I got my first staff job in the second half of the 1980s, around the same time that the movie Out of Africa played in Dublin cinemas. There’s a scene in the movie where the characters played by Meryl Streep and Robert Redford fly over the Rift Valley in a Gypsy Moth biplane. Wow, I thought, what a beautiful place.
My new job included the luxury of paid holidays, and when the summer came, I booked a flight to Kenya.
In Nairobi I stayed in a cheap guest house on River Road. To say that it was a rough part of the city is an understatement. There was an all-night bar near the guest house called the Modern Green, and it was far and away the seediest bar I have ever frequented. The counter staff were protected from their customers by the kind of ironwork you see protecting bank tellers in cowboy movies.
There were circular openings in the ironwork through which unopened bottles of beer could be handed out horizontally, bottoms first, once you’d paid for them.
A few impressively muscular men leaned against the walls of the small room that was the bar, holding large wooden truncheons for use on any customer who started to cause trouble. They also had bottle-openers.
There was a jukebox, that played mostly African music but also Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier. The male customers were often tough-looking characters, or asleep, or both, and I don’t recall ever getting into conversation with any of them. The women wore lovely summer frocks and were more than willing to pass the time chatting if you bought them beer and shared your cigarettes.
There was a yard out the back where the only illumination at night came from a charcoal fire, over which skewers of meat were grilled and offered for sale.
The lack of illumination was probably, on balance, a blessing when it came to using the loos.
I think the barely-lit yard may also have been where the women took their customers.
Two or three years later I got a place on the Journalism in Europe programme in Paris, where a Kenyan journalist called Ogula, since deceased, became a pal of mine. He was pretty surprised to hear I’d been to the Modern Green, which he knew of by reputation, but had certainly never visited.
One of the ideas of the now-defunct programme was that former participants would help current participants when they were travelling around Europe researching stories. After I returned to Dublin, a Kenyan journalist, whose name if memory serves was Patricia, came to Dublin and I put her up in the apartment I shared at the time with two friends, on the top floor of a Georgian building on Ormond Quay.
This was the early 1990s, when Dublin’s population was approximately 100 per cent white. On the Monday, on a bus to Cherry Orchard, Patricia told me she didn’t think it was okay that people stared at her, even if seeing a black person was a rare event.
We were on our way out to the suburb because there had been an outbreak of rioting there over the weekend, and she wanted to write about that. She spoke with some community workers in the local health centre, who told her about youth unemployment, the widespread feeling that people from the community were discriminated against when it came to employment opportunities, and the attitude of the local youths towards authority.
Afterwards, we approached a group of young men who were standing near our bus stop.
Patricia explained what it was she was doing, and the young men ably explained why it was they felt so aggrieved with Irish society. One youngster stood slightly apart, not offering any views, just frowning and staring at Patricia. Eventually he spoke.
“You probably think, coming from Africa, what have we got to complain about?” he said, or words to that effect.
We were standing outside two-storey houses, with front and back gardens, on a concrete pavement with patches of lawn and a few spindly trees, a wide green behind us on the far side of which was the health centre.
I have a very clear memory of Patricia’s response: “People from my country would swim across the ocean to live in a place like this.”
The young man looked at her respectfully, letting her comment have the room it deserved.
Then he said: “Yeah. But it’s all relative.”