The book has a great deal to say about conditions in Kenya and in many other countries Jack visited in 1994-96. Amid the joys and troubles of travel in Africa, the narrative runs through a number of quirky, sometimes hilarious incidents while Jack is working at UN-Gigiri. Yet the book is not called Africa at Large or Gigiri Gallop or See you in the Serengeti, it is Buffalo Gals.
Why alienate audiences interested in patrolling my complex observations by introducing challenging and intrusive subjects like:
- · prostitutes working in a bar,
- · the emotional and physical needs of men who have lost their families or left them behind.
The book is Buffalo Gals because the original intention of the book as conceived in 1997 was to describe the lives of the Buffalo Gals, specifically Njoki, Maggie and Gladys, and also middle-class Mumbi, within the social strata from which they emerged. The political background in which they operated was only weakly present.
In all my books, there is a place of entry from one world into the another world of very different possibilities, a portal if you like. In this one, the portal to the slums is Buffalo Bills.
The uniqueness of the Buffalo Bills story is why the book focusses on it. Anyone else who had visited exotic countries or had worked in the UN could talk at length about their situation, and tell their tales, possibly more interesting than mine. My particular angle was that I had made genuine friends with the girls of the bar, once they discovered that all I wanted was to enjoy a beer and their company. They knew I regarded their lives to be just as interesting and valid as anyone else’s. They were my friends.
Like most public venues, the bar morphed and changed, and by 1997 it was already different. Before 2005 it was closed and remodelled, and Nairobi lost “something wonderful if irredeemably seedy”. Without my testimony, Buffalo Bills would be lost in time.
Prostitution in Africa
There are very few formal sector jobs for women in Africa, and most women’s jobs are extremely poorly paid. The hospitality industry is a male preserve, and so are many other areas that usually provide women with employment.. Yet something like 40% of women households in Africa are women-headed, and health and education expenses must be met by these single women. Many choose sex work over domestic work or selling vegetables. With so many involved, the work is very competitive. European clients are held at a premium - they have more money and are more easily pressured for money.
Statistics for numbers of women participating in sex work are rubbery and contested, but there are an estimated 2.5 million sex workers in sub-Saharan Africa. In most countries it is decriminalised, but procuring, brothels and pimping are illegal.
Despite its widespread prevalence, sex work is not well-tolerated as a way of life or as a profession in Africa. The taxi driver in Ethiopia who mutters endlessly about harlots. The traditional tribal people singing and dancing around the fire in Turkana, impressing their girls with how it is bad to go to Nairobi and become a prostitute.
The crowd in Buffalo Bills and other Nairobi bars were entirely freelance in Jack’s time, and the atmosphere was not particularly sleazy or unpleasant. It involved no public demeaning or challenging activity, as it could in Eastern Europe, South-east Asia or the West. Jack encountered no madams in Africa and saw only one underage girl soliciting. The women were always warm and friendly.
Prostitution is not only heterosexual. Jack was approached by a young boy in Karnak, Egypt. Egypt does not admit homosexuality exists hence there are no laws and no recorded male prostitution.
Why is Buffalo Bills significant?
Buffalo Bills first came to global attention in a three-paragraph mention in National Geographic in 1990. In the 1970s the whole hotel was known as Buffalo Bills, and artists and others choosing to live outside the mainstream occupied small apartments around the square of Heron Court. Similarly, King’s Cross in Sydney had been an artists' retreat before being taken over as a red light area. It is not known when the owners allowed the bar to be fully colonised by sex workers, but it was probably in the late 1980s.
By 1994 Geoff Crowther was writing in his Lonely Planet Travel Survival Kit
The liveliest bar in Nairobi by far is Buffalo Bill’s at Heron Court … Decked out with mock, denim covered wagons surrounding a central bar, it’s extremely popular with a wide range of resident expatriates engaged in all manner of professions, tourists and locals. It’s the place to go if you’re single, but just as much fun for a couple. This is also one of the favourite bars of safari operators in Nairobi. (abridged).
This misleading description from the Bible of budget travel brought streams of tourists to Buffalo Bills to look for Kenya action and its real characters. Instead, they were faced by what Steve and Carmen saw, a crowd of prostitutes and their clients. This made the bar both notorious and legendary in equal measure.
