East Africa in 1988

Here I am in 1988, sitting down with my home-stay sister and her cousins.

Lillian (in a white dress) liked to have visits from her friends and cousins, and she loved to dance and listen to music. She was fascinated with Italian culture, and had dreams of someday visiting Italy.

Lillian turned 19 while I was living with the Wambuas in Kibera. She had this cake for her 19th birthday, and she was very happy to celebrate her life.

I like this photograph of Lillian dancing. This is how I like to remember her.

The young people in the Wambua household. Lillian and her younger brother Wilson were my homestay sister and brother. Culturally, they were urban Kenyans with Kamba ethnic background, but they often had students stay with them, and their mom, Grace worked for a Norwegian company, so they were very cosmopolitan.

Sometimes it was hard growing up in Kibera, and Grace was a single mother, so that made things more difficult, but Lillian and Wilson's mom had a strong character and spirit, and she clearly loved her children. I remember that the children's father came to visit sometimes, and he was a journalist with a major Nairobi newspaper, so he encouraged his children (who were quite bright, I thought) to study hard and make the most of their educations.

My homestay family in Nairobi loved to laugh, and although I saw them go through all sorts of experiences (high fevers, tears and sadness, anger, joy, excitement, fear, hope, and so forth) one thing I'll always remember is how often they found humor in life, and how eagerly they laughed at themselves and the world with all its absurdities.

This is my homestay brother, Wilson, and for the several weeks (over a month) that I lived in Kibera with the Wambua family, Wilson was my roommate. He was enthusiastic about playing ball, and he was very curious, very inquisitive. I remember him having lots of optimism, and he was so easily excited by thoughts of doing something fun. We have kept in touch with Facebook, and I'm glad that as an adult he seems to be just as charismatic as he was when he was a young boy.

We're all dancing in the Wambua home in this photograph. I didn't take the photograph, as I'm actually in it (you must click on the image to see the larger version, and you can just see a small part of me on the left). My impression in 1988 was that Kenyans of all ages in all areas of the country seemed to especially love to dance.

These neighborhood boys liked to hang around the Wambua home and play with Wilson. They were eager to have me take their photograph when I was taking a picture of the Wambua home, where I stayed for much of my time while in Kenya.

I stayed with the Wambua family in Kibera. In 1988, there were some cinderblock and concrete structures in Kibera, but most of the people living in Kibera had informal housing made of scrap lumber, cardboard, tin sheets, mud adobe, and various other building materials. Kibera did have schools, and this was a day nursery school near the Wambua home.

This building was near the Kibera bus stop; it is the size of an outhouse, but it is acttually a plumber's shop. The sign invites us to "Uliza Fundi wa maji hapa" [ask the plumber here]. Part of the School for International Training's program was for the students like me to take very intensive Swahili language training in the first few weeks. By the middle of the semester all of us were up to intermediate ability in spoken Swahili. It's such a pity I haven't had a chance to practice. Aside from the eight genders ("noun classes") Swahili is fairly easy to learn, and there are many words in the vocabulary loaned in from Arabic and English.

This is a street in the informal housing sector area of Kibera. As there are no utility services to the tiny houses and shops in this area, water, electricity, and sewage were all problems for people who lived here. The odors from that wet area in the middle of the street were appalling.

This is a street in the informal housing sector area of Kibera. As there are no utility services to the tiny houses and shops in this area, water, electricity, and sewage were all problems for people who lived here. The odors from that wet area in the middle of the street were appalling.

In 1988 when I lived in Nairobi (mostly with the Wambua household in Kibera), the two largest slums (informal housing districts) were Kibera and Mathare Valley. This is a view of some housing in Mathare Valley. Mathare Valley and Kibera were densely populated, and in the daytime I walked around in those areas (to visit people or walk to the University of Nairobi for my classes) without any fear; but as the sun got low in the sky, it was very important to get indoors, because after dark groups of thieves roamed the streets, and it was not safe to be outside.

This young child was drinking milk from this bottle, and then shared the bottle with the young goat. A generous little one.

Looking at the informal housing, with the problems of garbage and sewage and so forth so obvious, you might wonder about conditions in those homes. I had friends who lived in such informal housing arrangements in Kibera and Mathare Valley and so forth, and so I visited people. This friendly young man (a Baha'i friend) was extremely kind and friendly, and I enjoyed his company on several occasions. Here he stands by his bed and table in his small home.

