There was genuine cause for angst in the early days of the COVID lockdowns as the pandemic spread unabated throughout Europe. I was a new arrival in the Netherlands, marooned at home, working as a remote curator-at-large for the online publication The Elephant. While I appeared stoic to my team based in Nairobi, I could not shake off the feelings of uncertainty. I had a child who had just learned how to walk and my wife had started a new and demanding job.

Amsterdam was ghostly. Trepidation beset the city and it seemed as though people had gone into hibernation. On most days, in between Zoom calls to Nairobi, I would stare out of my home office window at a large weeping willow tree that stood on the edge of a canal, feeling a loss of control.

One morning, I noticed a flock of green ring-necked parakeets perched on the willow tree. I had not seen those birds since the days of my childhood in the Kenyan countryside and their appearance in a foreign country was serendipitous. In times of crisis one is attuned to signs from nature and in those familiar birds and in the willow tree, I found a sense of hope and belonging.

A friend from Kenya who arrived in Amsterdam around the same period also talked about the silent assurance he had discovered in trees. He worked the night shift. For months during those cold days, while his wife and children were away, sitting alone in the house staving off depression, he drew strange comfort from contemplating the sturdy nature of the single tree that grew in his backyard.

When you come from Kenya, winters are survived, chalked down and added to the résumé.

Having grown up under the tutelage of a father who was an avid forester, it was natural that I should fall back on the wisdom of trees to guide me through the unknown. But this awareness would unfold gradually as the trees of Amsterdam revealed their hidden lives.

There is a popular museum in the centre of Amsterdam, on Prinsengracht Street, dedicated to Anne Frank’s life, her famous diary and the secret annex. Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, and her Jewish family had fled persecution for the relative safety of Amsterdam.  When the Germans invaded and occupied the Netherlands in 1940 and began deporting Jews to death camps, Anne Frank went into hiding. During her two years in hiding, Anne Frank turned to writing to pass time, journaling not just the daily events but also her thoughts and feelings.

Anne Frank’s father Otto survived the war, found his daughter’s diary and it was eventually published in 1947 under the title The Secret Annex.

There is a passage in the diary where Anne writes about a tree, a white horse chestnut that she used to stare at from her window in the attic. That huge tree standing in the courtyard garden, 170 years old, was a beacon of freedom, longing and hope.

Tragically, Anne and her sister Margot were arrested and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp where they were separated from their parents. The sisters were taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where, under the unhygienic conditions, they both succumbed to typhus and died in February of 1945.

When I went off in search of the famous tree that Anne Frank wrote about, I found that it had fallen 10 years earlier in 2010 and all that remained was a stump. I found a connection with the story of the horse chestnut tree in Anne’s diary because trees were one of the first signposts that I used to navigate the newness of this city.

There is another tree that is located in Bijlmermeer in the south-east of Amsterdam that is not as famous as Anne Frank’s tree. Its story is much more recent. In 1992, an El Al cargo aircraft en route to Israel lost its engines while trying to circle back to Schiphol airport for an emergency landing. It crashed into Groeneveen and Klein-Kruitberg, two multi-storied apartment buildings, killing 43 people, most caught unawares in their homes innocently winding down the day.

There were speculations that the death toll may have been higher as many undocumented and unregistered people were not accounted for following the accident. On the site, facing a new apartment block, sits the tree that saw everything, a living witness to the Bijlmerramp air disaster.

Amsterdam is a green city and trees are everywhere. The canals are lined with old elms and practically all city roads and neighbourhoods are fronted by straight lines of trees, usually of one species. The tenement buildings may appear to have the same aesthetic similarity of the predominantly red or grey brick walls. But in the courtyards, hidden from street view, are lush green gardens and trees.

I was soon able to guess the age of a neighbourhood by looking at the size of the trees growing in it. I also started to notice that most of the trees in Amsterdam grow straight. Crooked trees are a rare sight.

Many mightn’t be bothered by this little detail but I began to inquire about the stories behind the trees of Amsterdam. A tree is crooked because it adapts to nature and the forces it encounters, but the breadth of uniformity I encountered in the Dutch landscape was an indication that nature had been colonised.

