Of Benzes and Brian Onyangos

A weekend of chance encounters reveals the culture of wealth and poverty in Kenya

By Jon Rosen | 07.28.07

After three months in a Kenyan village — complete with cold-bucket showers, kerosene lanterns, and drinking water straight from a frog pond — it's no wonder that I relished my first taste of African luxury: cruising around Lake Victoria in a 1994 E-Class Mercedes Benz.

It was a saturday morning in November, and I'd come to Kisumu, a city of half a million at Victoria's eastern shore, for a weekend getaway from my teaching job at a rural high school. My second morning in town, I met Ernest Okomo, a gregarious, well-to-do local, and almost immediately he volunteered an afternoon as my driver and personal tour guide. From Kisumu, we ventured to upscale hotels, scenic overlooks, sugar plantations and other hotspots. We talked politics, guzzled glass bottles of Fanta, and even paused for the requisite photo as we passed by the equator — all to the tune of 70's American pop music, which blared from the tape deck of his silver ride. For me, Ernest's car was a welcomed change from the canopied matatu pickups I'd grown accustomed to — shoddy public vehicles that supposedly seated eight, but from my experience, up to 27. Yet for Ernest, an aspiring member of Kenya's so-called wabenzi elite (meaning, quite literally, Benz-people), it represented something more. "I bought this car second hand last year," he told me. "I could never afford a new one. But in Kenya, if you don't have a Mercedes, you're a nobody."

A nobody, I thought back to a boy I'd met the previous day, like Brian Onyango.

It was actually Brian's father who had first approached me, as I relaxed in Kisumu's main park, a vast expanse of greenery free of the litter associated with public spaces in Kenya. Glancing up from my book, a man in a security guard's uniform stood before me. Timidly, he inquired:

"Do you know anything about medicine?" (As if all white people visiting Africa come prepared with a scalpel and copy of the Hippocratic Oath). "My son is sick," he continued. "It's a problem with his kidney. The doctor says there is medicine that can cure him, but I cannot afford it. He's my only son and he's going to die."

Having grown quite wary of fraudsters in Africa, I was skeptical. "So how do I know you're telling the truth?"

Five minutes, and less than a quarter-mile later, I stood inside the children's ward of Kisumu's public hospital. The atmosphere, to say the least, was grim. Two or three children occupied each bed, and a group of 15 others crowded around a lone nurse, who fumbled with various syringes and medications. Mothers, at their children's sides, looked expressionless as I walked by, their collective anguish forming an invisible fog that hung low in the dingy air.

Upon seeing Brian, I was certain his dad was no trickster. For a boy of eight, his body swelled beyond what I'd considered humanly possible. I greeted him and he did not speak, but his expression said it all. Even more telling, was the look in his mother's eyes, as she tried her best to comfort him. It was the look of a mother about to lose a child.

$40 worth of medicine was all it would take to save Brian Onyango, and after a detour to the nearest ATM, Brian's father and I went to the local pharmacy to fill his prescription. Back at the hospital, I said my well wishes, scribbled down my email address, and retreated back to the world from which I'd come, like pinching myself from a bad dream. My altruistic duty was over. Away from that room of dying children it was a beautiful afternoon.

Just 24 hours later, I could not have been farther from the world of Brian Onyangos. As we arrived back in town, Ernest invited me for a brief tour of the Aga Khan Hospital, one of Kenya's premiere health care institutions. It was here, less than a mile from the facility I'd visited the previous day, that Ernest worked as a registered nurse with an advanced specialization in epidemiology. What struck me most about the facility was not that it looked nicer than most hospitals I'd seen in the U.S., but that it was virtually empty. The reason why was painfully clear. "You know," Ernest proudly boasted, "this hospital doesn't just treat anybody. They require $300 up front just to let you in the door!"

Part of me wanted to confront him right there; to tell him what I'd witnessed down the road; to ask him if he or his colleagues at the Aga Kahn ever thought of the children dying needlessly at the public hospital; to reproach him, in the face of such social inequality, for his indulgence in the petty extravagance of a European luxury car. But I knew better. As a have in a country of have-not's, Ernest was no tyrant, no materialist glutton, but an ordinary, humble man, and, for that matter, one of the most hospitable and welcoming individual's I'd met in Kenya. Our day on the road had been a pleasant departure from the isolation I'd often felt in my village, and I sensed a true bond between us. Not wanting to jeopardize that, I tabled my inner altruist and joined Ernest and his friends for some beers and authentic Kenyan barbeque, nyama choma. Life was good.

Given the kleptocracy that has defined modern Kenya, and the African continent as a whole, it's not easy to look at a man like Ernest and fault him. In 43 years of independence, Kenya's national treasury has functioned like a personal trust fund for anyone with inside access. Even the current administration of President Mwai Kibaki, elected in 2002 on an anti-corruption platform, is responsible for the looting of more than $300 million worth of public funds during its first two years in power — at least according to former secretary for ethics and governance John Githongo, who resigned and fled to the UK in 2005 after his investigations into such graft drew him death threats. During the same period, according to the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International, the government spent more than $12 million on luxury vehicles for the personal use of senior officials, including the "ambient cabin lighting-", "dual zone climate-control-", and "rain-sensing windshield wiper"-equipped E-Class Mercedes Benz. According to the report, this "substantially exceeded" what the government spent during the 2003/04 fiscal year on controlling malaria, the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in Kenya.

If this flagrant self-indulgence is in fact model behavior, then Ernest, despite indulgence in wabenzi culture, should be extolled for doing his country a service. Though his days at the Aga Kahn Hospital were sufficiently sheltered from the stench of death and despair, his work — in immunology, nonetheless — may someday improve the lives of innumerable African people. Additionally, given the so-called brain drain of African-born medical professionals — referring to those (including half of all Kenyan-born doctors) who've fled the continent for better lives abroad — at least Ernest hasn't left his homeland. Or, I should say, hadn't. Roughly a year after our travels in Kisumu, Okomo got in touch with me via email. He'd moved to England.

It's only human nature, I suppose, in a country where resources are so limited, for an individual to grab what they can, even if that means taking a piece of the pie from someone else, or, ultimately, given the opportunity, moving on to a place where the pie is that much bigger in the first place. Yet at what point does the freedom of living one's own life mean being complicit in others' suffering? Just because he's Kenyan, does Ernest possess a moral obligation to assist his fellow citizens that you or I somehow don't? It's difficult to say. I do know that Brian Onyango is alive today not because of the goodness in my heart, but because his death confronted me directly; because saving him was cheap, and easier than living with myself thereafter if I hadn't. Sadly, there were other children on his ward that day that could have been saved for a pittance, too. But neither I, nor any able Kenyans, did anything about it.

Nearly three years later, I rarely think about Brian Onyango, save the occasional email from his father. The first message, informing me of Brian's full recovery, arrived four months later, long after I'd returned to the United States. Now, the periodic updates recount the seemingly mundane events in a young child's life — Brian is number seven in his class; Brian is happy because they are in second term holiday; Brian has greeted you abundantly. I do admit, when I get these emails, there's a part of me that smiles — for a life that nearly wasn't, for a father, a son, a family.

Yet there are thousands of other children throughout the developing world like Brian, dying needlessly each day from diseases that could easily be cured, and in most cases prevented. A dose of drugs to save a child from malaria, for instance, costs less than a grande mocha latte at Starbucks. Yet, while international aid, in this era of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations and Millennium Development Goals, is now in vogue, and more money is being spent on the developing world than ever, at the level of the individual, the time worn African proverb still rings true:

"The poor man and the rich man do not play together."

Now, forgive me, Brian Onyangos, I'm off to grab some coffee.