A still-life in which you can see the curtains, desk, chair, desk lamp, closet, clothing, and the foot of my bed. This was in the YMCA, where we lived for the first couple weeks of our stay in Kenya, while we were doing our intensive Swahili training. This was in YMCA Central, on State House Road.

This is a photo taken looking outside the window of a van as we passed a village near Eldoret on the way from Nakuru to Kitale. I thought it a fairly typical Kenyan village of the southern Rift Valley Province highlands (the plateau here is about 2000 meters / 6560 feet above sea level).

We had two wildlife safari during the semester in East Africa; the first one was fairly early in the semester, and we went to Nakuru (later we also went to Amboseli). This is the Nakuru lodge where we stayed. I was impressed by that massive jade plant growing in front of the building. I remember that the bathrooms were apart from the rooms where we slept, and one had to go outdoors to get from one to the other, and at night the stars were blazing bright, but I had to shine a flashlight around to scare away any warthogs or leopards or whatever might be lurking about.

I understand that decades ago, at Yellowstone National Park there was a dump, and people would sit in bleachers to watch bears come to the dump to pick through the garbage. In 1988 in Nakuru National Park it was baboons that came to pick over the garbage, and here they are doing just that.

Kenya's first president was Jomo Kenyatta, and he had many lodges placed in scenic spots around the country. This was his lodge at Lake Nakuru, which was just a structural shell without doors or windows when we saw it in 1988; a sad and picturesque ruin.

Here you can see a couple younger waterbucks on the slopes below the monkey cliffs; in the larger image a third waterbook is also visible. We saw many waterbuck and impala in Nakuru National Park.

Many animals could be seen in the bushes and trees near the high water marks of Lake Nakuru. The Lake seems to grow and shrink as its level rises and falls, and there is a vast empty area along its shores of exposed lakebed when the lake is not high. In this image I think we have a female waterbuck on the left and a baboon sitting on a fallen tree on the right.

Here are some big impala (or light colored waterbuck?) grazing on the slope below Baboon Cliff on the west side of Nakuru National Park.

There were hippos and flamingos in Lake Nakuru, but it was not easy to get close to them, because we visited during a time of year when the lake was low, and so there was a lot of exposed muddy lakebed between where we could go and where those animals were.

Looking down over Lake Nakuru from the hill to the west of the lake, probably not far from the Out of Africa Picnic Site.

Here is a photograph of Eric Hadley-Ives as a 20-year-old college student in Lake Nakuru National Park, in September of 1988.

This shows the forest and open area on the southwestern side of Lake Nakuru in 1988. Nakuru is sort of island of nature and wildlife, as there are many farms and villages to the west and north of the national park.

Looking east in the morning near Lake Nakuru, the gazelle and antelope are silhouetted by the sun rising behind them.

These vervet monkeys were plentiful along the roads. They were bold, and would jump into our vehicles through open windows to rummage around and look for snacks.

The central Rift Valley lies far down below the western highlands. For example, Nyaru (on B53, on rim of the escarpment) sits at over 2700 meters elevation, while the Kimwarer community down in the Kerio Valley below is at around 1300 meters elevation, a 1400 meter difference. In October the elevation difference is accentuated by the color difference, as it's drier and less green at the bottom of the Kerio Valley compared to the lush highlands of Uasin Gishu County.

Before going up to Lodwar, we visited Kigale and Mount Elgon. In the Mount Elgon National Park we saw Kitum cave (behind the waterfall in this photo). The cave is famous because animals (especially elephants) go into it to mine salt, and also because Marburg virus was contracted by people who went here (there are bats in the cave). On the cave walls not far from the entrance we noticed cave paintings or petroglyphs with spiral whorls, resembling the spirals or an Irish Triskelion or, even more, the patterns of a fingerprint. I cannot find any mention of this cave art in any articles about Kitum Cave. The photo I took of the cave art was blurry, dark, and not worth keeping.

the photographs I took inside the cave were dark and blurry, so all I have from Kitum Cave are these photographs of the approach, with the waterfall. That waterfall can be much larger in the rainy season, and it often does not flow at all in the dry season. There were no elephants in the cave when we entered, but we saw elephant spoor everywhere.

Back in 1988 the road up to Lodwar was not as good as it seems to be now. We stopped at the Turkwel River (just downriver from where the Turkwel Gorge Hydro Power Plant now stands at the Turkwel Gorge Reservoir). There was evidence of construction all around, as the dam was being constructed at the time. The rocks in this shut-ins formation were fun to climb on.