The Amsterdamse Bos (The Amsterdam Forest) that is located in the southwest of Amsterdam, sitting on the border between Amsterdam and the Amstelveen municipality, is a prime example of this. It is an imposing city park, of a scale and order that I find intriguing. Measuring 1000 acres, it is about the size of Nairobi’s Karura Forest, with one unique distinction; all the trees were planted by hand and its all features, including its artificial lakes and solitary hill, are products of grand design. There is also within it a naturist area where nude sunbathing is allowed.

Amsterdamse Bos began as a government work relief effort to deal with the economic crisis of the 1930s. Today it is a functional park, a natural landscape designed for recreation and relaxation that draws in 4 million visitors every year.

I remarked to a Dutch friend over a cup of coffee that the Amsterdamse Bos felt like a big green arcade. To which he shrugged and said, ‘’Poof! You think this orderly, you should go to Switzerland. They are worse than us.’’

Then, as if in admission that he was accustomed to unnaturally neat nature, he recalled a road trip he had taken in Canada a few years earlier.  As they drove through the spectacular Boreal forests, both he and his wife agreed that the forests were magnificent. . . if only the Canadians would clean up the forest floor and keep it tidy.

Another Dutch friend took me on a tour of the Vondelpark in Amsterdam, to a spot over a white wooden bridge from where I had a direct view of a tall fountain in the middle of a serene pond with a leafy tree line as its backdrop, spraying water high into the air.

“You see that picture. . . it was designed to be a paradise ideal and nature has been conquered for human splendour with man as the sole animal in it.”

Indeed, it was getting harder to distinguish between what was natural and what was artificial. The Netherlands is a waterproofed country and it is easy to forget that most of the country lies below sea level. It is a country that conquered the waters after a long struggle against nature and 17 per cent of the country’s landmass is reclaimed from the sea.

This is why “God created the earth but the Dutch made the Netherlands’’ is a well turned phrase.

****

In an effort to know my neighbourhood and meet the locals, I joined the Knotgroep of Uithoorn, green volunteer effort that operates in a municipality on the outskirts of Amsterdam. The group of volunteers are all Dutch pensioners with an average age of 60, and there are as many men as there are women. As I park my bicycle, I receive a series of hoi, Dutch for hi, pronounced with much emphasis.

After a briefing by the group leader, the pitchforks and rakes are distributed and we walk to a privately-owned polder that is used as a paddock on the border of a small lake called Zijdelmeer. Mown grass is strewn all over the paddock. The ground underneath the soaked grass is wet and I can smell manure. Our task is to pile the cut grass into haystacks. The work takes effort and jackets are soon thrown off. Why do they subject these senior citizens to such strenuous work?

I ask why this work is not done by machine given that the Dutch have a machine solution for every task to be done in nature. I am informed that the stacks of grass we are preparing are nesting places where small harmless snakes can hatch and thrive. It also leaves room on the ground for wild cranberries to grow. Such delicate work, necessary to balance the ecosystem, can only be done by hand.

The group continues to work silently and meticulously, and then suddenly, excited voices come from one end. We gather around to find out the cause of all the excitement.

Someone has found a frog.

“A frog!” 

I am puzzled so I turn to my group leader, a tall Dutch man called Bill.

“Why are we getting excited about finding an amphibian in nature?” 

‘’We don’t have frogs here anymore,’’ and he recounts the story of his youth and of a time when nights were filled with a cacophony of croaking. But since the arrival of the red swamp crayfish, an invasive species that feeds on aquatic plant and animal life, the nights have gone silent.

It then occurs to me that for all the canals that surround the neighbourhoods, I never hear any frogs croaking at night.

‘’We are just trying to bring back nature.”

I want to tell Bill about the irony of Nairobi, the former Green City in the Sun that has declared war on trees in an effort to modernise its infrastructure while Amsterdam seeks to return to its natural past and where trees are valued as sites of memory. But I don’t voice my thoughts.

I have lived in Mathare since I was four years old and I have seen it grow from a slum with a medium population density to become Kenya’s most densely populated area with over 68,000 people per square kilometre.

I began my schooling in the early 2000s at Action Child Mobilization Centre, a local private school that was nothing more than a shack built of iron sheets where we were taught by form four school leavers. In this part of Nairobi, qualifications did not matter and anybody could be  a teacher as long as they had an average command of English. This was the best we could get. The different classes were scattered all over the neighbourhood, as it was not possible to find space for all the classrooms to be in one place. We became accustomed to learning while listening to loud music from neighbours’ houses and we sometimes did our exams while a couple was quarrelling and fighting next door. That was the environment we learned in.

