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 left their families behind.
So. 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, Njoki, Maggie and Gladys, and also middle-class Mumbi, within the social strata from which they emerged. In their dangerous lives, the political background in which they operated was only weakly contingent.
The uniqueness of the Buffalo Bills testimony is crucial. Anyone else who had visited these many different countries or had worked in the UN could talk at length about their situation, and tell many 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.
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, it is Buffalo Bills.
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 are women-headed, and health and education expenses must be met by these single women, and 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.
Statistics for numbers of women participating 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 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 to impress 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, as it could be in Eastern Europe or South-east Asia. Jack encountered no madams in Africa and saw only one underage girl soliciting.
Prostitution is not only heterosexual. Jack was approached by a young boy in Karnak. 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. Prior to this, In the 1970s the whole hotel was known as Buffalo Bills. Artists and others choosing to live outside the mainstream occupied small apartments around the square of Heron Court. In much the same manner as King’s Cross in Sydney had in the 1950s been an artist’s colony before being taken over as a red light bar. 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 amid its real characters. To be 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 predisposed Jack to go there. After a couple of days left alone in the hotel, Lonely Planet drew Jack and Laslo to the bar, where Jack was overwhelmed by the exotic bar, his instant rapport with Maggie, the strangeness of travel and the strength of Tusker Beer. 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, 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 places mostly featured miserable or angry near-naked females on display in a sleazy atmosphere, like curiosities or cuts of meat.
Instead, the women in Buffalo Bills were dressed in neck-to-ankle fashions. This was forced by local expectations of modesty. Ordinary girls wearing short skirts could be stripped naked publicly or even raped to teach them ”a lesson”. Standing at a bus stop when they were aged 16, Mumbi and a friend were once almost raped by thugs who thought their dresses showed their legs,
As long as the dress code was followed, the women were mostly left alone by police and gangs. The regulars at BBs enjoyed a way of life made possible by the affordability of the women and 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 Kenya 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, with respect of a sort, and even pleasure in some cases, 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 his misreporting. 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” like Jack. Just as Njoki did, 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. Though Njoki’s snarl, “You think my home is a museum?”
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, although their marginal position was precarious if something went wrong .
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.
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 and deluges her with poetry and flowers. Success. He is deeply uncomfortable in the 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 help 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 without the complications of sex or money (restricted to Njoki), and he finds a social life there when Njoki disappears and he needs it.
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 - Njoki - he is overjoyed and believes he is in love. As with Elizabeth, he does not begin sexual relations until he recovers from the “shock of the new” feels safe with her, and checks her for AIDS – not aware she is a sex worker, as she never asks for money. Soon after, to curb approaches, 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 – and so he is mostly left alone, except when he ventures onto other turf like New Florida
One of the most effective tricks for dealing with the insistent crowds of sellers in the tourist parts developing 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 is the hospitalisation of Gladys, after an attack by other girls, and 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 complete unfaithfulness, tricks and lying 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. 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.
Then she 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, these are the only two exits from the bar. 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 just 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 and object 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.
Monica tells Jack that Maggie is embellishing about goods stolen from her house, and that she and her roommate both think the other set the burglary up.
What finally causes Jack to leave (apart from traffic) is Njoki’s final heist involving three different thefts, her 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 just confirms his new picture of an “aviary full of birds with all the pecking, twittering, swooping, posturing and territorial behaviour.” There are no ethics: 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. Never as 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.