Paul Brill went out on the rocks on the Turkwel when we stopped along the route to Lodwar.

Steve Dreher also took a turn climbing on the rocks in the Turkwel.

While driving up to Lodwar, we stopped near this massive ficus tree. Most of the countryside was try, with little scrubby acacia trees, so this massive tree (and all its inviting shade) presented an attractive scene.

While in Lodwar we visited KMTC Lodwar and climbed the hill overlooking the Lodwar airport runway (Lodwar High School is on that hill). Geoffrey Howe (1926-2015) came to visit Lodwar while we were there, so we went to meet him and his staff. He was then the British Foreign Secretary (he was soon thereafter promoted to Deputy Prime Minister), but he was in Kenya for his work, and wanted to see old friends in Lodwar, where he had been stationed while in the Signal Corps (he was second-in-command of a group of 100 soldiers for about a year-and-a-half in the late 1940s). The plane in this photograph is the one Howe was in when he arrived and left (he was only in Lodwar for a few hours).

With Geoffrey Howe, we only got to shake his hand and say hello, but we had a rather long conversation (about ten minutes or perhaps more) with his gentleman, who was Howe's aide of some kind. I recall he made some quip about Americans in refernce to the American Revolution, and I've often thought of that when I studied my genealogy because, yes, I do have a couple direct ancestors who served in the army of the Continental Congress, but in the same generations (7-8 generations before me) I had more ancestors living in England, Sweden, Norway, Westphalia, and Ireland than those living in Vermont, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.

One evening while in Lodwar we climbed up the hill behind the polytechnic school and watched the sunset. Lodwar and Lake Turkana sit in a desert area, although the lands off to the north, west, and south get more rainfall and have savannah or forests, but Lodwar is in a scrubby desert, and you can see great distances through the dry air. Below the stars we noticed heat lightening, silently lighting up the sky in the distance. The Turkana people were having some traditional dances, so the music of their festivities came up to us on the wind from the town below.

Here is Eric on some large rocks near the summit of Polytechnic Hill with some of the structures of Lodwar behind him below the hill.

These mysterious standing stones may have been shaped and placed here around 3000-2400 BC, when the first livestock herding appeared in an area that had previously been used for hunting, fishing, and gathering. In 2013 some researchers from Stony Brook University excavated to determine more about who placed these pillars and why. Papers published since then by E. A. Hildebrand and colleagues suggest that these monumental sites around Lake Turkana show us that nomadic pastoralists with almost no evidence of social hierarchies were living in societies with enough complexity and organization to construct monumental burial sites.

These are the Pillars of Truth at Kalokol. Our driver speculated (or perhaps he was repeating something someone had told him) that these pillars were persons who had been turned to stone; possibly they were pilgrims on the way to Mecca. Dr. Lisa Hildebrand has worked with teams to excavate these sites (Kalokol Pillars of Truth are just one of several such sites), and found that at least some are burial places.

Africa is a vast continent, and to get anywhere by road, you must drive through miles and miles of countryside. This is some of the landscape north of Lake Baringo.

This is the creek flowing out of the ravine at Kositei Mission.

Yellow butterflies taking minerals from mud and burned wood.

A Pokot girl and her younger sister or cousin stop to check on our work.

This Pokot livestock manager had quite a large herd he was bringing to the retention pond for drinks.

I hiked up to the top of the gorge to look down on the stream that flowed out of the rugged hills out to the plain where the mission station was, and saw this fantastic old snag of a tree. This is typical vegetation around the Kositei Mission where we stayed. Many of the plants have nasty thorns, but one cannot help admiring their tenacity in surving and thriving in the dry, hot climate.

From up above the gorge it was fun to look down into it. I remember that shortly after this photograph I was stung by the largest wasp I've ever seen in my life. It hurt for several hours. I remember being startled that it would attack me, because I had not done anything (so far as I knew) to annoy it.

From the hills above the Catholic mission station (Kositei Mission) where we stayed with some Irish priests (Holy Ghost Fathers), this was the view out over the land of the Pokot People, the pastoralists we were trying to assist with a service learning project (building banks and dams to create water retention ponds so some of that water coming out of the creek in the gorge would linger later into the dry season for the Pokot people's livestock).

After our week of service learning with the Pokot, we went to Kisumu to meet the rest of the class (who had done their service learning in Kisumu), but at some point I remember we went to Kabarnet, a town at a high elevation that seemed lush and attractive compared to the area of Baringo District where we had been. This is a view looking east toward the Morop Hills to the east of Kabarnet.

