Every nation has its hawkers. They are average Joes and Janes, out to make a few dollars (American, Canadian, Liberian, or Zimbabwean), dinars (Serbian, Jordanian, Algerian, Lybian, or Iraqi), dirhams, doubloons, euros, francs (French, Djiboutian, Congolese, Burundian, Rwandan, or Malagasy), pounds, shillings (British, Irish, Somali, Tanzanian, Kenyan, or Ugandan), pesos, quetzals, leones , birr...
I am a hawker myself—all day I man a telephone, making calls to stores across America , telling the story of Galison, wondering who would like catalogs. The work is grueling and my fingers ache, but compared to the work of hawkers in the Third World , it’s like eating pizza at a birthday party. I learned this on a recent trip with my friend through Uganda , Kenya and Rwanda . In East Africa , at the taxi parks, on the roadsides, at border crossings, hawkers are as common as pot-holes. They’ve got no phones, no catalogs—only their wits and their product. Their spirits are indomitable.
Massai Herdsmen. Photos by Hannah Rappleye
After crossing from Uganda into Kenya on a bus ride to Nairobi , the capital, we stopped in Kisumu. I was chewing on a roasted leg of street chicken when I met an off-duty hawker named Peter, a hard-driving dealer of wood carvings. He was pleasant, skinny and tall, and he wore a suit and tie. "I lost my parents, so I must work," he told me. "It is hard, but I am a man."
In Loita Hills, Kenya
A few months before my friend and I arrived in Kenya , President Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu known for corrupt excesses, beat Raila Odinga, a Luo who has a strong base of support in the destitute Kibera slum of Nairobi , in a rigged election. The nation erupted into gruesome ethnic violence. The two politicians eventually put together a unity government. But when we got to Nairobi , many Kenyans were still stuck in squalid internally displaced person camps, others were battling the rampant corruption of the government system, and the country's once-booming tourist industry stagnated in the limelight of a “Travel Alert.”
Goat Stampede in Loita Hills
Not even the dire dearth of tourists, though, could impinge on the daily grind of Nairobi 's tourist markets.
Outside the markets, hawkers mill about on streets, eager to meet wazungu. On the pretext of giving us directions, they dragged my friend and I a few blocks down the street, only to bring us ever nearer to the epicenter of some four-story indoor marketplace, vacillating with the tense energy of hawkers. Once, my friend and I stepped into the city's main market to buy some scarves. All at once, we were pounced on.
Every step we took, an amiable Kenyan would funnel us into their little shop. The strategy was always the same: kill you with kindness, present an innocuous novelty that cost an exorbitantly high price, graciously mark it down, seal the deal, and then present another innocuous novelty…
"You're the first customer of the day," each one of them told me. "I will give you a special price." I thought that this might be part of their strategy, but it was probably true. The only other wazungu we saw were an older man and woman dressed in pastels, whose overly-pale skin-tones suggested that they were British.
In the end, we bought three scarves, a t-shirt advertising Kenya 's Tusker beer, and wooden sculptures of a tribal man and wife. "Hakuna matata," the hawkers kept telling me, huge smiles on their faces. "It means, 'No worries.'" And after this escapade, when I looked into my wallet, I definitely worried.
What surprised me was that, in every shop, the knick-knacks were the same—granite chess sets, wooden carvings of elephants and giraffes, sentimental paintings of African sunsets and Kikuyu tribesmen, corny t-shirts. I often wonder where all this kipple comes from. The hawkers told me it is home-made. I hypothesize that much comes from China . The truth is shrouded in mystery.
Walking through the market, I got an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. I recalled my visits to Tijuana , the Mexican border city in Baja California —all of those fake golden chains, overpriced granite chess sets, sombrero key-chains and hand-built guitars, all of that hustling in broken English. In Nairobi , the products were different, but the hawkers were just as desperate and clever.
Everything has value, even useless trifles bought in tourist markets. When I presented those wooden sculptures to my best friend as a gift, I remembered the sedulous soul who sold it to me; those kind, trilingual agents of tourism; those dauntless distributors of bibelots and trinkets, baubles and curios, kickshaws and tchotchkes; those unavoidable, unflappable, unstoppable hawkers.
Peter Holslin
Special Markets
Galison/Mudpuppy Press
