Westgate terror attack and Teju Cole’s tale of an open city

The relevant theme of the next edition of the Storymoja Hay Festival is ‘Imagine the World.’ Nigerian-American Teju Cole, author of the beautiful book Open City, will be one of the guests. It is a title that applies more and more to Nairobi.

This is the last paragraph of a piece I recently wrote for the news of the literary world section of the Dutch magazine Das Magazin.

Teju Cole indeed came to Nairobi, and he lit up the crowded auditorium at the National Museum with his brilliant, incisive personality.

But as he was speaking about his writing and how he acquired his powers of observation and how his academic training as an art historian and his experience as a photographer developed his eye for detail, the first reports began to arrive about a shooting at Westgate Mall.

The wailing of sirens penetrated the room, and the armed robbery turned out to be a terrorist attack.

Nairobi became world news, and the festival was cancelled.

Among those killed at Westgate was the Ghanaian poet and diplomat Kofi Awoonor, who had also come for the literary festival.

The hours and days afterwards were dominated by Westgate. My world narrowed, and a strange kind of sadness came over me.

So many stories of near death, children, images of fleeing people, lurking silhouettes, gunshots, explosions, the clacking sound of helicopters.
And all this time the hostages were in there, just a few kilometres from where I live.

In other parts of the city, thugs grabbed their chance.

CARJACKINGS

There were reported carjackings at lunch time on a road I had just used.

From my garden, I heard gun shots in broad daylight . A woman frantically tweeted: police attention! Thugs are all over the place.

Warnings of new attacks; stay inside. At night, I heard every sound.

Pervasive feelings of uncertainty and insecurity are suffocating.

They are emotions that are diametrically opposite to the Nairobi where I lived for three years, a place where life is a bit more uncertain than on a Dutch dike, but uncertainty meant a thrilling tension that was always manageable.

There is a lot of crime, but I choose to turn my eye instead to that rather energetic city that is constantly evolving.

An open city of new buildings, new roads, galleries, fashion week, poetry slams, music, new stories, friendships, Internet training grounds for boys and girls, and festivals.

Like the one with street artists who challenged residents of 12 different neighborhoods to ask Who is Nairobi? Nai Ni Who?

An interesting project in a city where Africans for decades lived in separate neighbourhoods and were only allowed into the white areas to work. Or in Asian areas like Westlands, where Westgate Mall opened six years ago.

But is an open city by definition also a city of freedom? Freedom to mindlessly go where you want? To walk, to wander, to muse, as Teju Cole does in his New York?

In the web of communities and neighbourhoods, high-rise, low rise, alone on a walled-in acre, or with hundreds to an acre. In this eclectic mix of streets, buildings, houses, tribes and nationalities, I could only find that particular public freedom in a few places.

FAILED PUBLIC SECURITY SYSTEMS

For Nairobi has developed rapidly, the government has failed when it comes to ensuring public security and safety. In public, on the street, there is always that chance of an accident, a criminal, an intimidating or shooting policeman.

And this is exactly why a place like Westgate in a city like Nairobi is much more than a collection of shops and restaurants where you do some shopping or go for a cocktail.

It is one of the few public spaces where you could have that experience of mindless freedom that is so common in other parts of the world. And that was true not only for expats. The crowd that visited Westgate and the dead in the morgues are a reflection of that Nairobi mix of Africans, Asians and whites.

These people had, through their increasing levels of wealth, acquired the possibility of accessing this secure space in the public domain in which they could move around freely.

KDF INVASION IN SOMALIA

Since Kenya invaded Somalia in 2011, it has found itself in a state of war. Not a conventional war between two armies but an asymmetrical one of the 21st century: between security forces and terrorists.

Kenya became a target for terrorist attacks. The embassy began texting us regularly. Stay away from crowded places where foreigners gather.
In southern Somalia, Kenya overcame Al Shabaab, but on Kenyan territory, that same enemy remained invisibly present — and elusive.

Did the attention of the intelligence services wane? Was there a lack of will to better protect Kenyans? A lack of priority, a lack of urgency?

Should that articulate middle class have been less involved with their own well being, and should they have demanded more from their government?

On September 21, 2013 around noon, Teju Cole told how he wrote in his novel that in World War II, the city of Brussels decided to capitulate, declared the Belgian capital an “open city”, and the Nazi army marched in. As he was speaking, Al-Shabaab militants stormed Westgate — and Nairobi.