Two questions occur to me.

1. Which is safer, Nairobi or Boston?

a. Not sure how to calculate the terrorism risk. We had an incident here recently, of course.

b. Separately, post-election political violence risk is zero in Boston and the USA. People get worked up about elections, and then smooth transitions of power. Heck, forget about violence: our current mayoral race threatens to be civil. We shall see. John and Marty are both “good guys” in my book; I have friends and former students in each camp. Worst case is probably a little graffiti on a few lawn signs.

Not so in Kenya. Political violence there is very real.

Terror and political violence aside, I wondered about the homicide rate.

Boston has a homicide rate of 10 murders per 100,000 residents per year. Used to be higher.

According to this United Nations data, Nairobi has a lower homicide rate. 4 to 7 per 100,000 per year from 2004 to 2008.

Large data sets aren’t enough, though. My thoughts, not surprisingly, often start with myself: where am I safer? The Westgate attack? I could imagine myself there at a cafe, blogging on my laptop.

By contrast, there was a bombing that killed 85 in Pakistan last week. No connection to me. Did you know about it? I didn’t. Just found it now, Googling.

Here in Boston, an adjusted homicide rate would be something like 100 per 100,000 for black men in their teens and 20s. Does it feel unsafe? To those guys? Yes at times.

Not to me. I’d guess the Boston homicide rate is something like 0.1 per 100,000 for middle-aged balding white guys. It’s probably even lower if your late night vice of choice is online Scrabble.

Homicide affects my professional experience and kids I care a lot about, but not particularly my neighborhood.

No question I’m personally way safer here. For a typical black teenager in Nairobi or Roxbury, I’m not sure.

2. Is there a third story, nestled between the two narratives Gettelman describes, an emerging Kenyan middle class and a violent, broken Somalia?

Yes. Most Kenyan kids still live in the tin-shack slums and their rural equivalents. Will these kids, the vast swaths of population, become reasonably well educated, and does the answer to question determine Kenya’s future?

Here I venture far outside my knowledge. I’m not clear on the complex relationship between education and the economy in developing countries.

My rudimentary economics suggests: Kenya with an educated “median person” would simply be too attractive for business…similar to India (former British colony, English as official language, where the 2008 Mumbai bombings didn’t put a dent in Indian economic growth, in part because so much American companies are investing in the people working there).

However, without really educating the kids in the tin shacks, if the Kenyan economy remains too reliant on tourism, perhaps it teeters and falls back. I wonder. Open to being educated here, by email or comment.

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