We had a very short stay in Kisumu. I only caught a brief glance at Lake Victoria. We did enjoy a visit to the Kisumu museum, where this amazing example of taxidermy was featured, showing a lion attacking a gnu (or wildebeest).

The national museum in Kisumu had a display of traditional architecture, and within the homes were displays of traditional pottery and carpentry. In this place, we also saw some hens resting beside the pots in the dark and relatively cool interior.

The Kenya museum in Kisumu had some wildlife on display, including this cute Leopard Tortoise (Geochelone paradalis).

This was the Flamingo Casino in Kisumu. I thought it was an amusing contrast to the casinos of Nevada. It seemed to me that back then (in 1988) there was a sort of emphasis on casinos and discotheques as recreational venues for the rising middle class, which I considered a pity at the time.

This advertisement in the Kisumu train station seemed odd to us, with its reassurance that cement is available, and a list of sources for cement.

We took the Lunatic Express (the train) from Kisumu to Mombasa. It was an overnight train. In this image you can see me looking out the windows as we made our way across the Kenyan countryside outside of Kisumu.

The train departed Kisumu late in the afternoon, so the light was just right for looking out the windows as we made our way to Nairobi and Mombasa.

Here is a view out the window of the train as it travelled out of Kisumu and toward Nairobi and Mombasa.

Our hotel in Mombasa was along Moi Avenue (the main street), and in this image from a hotel room window you can look down Moi Avenue to the Pembe Za Ndovu giant aluminum elephant tusks. I think maybe we stayed at Rahemtulla Mansion near the intersection of Kwa Shibu Road and Moi Avenue.

Mombasa has many of these old Swahili Coast houses with traditional architecture influenced by the Arabs who settled this coast coming down from Oman. There were also many telephone wires and power lines, as you can see well here.

This is the Badala Mosque in Old Town Mombasa. This was built by a congregation of Indian Sunni Muslims (following the Hanafite school of Islam). The mosque dates to 1910, but was enlarged and remodeled in the 1950s.

In Mombassa I was interested in the colored glass on the second floor windows at the Sidiq Cafe.

Mombassa has been an important port for centuries, and it is right on the Indian Ocean. This is the mouth of Mombassa Harbor (I think).

Mombassa was an important East African port in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it still is, for that matter. Vasco da Gama visited in 1498, and from 1528 until 1698 the city was frequently ruled directly or indirectly by the Portuguese, although sometimes during that period they were defeated and pushed out, only to return later. The Portuguese had this fortress (Fort Jesus) constructed between 1593 and 1596.

Although Fort Jesus dates back to the late 1590s, it was probably updated and repaired many times, having been used as a fortress until the British took Kenya in the late 19th century and turned it into a prison. The fortress therefore has some Portuguese, Omani, and British architectural elements. Some parts of the fortress complex are well preserved, and as you see in this photograph, some elements are in ruins.

We had a chance to swim in the Indian Ocean and hang out on the coast while we were in Mombassa, but in 1988 the beaches were so unsafe we could only go out to them in groups of several students together at at a time, and we could not be on the beaches after dark. I understand it is less dangerous now. I cannot remember whether we stayed near Diani Beach or up north near Kikambala.

I happen to love beaches and swimming in the ocean, and I especially love to use a snorkel in the sea. Here I am at the beach (I'm looking away from the camera, so you see the back of my head. )

Another thing we did during the semester in Kenya was to visit Tanzania for about a week. We went to the southern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, visited Arusha, stopped to visit some Masaai people on the Tanzanian side of the border (Masaii live in northern Tanzania and southern Kenya), and when we got back to Kenya, we went to the Amboseli Park. This is a view of Kilimanjaro.

Rather late in the day as we were driving on A23 between Voi and Taveta we saw a rainbow off in the distance.

We had some views of Mt. Kilimanjaro, and we even stayed in a place up on the slopes (I think maybe near Marangu Teachers College), and visited a waterfall (Kilasiya or Ndoro or Marangu, there are many waterfalls on Kilimanjaro's slopes). This is the view of the mountains and Kilimanjaro from near Arusha, but of course Kilimanjaro is obscured by clouds.

I especially like to meet people and learn about life among local residents when I visit someplace, and I think the Kenyans and Tanzanians were among the friendliest people I have ever enountered (Taiwanese and American Midwesterners are also very friendly). In Nairobi the friendliness almost always came with people wanting something from us, but in rural Kenya and everywhere we went in Tanzania, people were pure-hearted and gracious, manifesting good-will and curiosity to match our own.