As a resident since childhood, I can attest that despite the sad, depressing stories that come out of my Mathare, it is also a place of beautiful stories. Some of our best footballers and sports people honed their talents while training on our soil, people like football international Dennis Oliech and famed female boxer Conjestina Achieng. Mathare has also produced great musicians like Bahati, Willy Paul and Eko Dydda.

But the world does not get to hear about our success stories, knowing only about our struggles and the challenges we go through. When you mention Mathare to a random Kenyan, what comes to their mind is the Mathari Mental Hospital, Kenya’s only national and public psychiatric referral hospital that was established in 1901. Due to its close proximity to Mathare Valley, some people even have the audacity to ask why we live with “mad people”; they believe Mathare is for the mentally challenged and escapees from the hospital. I once tried to explain to a friend in high school that, just like anywhere else, only a few people in Mathare are mentally challenged. But he said, “Yes, every market has its own mad man, but Mathare is a market where all are mad.”  I stopped talking to him. I was very angry and bitter about the picture painted of my home, the place that has nurtured me since I was four.

The stigma of coming from Mathare was so acute that, while in high school, I stopped telling other students where I grew up to avoid ridicule. Any wrong or “weird” answer would be attributed to my so-called upbringing with “mentally challenged people”. Most of them would back their highly opinionated statements with references to the violence witnessed during any general election, where Mathare youths are hired by rogue politicians to die for them on the streets.

Today I am writing the story of Mathare, the untold story that is unknown to many. Not out of anger or bitterness, but as a counter-narrative about the place I call home from a proud insider’s perspective. It is the beautiful story of a former quarry that became an urban bastion against oppression by the colonial government, and by the four regimes we have had in Kenya since independence.

I am writing this piece because only we can tell our story to the outside world. “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” as Comrade Gacheke Gachihi of Mathare Social Justice Centre puts it.

Mathare did not start as a settlement for mental hospital escapees as some claim. Mathare emerged from what had been a stone quarry during the early years of colonial rule in the Pre-World War 1 (WW1) period. Most of the building stones and ballast used in the construction of the Eastleigh and Muthaiga residential areas and the Nairobi Central Business District were extracted from this big quarry. It is only after the First World War, in the early 1920s, that people started settling in Mathare. Some of the early settlers were from the areas around today’s City Park and Muthaiga that were then part of the larger Karura Forest, from where they were evicted by the colonial government. These prime areas were reserved for the white colonial elite and the former inhabitants were rounded up and concentrated in the low-laying areas, leading to the birth of Mathare and the mushrooming of the many slums in Nairobi’s Eastlands area.

The first evictees settled in the lower Pangani area that is separated from Mathari Hospital by River Mathare. This area that is today part of Mlango Kubwa and Lower Pangani was known as Kiamutisya. The different sections of Mathare were named after the headmen or leaders controlling them, like Kiamutisya and Kwa Kariuki. From there, the slum began to spread eastwards to Bondeni, then known as Kiandururu. Other areas such as Gitathuru, Mashimoni and Mathare 4A emerged gradually as the population burgeoned.

Mathare is now one of the most congested slums in Nairobi with over 500,000 residents concentrated in a mere 7.25 square kilometres. It is home to diverse ethnicities from all over the country, from as far away as Turkana in northern Kenya, and to foreign nationals from Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania.

Mathare is 8km from Nairobi CBD. This proximity, and its closeness to Eastleigh to the southwest and Muthaiga and Karura to the West, attracted Kenyans, particularly those from eastern and central Kenya, who came in search of jobs and settled in the area. This rural-urban migration created a cheap labour pool for the upmarket areas occupied by the settlers, as well as for the Asian community that resided in Eastleigh and Pangani. By the late 1920s, Mathare was home to several thousand Africans living in temporary makeshift houses made of wood, mud and other materials and working in the surrounding areas.

As the struggle against colonial rule began, Mathare emerged as the hub of anti-colonial organizing because of its strategic location. It slowly became the urban vanguard against the colonial government. Meetings to strategize how to disrupt the peaceful stay of the settlers in the country were planned in Mathare.