Jack’s friend Noel had already encouraged Jack to go there. After they had spent a couple of days alone in the hotel, the enticing Lonely Planet description drew Jack and Laslo to the bar. Jack was overwhelmed by the exotic bar and his instant rapport with Maggie. The strangeness of travel and the strength of Tusker Beer also disoriented him. He fell to Njoki’s elaborate fabrications – and then it was too late.
The real situation
With no experience, Jack did not identify BBs as a place of sex trade, as he would have done a year later. The women were modest and discreet, warm, friendly, talkative, and quite happy to sit and enjoy a beer. In fact, they were considerably better-behaved and better dressed than single nightclub-goers in Australia. The Buffalo Gals were very different to women in the strip joints and brothels of Canada and Australia, or the bar girls in Bulgaria or Thailand. These other places mostly featured miserable, leering or angry near-naked females on display in a sleazy atmosphere, displayed like curiosities or cuts of meat.
Instead, the women in Buffalo Bills were dressed in neck-to-ankle fashions, forced by local expectations of modesty. Ordinary girls wearing short skirts in Nairobi could be stripped naked publicly or even raped to teach them ”a lesson”. Mumbi and a friend were once almost raped by thugs who thought their dresses showed their legs, standing at a bus stop when they were aged 16, ,
As long as the dress code was followed, the women were mostly left alone by police and gangs. The expatriate regulars at BBs enjoyed a way of life made possible by the affordability of the women and the beer and the relaxed, entertaining environment.
Everts the Belgian stayed in Heron Court when he was in Kenya, kept a girlfriend in his flat, and took other women for variety when he felt like it. Geoff Crowther was similar to Everts, except that his Kenyan girlfriend worked for him and helped him put together the Lonely Planet Guide. He also had a Korean wife back in his tropical hideaway in Byron Bay, whom he lived with for half the year.
All these older white characters kept a low profile, They were aware that their activities, while comfortable and a great alternative way of life for them, would be disapproved of by their peers. They might have been providing the women with an income and with respect of a sort, but society at large would never see it that way. In particular, the new generation of feminists were totally opposed, as Crowther says when Jack bails him up over the Lonely Planet misreporting which had led him into so much trouble. The feminists would see it not as a willing and comfortable meeting of cultures, but as gender exploitation and neo-colonisation.
Buffalo Bills could be a gateway for visitors who wanted to visit the “real urban Kenya”. Just as Njoki did for Jack, Crowther’s girlfriend Alice introduced him to what he describe the “wrong side of the tracks, where all you see are smiling children’s faces, tenacity and extreme hardship”. That is the Kenya Jack wanted to see, not the flower gardens of Gigiri.
Critics might see Jack’s interest in a similar light to those taking “slum tours”: as voyeuristic, exploitative, and a "commodification of poverty" where wealthy tourists gawk at locals living in hardship. But Jack was in a genuine position to assist, and coming from a poor situation himself, he empathised with the locals and accepted their communities as a valid, mostly tolerable way of life.
Three men in deprivation
Many men, and some women too, find it extremely difficult to divorce or otherwise separate from their spouses. There is the loneliness, the loss of physical and emotional support and companionship. To most men, the loss of sex is the most glaring need at first, though it is ultimately not the most important, it is the loss of intimacy.
Buffalo Gals contrasts three men who are alone. At one extreme there is Steve, the giant sea-kayaker, sword dancer and flower arranger. He is a true romantic. To find a partner, he advertises in the newspaper, chooses the best respondent and deluges her with poetry and flowers. Success. He is deeply uncomfortable in Buffalo Bills Bar, full of friendly women of suspect morality, and he leaves as soon as possible.
At another extreme there is Rod Silver. He is distressed about his unpleasant divorce and the fight over custody. He is not ready for a relationship and chooses sex workers for uncomplicated short-term company. In Buffalo Bills, he canvasses the place for action and in only three days he investigates the possibilities far more thoroughly than Jack ever did, even moving into the apartment of one girl.
There is also Laslo, who first took Jack to BBs for a kind of sociological investigation. He conducted this under the radar, having fun with Maggie while staying uninvolved and out of trouble.
Jack in the bar
Somewhere in the middle is Jack, We know from the prequel Jacob’s Ladder and several short stories that Jack regards sex as a powerful spiritual act. His one night stand with Dr Elizabeth sends him into the stratosphere for a month. For him, as for Steve, casual sex of any kind is impossible, and the idea of buying sex is inconceivable, though it might have helped to reduce his extreme deprivation.