These Tanzanian children were having a great time chatting with us and laughing and generally enjoying life. They had fun posing for photographs.

The phograph accurately captures the mood of the children, as I remember it. This was in a higher elevation rural area on the lower slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro, but it was a place that was not so highly visited by foreign tourists.

This young lad and his sister were the children of the housekeeper or cook in a place where we stayed on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. He was born on Christmas, so his name was Noeli.

I thought this tree looked rather attractive in the early morning, and that is Mount Kilimanjaro behind it.

Here is a waterfall on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. I cannot remember which one (maybe Kilasiya, Ndoro, or Marangu).

This is a closer view of the waterfall. That is Paul Brill up on the top looking down.

We learned about agriculture during our time in Kenya and Tanzania. We visited these rice fields, for example, while in Tanzania.

I liked this one tree standing by itself in the rice fields.

It seems these ladies were planting rice.

This may have been the soldier statue in Bondeni Park, in Arusha, Tanzania, which served as a memorial and monument for the Tanzanian soldiers who helped put an end to the rule of dictator Idi Amin in Uganda in the Vita vya Kagera (the Kagera War of 1978-79). I understand that it was removed in 2006. The Tanzanians and their Ugandan allies faced the Ugandan army (the part of it that remained loyal to Idi Amin) as well as soldiers from Libya and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

This mountain is Longido, a national park in Tanzania. The village at the base of it on the road between Arusha and the Kenya border is Kiserian, and it is a collection of small villages or homesteads and ranches inhabited by Masaai people.

Our driver (who took us through Tanzania) came with us to visit the Kiserian village, and told us that this woman was his mother. I had not realized that our driver was a Masaai.

Back in Kenya, we had a couple days in Amboseli National Park, were we saw wildlife such as these zebra.

The land is very flat around Mt. Kilimanjaro, which helps the mountain impress all onlookers with its massive height, as it is almost 5,900 meters high.

This hyena left bones outside its den.

Cape Buffalo are large, strong, and potentially aggressive. Nothing much messes with them.

The Cape Buffalo were wary of us a we approached in our vehicles.

When you go on a wildlife safari in Kenya or Tanzania, it's not all about seeing large animals, sometimes the smaller ones are fun to watch. This Egyptian goose (Alopochen aegyptiaca) and her goslings going toward a pond in Amboseli Park were cute and charming.

This impala buck was out on his own in Amboseli.

These elephants were marching along the flat plains of Amboseli.

Elephants position themselves to defend the little calf while the larger ones look at us to see what we are doing.

At one point in Amboseli, we parked our vehicle and just waited, and a few elephants came right up within a few meters of where we were sitting, which was very exciting for us.

This is probably one of my favorite photographs from the entire semester in Africa; a baby elephant calf with the mom (or perhaps and aunt or elder sister, I can't tell).

Central Park and Uhuru Park spread out between downtown Nairobi and Upper Hill, and people walking into the city along Ngong Road from places to the west (such as Kilimani, Kibera, and Maziwa) can stop and get a snack in the parks. Here a guy with a pushcart sells snacks and Fanta drinks.

In Central Park, near the traffic circle for the Uhuru Highway and Kenyatta Avenue, stands the Nyayo Monument, pictured above when it was fairly new (it was constructed in 1988, the same year I was there and took this photograph). President Daniel Toroitich arap Moi had this monument built, and it's fairly restrained and doesn't show much megolomania.

As dicators go, Moi wasn't among the worst, and I would compare him to Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew or Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev (I intend this as a fair comparison, not any sort of compliment). Here on this detail of the Nyayo ("footsteps") monument (footsteps because Moi said he would follow in the footsteps of the first president, Jomo Kenyatta) you see an idealized Kenyan family with the father playing with the daughter and the son holding evidence that he is studious.

The Peace, Love, and Unity monument in Uhuru Park is another of Daniel Arap Moi's monuments; this one in Uhuru Park. As you can see in this photograph, it was a popular place to hang out on nice days (most days in Nairobi are nice).

We took some classes with professors from the University of Nairobi, and so we had to go to Kijabe street to purchase books, notebooks, and pens. This was (and I think still is) the main street for bookshops in Nairobi.

The urban environment in Kenya (in 1988) was often beautified by flowers and shrubs and trees, but I was not impressed with the architecture; at least not in general. This little fountain, however, I thought was delightful, with the highly stylized antelopes under a fountain of water.