The agitation was amplified by the presence in their midst of radical elements who had fought alongside whites in both world wars. Residents started protesting against the punitive measures imposed on Africans, such as the hut tax, the kipande (identity document) and unfair urban zoning. The British felt threatened by the continued agitation and in 1952, at the start of the State of Emergency which was declared by the then Governor Sir Evelyn Baring, the colonial government razed down many houses in Mathare. Baring was reacting to intelligence that Mathare residents were supporting the Mau Mau, the nationalist movement fighting for Kenya’s independence. This did not deter Mathare residents; it only emboldened them to push further and Mathare continued to be the planning ground for Mau Mau activities.

It is during the active years of the Mau Mau (The Kenya Land and Freedom Army) struggle that Mathare became the crucible of anti-colonial action with the help of people like Pio Gama Pinto, who played a key role in uniting the different factions agitating for independence. Pinto was a Kenyan-born Goan who had studied in both Kenya and in Goa in India. After completing his studies in India, Pinto joined movements against Portuguese rule in Goa, which placed his life in danger and so he fled back to Kenya for his safety. In Kenya, he was the link between trade unions, the Mau Mau, lawyers and others involved in the fight against British rule in Kenya.

Workers from Karura and other areas would steal arms and other supplies from their white employers, which would be gathered and smuggled to the Aberdare and Mt. Kenya forests from where Mau Mau guerrillas were waging their war against the British.

After Kenya gained independence in 1963, the population of Mathare grew exponentially as more people flocked to the city. The first government of Jomo Kenyatta did not undertake any measures to improve the dire living conditions of the people of Mathare. The residents continued to live under the poor conditions that had existed since the colonial period. As the slum expanded, the residents were abandoned to their fate, despite the active and largely undocumented role they had played towards the attainment of Kenya’s independence.

This neglect of the people of Mathare continued under the Moi regime. During his 24 years in power, nothing was done to ensure planning, access to water and other basic services. In 1982, the residents of Mathare bore the brunt of the failed Kenya Air Force coup. The Moi government turned its anger on helpless and defenceless citizens, the majority of whom had no idea what was happening in the country. The military were unleashed on the residents like bloodthirsty dogs and houses were ransacked under the guise of searching for soldiers who had participated in the failed coup and whom it was alleged were being harboured in Mathare. The crackdown that followed in the wake of the failed coup left more than 200 civilians dead, the majority from Mathare, which is just across the road from Moi Air Base, the epicentre of the aborted coup attempt. Bodies were left lying in the streets and hundreds were maimed and injured. The damage was enormous, and the trauma would last peoples’ lifetimes.

The oppression has continued, but has never broken the resilience of the residents of Mathare, forged from a legacy of resistance. The neglect continued unabated under the Kibaki regime, and together with it, oppression from law enforcement agencies. An example that stands out is the infamous crackdown on Mungiki in Kosovo and other parts of Mathare between 6 and 9 June 2007. Those were tension-filled days as officers of the feared General Service Unit unleashed violence, rounded up citizens and demolished tens of shacks. The crackdown came after two police officers were killed and their guns stolen on the night of 4 June 2007. It was a terrible time to be a young man in the valley. Wearing dreadlocks only made things worse as they would use that to profile members of the banned Mungiki Sect. Young men were rounded up, made to lie on the streets, beaten and then forced to wade in the filthy and murky Mathare River in search of the arms that were supposedly dumped there. As though the demolitions and brutality meted on them was not enough, the police then executed more than 30 young men, some in broad daylight. The executions were carried out under the orders of the former Minister of Interior Security John Michuki and the former Inspector General of Police Gen. Muhammed Ali. 

One day during that terrible week, shortly after our mid-morning break, the sound of gunshots reverberated around us. The police were firing tear gas grenades and our school was soon engulfed in smoke. With no water available, we washed our faces with the porridge in our mugs and as panic spread, some of my class six classmates tore through the iron sheets and scampered to the safety of their homes.

It is during this time that I witnessed a scene that has never left my mind. It is still as vivid as though it happened yesterday. A man was lying face down on the ground with some officers poking his back with their bayonets, those sharp knives fixed to the muzzles of their guns. The man was crying and pleading with the police and after a few minutes, gunshots rung through the air scattering the crowd that was watching from afar. I went back to the scene late in the afternoon and what I found was only blood-soaked soil. I have lived with that memory my whole life.