Like Lazlo, Jack is curious. From the story “Sandbox”, we know Jack’s father told him he ”wasn’t a real boy” when he was small, and he has had no positive male role models throughout his youth. Therefore he wants to see what “real boys” are like so that maybe he can learn to become one. While he never mixes with the expatriates, over a few months he forms real friendships with a few of the women at Buffalo Bills, mostly without the complications of sex or money, and he finds a social life there for a short while when Njoki disappears.
Normally, Jack backs away in fright from female advances, though by the time of this book he has learned to control his panic. When he does manage to overcome his inhibitions and actually lies with someone new - Julia, or Dr Elizabeth, or Njoki, or Maria Fuchs - he is overwhelmed and believes he is in love. He does not begin sexual relations until he recovers from the “shock of the new”. With Njoki, he is not aware she is a sex worker, as she never asks for money,, but still, no sex until he checks her for AIDS.
Soon after, to stop approaches by other women, he lets the word be spread by Maggie that “he can’t do it with prostitutes” – which is certainly the case in the shorter term. So he is mostly left unmolested. One of the most effective tricks for dealing with the insistent crowds of sellers in the tourist parts of the world is to hire one to keep the others at bay. By accident, Jack does exactly this with Njoki, who is maybe the tallest, toughest and most jealous of all the bar regulars..
The women find Jack to be something very unusual “You are a very good man. We do not see men like you round here”, says Maggie. Even Gladys starts to think that maybe she Jack could be her first real boyfriend. Eventually, however, Jack sees the dark side of the bar too clearly, and leaves it all behind.
The Dark Side
Although Buffalo Bills looks just as Crowther described it, a colourful place where Kenya’s real characters meet, where the “wrong side of the tracks” has a portal. it doesn’t take long for Jack to encounter the darker scene.
First there are the two hospitalisations of Gladys, first after an attack by other girls, and then her pack rape in the taxi. Then there is Njoki’s compulsive and casual lying, which goes beyond what even the Bar can tolerate. From the start, her unfaithfulness, tricks and dissembling hurt Jack and causes him to make doubtful and dangerous decisions. She does the same to several other “nice” men during the course of the book.
Monica, who is an honest woman, soon fills him in on Njoki's real activities. After confirming Njoki’s profession, she tells Jack he should never believe what any of the girls say about each other, as they are in competition and will try to put each other down at any opportunity. Monica also tells Jack that Maggie is embellishing about goods stolen from her house, and that Maggie and her roommate both think the other set the burglary up.
Then Monica says something very telling. “If you come asking for someone, they will never tell you where she is. They will say, that girl has died or has married.” In other words, as the girls see it, there are only two exits from the bar, death or marriage. In trying to find alternative work for Njoki and Maggie, Jack is pushing against tradition and the lifetime experience of the women. His failure to find them work confirms everything they already know.
The mysterious disappearances of Zemei and Cutie, girls mentioned in Lonely Planet Guide with Gladys, is ominous. And soon the dying starts, first Stella and then others.
As to marriage, the older women who have married, and who Njoki therefore holds as having reached the pinnacle of the profession, are fairly nasty pieces of work. Both Nancy and Pierina only socialise with Njoki as long as she buys the drinks (on Jack’s dollar) and they connive in cheating Jack. Carol is downright evil.
What finally causes Jack to leave Milimani (apart from the morning traffic) is Njoki’s final heist and identity switch, and Gladys who says this is just standard behaviour. Then he sees a miserable 13-year old leaving with the old man. Finally, with Njoki gone, the speed with which the whole bar moves on him confirms his new picture of BBs as an “aviary full of birds with all the pecking, twittering, swooping, posturing and territorial behaviour.” There are no ethics here. Men, particularly mzungus, are fair game to them all and are there to be stripped of as much money as possible, as soon as possible. They are never allies who might see them into a better life. The lack of any kind of constructive morality is too much for Jack to take. And so he leaves the bar behind.
Still, in Rod Silver’s words to Jack just before Istanbul,
if anyone has ever wrung out the last bit of experience out of a job as you’ve done in the last few years I’d be surprised.
And part of that experience was his year in the lair of the Buffalo.