Africa, perhaps more than any other continent, is a place where people figure as monuments. Themonuments here might not be cut in stone and grandiose like they are in Europe, but they possess a pertinence in their own right.

A figure that incorporates all of the impressions I have had so far of this bizarre metropolis, is a street seller at Gitanga Road. How old he is, is a mystery almost impossible to unravel. Sure, his hare is grey, but his posture far from elderly. In one hand he holds a staff, a tradition for members of his tribe (or so I've been told) and in the other a scultpure made out of ebbony that bears an eerie resemblance to its possessor. I pass him by while being driven to and from work. In my mind he has become a symbol. the symbol of a people that appear to be caught midway in between progress and their ancestral ways. before all else I see in him the symbol of a people caught in abject poverty, subject to a government that fails to deliver even the most basic services to its citizens while its members possess more land and wealth than any mzungu. yet, despite of all this, I see in him also the daily reports on the radio that diagnose society's problems and discusses them in all openness and freedom. The man, now a symbol in my mind, is the day labourer who sells himself for a pittance and is prepared to move mountains if necessary, and the businessman in the City, the guard at my gate in Kilimani and the children that play in my courtyard.

As I write these words, I hear a sound. it is like a thousand pebbles landing on the tin roof of the shack that I can see from my window. I smile and I remember my first words in Swahili: Mvua(rain), so appropriate after Moto (fire) claimed the lives of so many in the slum of Sinai, close to the industrial centre of this city without a functional fire brigade.

I smile and remember looking out of the window of the toilet in my office building, Lonrho House and seeing(or perhaps imagining) beyond the limits of the city into the savannah. Oh, it is a peculiar place, this metropolis. This place of fresh water which the Masaai called enkare nairobi.