That same afternoon, I saw the Inspector General of Police criss-crossing the alleys and open trenches in the valley. It was very unusual to find a high-ranking government official in the deepest parts of Mathare. He was escorted by a contingent of heavily armed officers. Even at my young age, I knew that the next few days were going to be hell, and they were. The people of Mathare endured nights of violence at the hands of state agents and more people died. My two cousins, who had come to the city in search of jobs after finishing high school, had to be sneaked out before the door-to-door search that started with the start of the dusk to dawn curfew that had been imposed. The operation left more than 30 people dead, hundreds injured, demolished shanties, displaced people, and trauma. This kind of reaction by so-called law enforcers has also been witnessed during election times, where police officers act without regard for the sanctity and dignity of human life.

Uhuru Kenyatta’s Jubilee government has exacerbated the already precarious situation in Mathare. As poor youth, we have been criminalised by the same system that oppressed our grandfathers and our fathers. Young men spotting dreadlocks like those worn by Kenya’s freedom fighters are targeted for arbitrary arrest, extortion, killings and, as is the trend nowadays, enforced disappearances. According to Missing Voices, an organization that documents cases of arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings, 105 people were killed or disappeared by police between January and July 2021. The majority of these killings and disappearances occurred in the low income neighbourhoods of Nairobi such as Mathare. It is quite common for a youth to be framed and accused of being in possession of marijuana – it is planted in their pockets during arrest – and end up disappearing at the hands of the police, only for their lifeless bodies to be found in the city morgue or dumped somewhere else.

I see the youth being terrorized every day in this valley. I have also been a victim of arbitrary arrest several times by the same officers who swore to protect us and uphold the constitution. I have lost classmates and friends to police bullets; the trend of extra-judicial executions continues unabated.

It is this injustice that led me to join the Ruaraka Social Justice Centre immediately after graduating from college instead of looking for an internship or finding a job.

A systematic approach is needed to deal with this systematic oppression of generations of Kenyans, first by the colonial government and the African Home Guards, and by their allies in the four post-independence regimes. One of the founders of the Mathare Social Justice Centre, Gacheke Gachihi saw this need and collaboratively established this community justice centre in the heart of Mathare, on the same grounds where the anti-colonial struggle was planned. As a visionary leader, Gachihi saw the need to form a network of social justice centres in the country that would coalesce around issues of social justice. The reactionary approach of one-day demonstrations has been replaced with a systematic approach: that of organizing the community, educating it and allowing the same community to liberate itself from the shackles of exploitation and oppression. Through this community organizing, of which I have been a part since 2019, the residents of Mathare are now cognizant of the power of a united people with a common goal.

With my pen and paper, I shall live to protect Mathare and its rich history and heritage that derives from the critical role it has played in organizing the masses and as a revolutionary bulwark against oppression in the colonial era and during successive regimes. The onus is now on my generation not to betray the struggle but to bring it to fruition.

Mathare is now home to various progressive groups such as the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA), Mathare Roots, Mathare Green Movement and the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC), the mother centre of the social justice centres movement in Kenya. Mathare is once again leading the struggle against oppression and it continues to play this role faithfully. The blood of our freedom fighters that was shed on our soil will continue to water the seeds of our freedom. Every time I walk along Mau Mau Road, from Mabatini to Mlango Kubwa in Mathare, I walk with my head held high knowing that I am walking on fertile ground, the home of past, current and future revolutionaries. The name Mathare is no longer a source of shame for me but a beacon of hope for the future for I now know that it means resilience. From Mathare to the world, the social justice movement is born. May the sacred torch of freedom fighters never dim but light the way to a socially just nation.

Appreciation

This article would not have been complete without contributions from Comrade Kimani Antony of Kiamaiko Community Social Justice Centre, Comrade Samuel Kiriro of Ghetto Foundation, Mr Zaangi of Muungano wa Wanavijiji and Comrade Gacheke Gachihi of Mathare Social Justice Centre

Stadhouderskade is a teeming thoroughfare in the heart of Amsterdam, part of the city centre ring connecting Amsterdam-West to Amsterdam-South. It begins at a bridge over the Amstel river, snakes for two kilometres alongside a series of canals, running past the historic Vondelpark, Leidseplein, the Amsterdam Marriott and several national monuments like the iconic Rijksmuseum.

