If city on sewer land exists, it should be named

What on this earth is a mystery firm”? One Nairobi newspaper raised just that question in a page-one headline on August 19. Said the headline: “Mystery firm builds city on sewer land”. It was a perplexing statement. What commodity does a “mystery firm” make or sell? Mysteries? Indeed, other than Nairobi, which city has our country or region ever put up?

RUMOURS

I ask because, in the United States and other parts of North America, a city is any urban build-up. In North America, even a town as small as my native Awendo — a mere piece-goods shopping centre — can be called a city. Moreover, in a town as overwhelmed by rumours as Nairobi is, mysteries might be some of your preferred commodities.

That was why, in high school, many decades ago, I was extraordinarily fond of Peter Cheyney, one of England’s producers of rapid-fire mystery stories.

However, it was when I became a newspaper employee, very much later in life, that I was made aware of stories in the city’s newspapers that could be described only as “rumours”.

Howbeit, practically all my high schoolteachers — most of them Caucasian Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen and Welshmen — had vigorously discouraged us from reading such a popular fiction producer as Peter Cheyney — Cheyney being a Euro-English surname pronounced very much like chini, the Kiswahilili word for “down”.

Howbeit, our British teachers at Alliance High School had no idea that their discouragement of the likes of Cheyney succeeded only in endearing the Cheyneys to us.

Nevertheless, we read Cheyney only secretly because, if he caught you with a Cheyney title, Edward Carey Francis, that time’s famous headmaster of Alliance High, would have called you to his office and caned you naked.

QUESTIONS

Nevertheless, Peter Cheyney taught me a great deal of idiomatic English. Unresolved mystery of the kind from which Peter Cheyney might have produced the fiction that so absorbed the juvenile mind that mine was abounds on the pages of daily newspapers in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

None the least, it might raise a completely different kind of question mark in your head. For example, what on earth is the “mystery firm” that the Nation’s lead headline writer spoke of?

 Is it a kind that publishes such easy mystery fiction as Peter Cheyney did once upon a time? Or is a mystery firm one whose existence depends on the making and sale of consumer goods that might be defined as mysterious?

Many observers of East Africa’s industrial and commercial scenes will have raised, at least to themselves, exactly such questions at one point or another.

For, in the world of human beings, including East Africa’s urban areas, certain industrial and commercial companies do exist whose activities occasion in the thinking of clean-minded individuals about a million question marks of exactly that kind.

CITY STATUS

In Kenya, for instance, which city is it that a “mystery company” has built on sewer land? If such a city is in our country, it can only be Nairobi because Kenya is not like the United States, in which even a tiny build-up is called a city. In our country — indeed, throughout Eastern Africa — Nairobi may be the only urban build-up properly known as a city.

Howbeit, it is possible that Kampala and Dar es Salaam, near-by, have also, in recent times, been elevated to the level of cities — although I don’t have such information. I must thus continue to assume — perhaps wrongly — that, in our whole region of the human world, Nairobi is the only urban build-up that has attained the city status.

Philip Ochieng is a veteran journalist.