Sitting, Waiting, Wishing

NAIROBI, Kenya—It is my third visit in as many summers to sub-Saharan Africa. I now realize being even slightly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed was foolish. My first day here, waking to the dawn, having a quick tea, sharpening pencils, readying my digital camera, powering up my laptop—doing all those things one must do in readiness for an archive filled with glorious, old, virginal glimpses from the past— I was in the groove for historical research.

My excitement lasted until around 8:45 a.m., when some wrangling in Swahili with the archives’ receptionist yielded the necessity of a permit, which, of course, I did not possess.

How long might this take? “Siku moja tu—only one day,” his reassuring voice uttered.

Well, where might I sign up? “Sayansi.” For the uninitiated, in Swahili, “I” is appended to the end of many words of alien origin. Hilariously, my dictionary shows the term for “highway rotary” as “kipulefti.”

But I had heard of “Sayansi,” by which they mean COSTECH, the National Commission on Science and Technology. To be precise, I actually hadn’t heard of it, I had seen it. Its headquarters stand across from a new South African-run luxury hotel. In 2004, when I was last in Tanzania, the Commission’s smudgy grey facade—unclean after a three-decades-long unkempt existence—was apparently deemed to be an unbecoming look given what the agency nominally was.

The grime accentuated the building’s weirdly Gotham feel—it is divided into two five-story wings which fan from a taller, and, might I add, completely useless center. Nowadays, everyone knows Sayansi because the chosen remedy to its erstwhile grunginess was to paint one wing a bright blue, and the other an equally radiant white. The two bodies of paint meet in a momentous curve that swoops from the South wing’s top floor to the base of the North wing.

In a capital city full of garish wonders, Sayansi must surely occupy a top spot. Perhaps, though, the decoration was merely a way of declaring, “I must be reckoned with,” which is surely true in my instance.

So, I enter the building and proceed into the appropriate office. It is absolutely frigid, and I am well aware Tanzanians have lately been experiencing severe power rationing. Of course, Science and Technology—or rather, issuing the permits that make Science and Technology permissible, insofar as these materialize at all in Tanzania—needs the comforts only arctic climes can offer. The first words uttered by the relevant bureaucrat, Mama Gideon, order to close the door, lest any well-contained frostiness escape.

Waiting is the name of the game in Tanzania. It’s tempting to say this is a petty torture civil servants know they can inflict on you with impunity, except that the waiting game happens in the private sector, too. If you want to make a deposit into your bank account, you’d better block off 45 minutes to wait in queue.

Mama Gideon eventually honours me with her attention. My voice is soft, I sound apologetic. A fellow Sayansi permit-holder, Dr. Jane Goodall, has something to say about this submissive behavior in primates and its desirable effects for social cohesion. Regardless, however, I wonder meekly how soon I might get a permit.

But who am I to be asking Mama Gideon questions at all? She assumes the most physical manifestation of suspicion I have seen, and begins a lengthy interrogation. Where I’m from, what I’m studying, why I want to study it, and so on—she seems to disbelieve some of my answers for reasons I cannot grasp. She looks askance and solemnly declares, “I just do not understand. The Americans are well aware of these procedures.”

Ah yes, the Americans.

It emerges that the ‘only one day’ notion is, naturally, untrue. I am to apply, pay a $50 fee, and then wait for my proposal to be vetted by a committee of Tanzanian intellectuals.

“It is secret,” Mama Gideon saucily informs me when I ask the names of those on the committee. If my enumeration of my project’s “beneficiaries” sufficiently pleases the committee, which meets next month—I somehow resisted the temptation to scrawl jokingly “lumpenproletariat” in florid capital letters—I need only pay a $300 “research clearance fee” and then I can begin.

Yes, it’s my third consecutive summer in Africa, but, as in any good fable, there’s a lesson to be learnt.

I’ve learned plenty about frustrating tales of post-colonial Africa. Try, at least, to conclude gingerly on the scarce, redemptory point:

Africa is a continent of many countries. If researching in the archives of one Swahili-speaking former British colony doesn’t quite come off the right way, there is always another way.

And so, on to Kenya!

I’ve been here 48 hours, am already the proud bearer of a rose-red permit from an agency named KNADS, and well on my way to suffocating amidst smoldering archives. Glorious research awaits.



Travis R. Kavulla ‘06-‘07. a Crimson editorial editor, is a history concentrator in Leverett House. Being Travis, did you really expect any less?