It was one of the first streets I became acquainted with when I moved from Nairobi to Amsterdam two years ago. At the intersection of Stadhouderskade and Ferdinand Bolstraat street, situated between the distinct Heineken Brewery and a small sex club called Tour De Boton, sits a nondescript barber and board store with a cool name.

Shortcut & Hardwear 

It is a small lifestyle shop that sells snowboarding gear and urban street wear. Inside, past the racks of clothes and merchandise, at the back of the shop, hidden from street view, is a single barber chair facing a full-length mirror. One side of the mirror is dominated by a charity poster advertising a relief effort in India. On the other, hangs a large and colourful snowboard with the image of Chairman Mao staring back.

This is my barber shop and my barber, a middle aged man named Brian, is an institution on this street. He has been in the same location for 30 years and has the laidback demeanour of a man who has cultivated an unhurried life. It is the vibe you stumble onto when you escape the chilly autumn streets into the cozy interior of the barber shop. There is always some music with a deep bassline playing. Typically, you will meet his friends who drop by to say “Hola’’, a collective of Spanish-speaking South American brothers who greet you with the warmth of people who grew up in the sun.

For Africans abroad, a barber who knows how to handle black hair is a lifeline.

Brian draws his heritage from African, Chinese and Indonesian ancestry. He is Dutch but his roots are in Suriname, a nation four times the size of the colonial master’s homeland that was once part of the Dutch colonial empire. Before I arrived in the Netherlands, I could not place Suriname on the South American map, sandwiched as it is between Guyana, French Guiana and Brazil; nowadays, it is the Surinamese cultural footprints that guide me through Amsterdam’s foreignness.

Shortcut & Hardwear has grown to be more than a barber shop. It is a black space where I find anchor as I explore Amsterdam through a network of spaces that evoke feelings of “home’’.

I am a Kenyan writer, a former newspaper columnist who moved residence from Nairobi to Amsterdam. I am the father of two young children, one of whom is a pandemic baby. They might speak Dutch as their first language and never master Kiswahili. I am living in the post-Covid-19 reality in a transformed, physically distant city of QR codes, PCR tests, vaccination certificates thrown in the face of anti-vaxxer protests, and the daily drumming of xenophobia and nationalism on social media.

The coronavirus has had an effect on this city. I once knew a freer Amsterdam, the epitome of personal liberty where tourists smoked joints in front of the police and public sex did not even raise eyebrows. I have watched it transform into a 1.5 metres society, marked by glass barriers in public spaces and where citizens hoard toilet paper in a gut response to an existential crisis.

Much like Stadhouderskade where construction works are ongoing, Amsterdam is undergoing rapid social transformation and I struggle to make sense of this new world I find myself in. The city is in the midst of a radical shift to overhaul its infrastructure in the wake of climate change while its cultural foundations, which were once thought to be entrenched and secured, are challenged by vocal minorities. On Twitter, behind the facade of a city on the shores of the North Sea moving to the rhythm of its bicycles, trams, and boats, I catch a glimpse of a city now confronted by the anti-islamic and anti-immigration rhetoric of Dutch politician Geert Wilder, the notoriety of Thierry Baudet, known for his anti-COVID restrictions and anti-Europe sentiments, and the audacity of Sylvana Simons, the founder of the anti-racist political party BIJ1.

The Dutch Puzzle is the title of a book written by Duke de Beana from a Spanish ambassador’s viewpoint and published in the 70s. Decades on, I have also found a low country of paradoxes, perhaps best illustrated by the coffeeshop located across the road from a church building. I may have been primed for the much-touted Dutch tourist attractions, its Red Light District and its coffeeshops, but one quickly becomes blasé after the initial culture shock.

Netherlands, a culturally liberal society and the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriages, is also a place that celebrates a Christmas tradition where the Dutch Santa in white appears on a boat trailed by his black-faced sidekick, Zwarte Piet, to the delight of the kids. This supposedly benign cultural festival in a country with a gory slave trading past, is vehemently defended as a Dutch thing that outsiders could never understand.

