This series has been mostly generous to Kenya. The rivers, the road trips, Nairobi against the countryside, the beautiful, chaotic, ever-surprising country I called it on Day 50. All true. All still true.
But if I only tell you the generous version, I am not telling you the whole story, and this whole series has promised the whole story.
So here is the honest one: I no longer feel drawn to Kenya the way I once did.
There are things about living here that genuinely wear me down.
The roads are one of them. Private cars, matatus, boda bodas, all of us out there negotiating the same tarmac with almost no shared agreement on what the rules even are. Every drive is a small negotiation with disorder. And underneath the traffic sits something bigger: a general looseness around rules, an assumption that authority exists partly to be gotten around, or gotten from.
Let me tell you what happened to me recently, because it says more than any general complaint could.
A traffic officer stopped me and informed me I was in the wrong lane. I was not. I knew the road. I was using it exactly as it is designed to be used. I said so.
She did not like that.
She threatened to arrest me. When I pushed back, she told me, quite plainly, to be careful, because she had power over me. She could make up a story. She could claim I had tried to run her over. She wanted to get into my car so she could take me in.
The entire situation had one obvious exit: five hundred shillings, maybe a thousand, and the “wrong lane” would have instantly become the right one. I found another way out of it that day, through patience and persistence rather than payment. But if you go back to that same road today, you will find people using that exact lane she invented a violation out of. There was never a rule. There was only an opportunity, and I happened to be driving through it.
This was not an isolated incident. It rarely is, here. Security guards who expect “something for lunch” before they do their actual job. Government officers who make you understand, without ever quite saying it, that your file moves faster with a little help. I could fill several posts with examples. I am sure you, reading this in Kenya, could fill several of your own.
I want to be careful here, because I refuse to write a post that becomes cynicism dressed up as honesty. I do not believe every officer, guard, or official operates this way. I have met plenty who do their jobs properly, without asking for a shilling that is not theirs. But the system does not protect them or reward them for it, and it does not meaningfully punish the ones who do the opposite. That absence, the absence of consequence, is really the thing that wears a person down over time. Not one bad encounter. The accumulated weight of many.
I think, too, about the speeding ticket I once received in the USA. I was genuinely speeding, and the fine stung. But the process itself was orderly. I received a ticket. I had the option to contest it or pay it. The matter closed cleanly, on its own terms. And when I paid, the money went where fines are supposed to go, not into somebody’s pocket, not into a private negotiation invented on the spot.
I am not idealising America. Every system has its own failures, and I have lived close enough to that one to know its faults too. But there was a predictability to that encounter that I genuinely miss here. Being wrong and being punished for it in an orderly, transparent way is, strangely, easier to live with than being right and being threatened anyway because someone in a uniform decided the day called for a shortcut.
So here is where I have landed, at almost fifty, after decades of loving this country loudly in public.
I still live here. I still build here. My work, my faith community, my children’s roots, this blog itself, all of it is planted in Kenyan soil, and I have no plans to uproot it. But I have stopped performing an uncomplicated love for a place that is, in fact, complicated. Kenya is not a slogan. It is a country with real beauty and real dysfunction living side by side, sometimes in the very same afternoon, sometimes in the very same lane.
Loving a place honestly, I have come to believe, does not mean pretending it has no flaws. It means staying anyway, clear-eyed, and doing the small, unglamorous work of not adding to the problem. I do not pay the bribe. I push back when I am right, even when pushing back is inconvenient and a little frightening. I try to run my own corner of this country, whatever that corner happens to be on a given day, with the order I wish the whole system had.
That is not patriotism as performance. It is something quieter and, I think, more honest: a decision to keep showing up for a place, without pretending it is easy to love every single day.
Some days it still is. Today, writing this, it is a little harder.
That is also allowed.
Come back tomorrow for Day 21: favourite things.
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Leave me a birthday note, tell me which post was your favourite, or share your own way to shine. I read every one.
