It’s Africa Time!

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Hello, here we g...

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...go! Welcome to Kenya. Everything takes a little longer in Africa. We were completely unprepared as we associated Kenya primarily with the dense mass of world-class marathon runners, whose times are definitely not the same as those of the local bus network.

Our first day in Africa was devoted to arrival and acclimatisation. This went surprisingly well in certain respects. After India, we praised the modernity of the cars, roads and shops (which shows that we had probably spent far too long in India). Payment is mainly digital, albeit via a sort of Kenyan PayPal, for which you need a Kenyan number, for which you can only get the SIM card in selected phone shops, for which you must have already withdrawn cash, for which you must have activated your credit card in the app, for which you must already have internet, so everything is very simple and problem-free.

Only the acclimatisation to the food was unfortunately a step in the wrong direction. The word vegetarian is difficult to translate into Swahili, and I've already forgotten how tired I get of greasy Western food. We were told that warthogs have such small brains that when they run away from predators, they suddenly forget why they are running away and then run back to their original location - pretty sad. Well, my brain is similar when it comes to food and that's why I still make the same mistake every day and have a burger followed by a trance.

On day two, we planned to take a short journey to Naivasha, 90 kilometres away. Either as tourists in a private taxi for 90 US$, or as locals in a matatu. Hakuna Matatu, let's go. After a brief enquiry in Nairobi's central business district, we find ourselves in the correct street with the countless minibuses, which are lovingly decorated and... painted. We are routinely thrown into a still quite empty matatu by a middleman. There were a few place names on the roof sign, not including our desired destination, but they would certainly do their job well. A quick glance at the price tag, 500 shillings, was the same as our hotel receptionist's estimate, everything was okay. When would the matatu leave, I asked. It takes 1h30, was the answer. Ah, he must have misheard me, because that's the journey time. It turned out he hadn't misheard me...

Our matatu had a fat TV screen built in, which quickly mesmerised me. While I watched episode after episode of National Geographic Africa's Deadliest Animals (and thus prepared myself for our upcoming bike safari), I didn't realise that we had been sitting in the van for over an hour and it was only filling up very slowly. Our hotel was two minutes away, so why had we been in such a hurry in the first place?

After another 40 minutes, the very last seat was successfully occupied and the journey began. It seemed to be the driver's mission in life to make up for the almost 2-hour delay on the short distance to Naivasha. He didn't succeed, despite the 15 motorcyclists from the opposite lane now lying in the ditch.

The 90km journey was completed in four hours. At the end, we realised that we had of course paid a lot more with 500 shillings, as this was the price to the final stop. Yes, the middlemen really do their job well.

The slight delay left us with a hole in our stomachs. When we arrived at our cozy hostel, we were relieved to find that they also served food. We ordered two dishes and were the only guests to sit down in the neighbouring garden. The service was so adynamic that I slowly realised that maybe we should get the playing cards out. After a good two hours, our pasta with tomato sauce arrived. And they were warm.

Well, we are in Africa and here we are on Africa Time. As annoying as it can be for a tourist when buses have no departure times, restaurants take forever and you get the feeling that half the day is wasted waiting - it seems to be part of African culture. Anthropologists (who else particularly enjoys researching Africa) gleefully refer to this as ‘polychronism’ - when time is seen as a rather elastic concept, when appointments are rather vague and several things are done at the same time, with less emphasis on punctuality, focus and planning. In fact, this cultural behaviour pattern also annoys some Africans. In some opinions, Africa Time is even seen as the main reason for the ongoing underdevelopment of the entire continent.

All the better to explain the displeasure of a tourist, as Western cultures, especially we Germans, are particularly proud of our punctuality, reliability and our functioning Deutsche Bahn.

Fortunately, we are not in Africa to propagate our German values, but to find out what we can learn from other cultures. After just a few days, we have already realised that everything works more organically in Africa Time and that flexibility is offered from all sides when things don't run strictly according to schedule. There is a lightness in life that culminates, for example, in people spontaneously stopping on the streets one afternoon in Nairobi to practise a dance together - without any particular purpose, it wasn't even recorded for TikTok.

And on our bike safari, which incidentally ended in a desperate odyssey (our highlight and biggest diversion, the spa with the only restaurant far and wide, had spontaneously closed: Africa Time...), every passing car really did enquire about us Mzungu (‘light-skinned people’), people took their time and helped each other, after all, you could be the next one in need of help. In today's stressful world of constant efficiency thinking, Africa Time - if you surrender to it completely - is a relaxed and socially acceptable antithesis that we somehow want to incorporate into our everyday lives.