Europe is a place where privacy is a right. Sierra Leonean columnist Babah Tarawally said it is where you learn to become an individual first. I feel it the most on the metro, during rush hour in a train full of individuals where eye contact is deliberately avoided and aloofness is the norm. Navigating Amsterdam as an African man has been confusing. For a long time I was the eager new arrival who tried to acknowledge every black brother on the street with a solidarity nod and wondered why some of my black brothers did not respond to my spirit of ubuntu.

What did I really see other than pigmentation?

I did not have the foggiest clue about the vast representation of Global Africa on the streets of Amsterdam and despite my bred-in African credentials, I was learning to see my blackness anew.

Your black worldview changes when you begin to notice resonance with the diversity of people of African heritage congregating in the Netherlands. I have met men from the Caribbean islands of St Vincent, Aruba and Curaçao who reminded me of family members in Kenya. I have struck instant rapport with an Ethiopian Uber driver, a Jamaican clothing store attendant, a Ghanaian delivery man, a Congolese-Dutch columnist who spoke Kiswahilli, an African American poet from Charleston, a Guyanese who spent his youth in Uganda under Idi Amin, and a Tanzanian sister at a lifestyle store who exclaimed in excitement, “Jirani!” “My neighbour!”, when she discovered that I hailed from Kenya.

Not a single one gushed about a wildlife safari or a golden sunset over the Maasai Mara.

I recently spoke to an African man whom I had seen selling newspapers outside supermarkets around the Amstelveen suburb. He said he was from Biafra, not Nigeria, and as soon as I told him I was from Kenya, he complained bitterly about the betrayal of Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra who was abducted in Kenya and deported to Nigeria.

“Why are you Kenyans not behaving like Africans?”

I knew the context of the word behave, a rebuke to post-colonial Africans living in Europe who are prone to forgetting the struggles of family left behind in the motherland. Yet, if you stay in a place long enough, it changes you. A Moroccan taxi driver told me as much, about the lure of the Dutch lifestyle and how difficult it is to let go of the comfortable life.

“It’s hard to leave. The system works, you can make progress and invest back home. Then the women join you and you start to make babies, now they are Dutch and they grow up to be told to go back home by the racists because they are not Dutch enough and when they arrive home, they are reminded they are no longer Moroccan, they have become Dutch”. 

**********

I am 15 minutes early for my monthly haircut. Brian is busy cutting a client’s hair. Burna Boy is the musical mood of the moment.  From the window, I watch the traffic zoom past on Stadhouderskade, processing a new set of city sounds. Clanky bicycles on cobblestones, trams squealing on the rails to a slow stop, and the recurring siren of a speeding ambulance. The streets are covered in leaf fall, the trees are naked, a sure sign that winter is coming.

The Netherlands is a flat country with no natural barrier against the assault of the North Sea winds that sweep across unrestrained. On my weather app, I pay attention to the codename Orange warning of unusual coastal activity. I used to complain about the weather to friends back home in Nairobi until I had an encounter at the Irish pub on Leidseplein whilst taking shelter after getting caught wrongly dressed in the icy cold rain. I wouldn’t stop whining about the duplicitous Dutch summer, causing a lean, sinewy stranger in workman clothes to blurt out,

“You are not made of cotton candy and sugar. It’s just water!”

Fair point.

Now I have accepted that the weather is shit and I am learning to be a weathered rock of all seasons.

My turn arrives and I take a seat on the barber chair. Normally a man of few words, Brian is in a chatty mood today. He complains about the construction work on his street, and how bad it is for business, and then we talk about football. The Dutch did not have an impressive UEFA Cup run last season and I ask what happened to the spirit of the flying Dutchmen of my youth, the magical trio of Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard and Marco Van Bansten.  To which he answers,

“Gullit was here.’’

“Where?’’

“On this chair, in the morning, he came for a haircut before a TV appearance in Qatar . . . he is a busy guy. . . .”

He tells me about the Dutch football legend, a childhood friend he played ball with on the streets of Amsterdam Old West. Gullit no longer spots dreadlocks and has morphed into a celebrated TV sports commentator.

“He is a funny guy, he was complaining about relatives back in Suriname, always finding a way to ask for money’’. 

What were the chances, I wondered, that I would share a barber with Ruud Gullit, the foremost disciple and master of the Dutch brand of total football, the international superstar from the Netherlands that I admired as a teenager.

Dunia ni duara. The world is round.