It was 30 December and the girls were all in Kilifi. Bottles on the table, music piping through a speaker, the beach and the Indian Ocean less than 200 metres away from the villa. Some of the girls had partied together in New York and Miami and Ibiza, and now they were on the Kenyan coast.
Like thousands of other young people across Africa who belong to a very specific social class, they had attended top universities in the UK and the US. After graduation, some had gone back to their countries and walked into fancy jobs in finance or consulting. Others had stayed abroad and lived in London, New York, Paris and the world’s other financial centres. Every December, they would go back home to visit.
A few weeks earlier, I had called up my cousin Maria and told her that I had been assigned to write about this international elite. Maria grew up in Nairobi, but went to the University of Pennsylvania to study engineering and now works for a blue-chip investment firm in New York. “Do you know anyone who fits this description?” I asked.
She laughed. For the new year, she said, she was attending a music festival, Beneath the Baobabs, in the beautiful sandy outpost of Kilifi. This was the place where the very specific social class I was seeking congregate. And that’s how I ended up in the villa with them.
It was 6pm and we were on the patio. There were people streaming in and out. “Yo, I’m telling you, I’m tripping,” said someone inside. “I’m high as fuck right now.”
Maria went into the house, and brought someone out on to the patio. She was wrapped in a towel and her hair was wet. “This is another smart girl for you,” she said. They went back inside.
The music from the house oontz-oontzed to a climax and everyone seemed psyched for the evening ahead. “You’re happy! You’re young! You’re beautiful! You’re single! You’re thriving!” shouted another voice from inside the house.
A tall girl came on to the patio. She had a flower in her hair and sunglasses on her head. She asked me if I could give her a pseudonym for the article. “Give me something sexy. I’ll be Lisa.” She paused. “No, give me Nyangie. I’ll be Nyangie.”
Nyangie asked, “Am I going to be featured as a smart kid?”
“Are you a smart kid?” I asked.
“Well yes, I got a full scholarship to a university in the middle of nowhere.”
The girl who had been in a towel came out, dressed in a short white dress. Usually when she came back to Kenya in December, she would spend New Year’s Eve with her family in Nairobi before returning to Washington DC where she worked for a tech company. This year she had more free time, and so she was in Kilifi, partying by the ocean, far from her strict parents.
Nyangie told her that she could pick a name for the story.
“Ooh, then I’ll be an African name,” she said. “What was Lake Victoria before it was Victoria? That will be my name. Victoria, but not colonial.”
* * *
There are tens of thousands of young people like Maria, Nyangie and Not-Colonial-Victoria. And though their generation of western-educated Africans differs from previous generations – more numerous, more globalised, less political – they are far from the first. From the 19th century onwards, colonial powers offered a select number of students an elite western education, in the hope that when they returned, these bright young men would take on the work of ruling these countries on their behalf. Not infrequently, the students ended up radicalised by their experiences and led movements for independence in their home countries.
Then, in the late 1950s, as colonialism started to crumble and the ideological battles of the cold war began, eastern and western powers began offering scholarships to African students. The writer Aminatta Forna has termed those students who went west during this period the “Renaissance Generation”. Among them were her father, the Sierra Leonean politician Mohamed Forna, the Ghanaian politician Joe Appiah, father of the celebrated philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Barack Obama Sr, father of the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. In some African countries, villagers, enthused by the prospect of their children getting these prestigious degrees and then returning home to help run the country, raised funds to support their education abroad. The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s novel No Longer at Ease is about one of these children, Obi Okonkwo, who goes to a university in England after his village fundraises for him.
In the decades since, studying abroad has become increasingly common. Today, perhaps unsurprisingly, degrees from Ivy League universities, along with Oxbridge and a handful of other institutions, are the most sought-after. Over the past 10 years, the number of new African students enrolling at Brown, for instance, has almost doubled. The same is true at Cornell, where there were 104 new African students in 2013 and 195 in 2023. At the University of Pennsylvania, the number of newly enrolled African citizens has increased from 88 in 2004 to 232 in 2023. (All these numbers include undergraduate and graduate students.)
One of the most well-represented nationalities among these African students are Kenyans. And when they return home, to a country where poverty rates hover at about 40%, they almost instantly find themselves among the country’s highest earners. In Nairobi, many of this social class, especially those in their 20s and 30s, are easily identifiable. They live in central neighbourhoods – Lavington, Kilimani, Kileleshwa and Spring Valley. They eat cheese and drink wine in the garden at Chez Sonia, go for live music at Geco Cafe, dance at The Alchemist, and have beer and lobster rolls at Nairobi Street Kitchen. They go to gin-tasting soirees. They brunch. Sometimes, there are alumni parties (Harvard Club of Kenya, Yale Club of Kenya, Oxford and Cambridge Society of Kenya). They have potted plants, and go to Blankets & Wine, a popular music festival held in Nairobi every few months. Their taste in books is not too trashy, not too literary. Delia Owens, the American author of Where the Crawdads Sing, is perfect.
They work for McKinsey or Dalberg or another management consultancy, or for tech firms, or for European and American NGOs that aim to save Africa in some way or other. Over weekends they fly to the tourist towns along the Indian Ocean: Malindi, Lamu, Dar es Salaam, Kilifi. On longer holidays there are trips to continental Europe – their travel histories guarantee that visas are not a problem – and Beyoncé concerts to attend. They are on Bumble, not Tinder. They sound a bit American: they draw out their vowels, gloss over their t’s, and embellish their conversations with y’alls. Saturdays are spent playing padel, or going for walks in Karura forest, or for jaunts in Naivasha or at “hidden gems” that you’ve never heard of, but which were featured in Vogue or Lonely Planet or Vanity Fair.
It’s a pleasant life, but returnees can also experience difficulties. Many come to feel that while they couldn’t quite fit abroad, they also don’t quite fit in back home. Wherever they live, they are outsiders. Bilha, a 29-year-old biologist who moved back to Nairobi after finishing degrees at Yale and Cambridge, told me that she had dreamed of being “a cute little scientist”, but that didn’t seem possible in Nairobi. If you studied abroad with the aim of being rich, you were set. If, like her, you had gone to college as an idealistic person with dreams of changing your country, it was different. For lack of other options, some end up working for the “saving Africa” NGOs, while wondering how much good they are doing.
Then there are the parents. For some, their kid’s university degree is vindication enough; something to brag about to their relatives and friends. And it doesn’t hurt that on their return, their children land cushy high-paying jobs in Nairobi. So their children feel welcomed back. For other returnees, the reception is less gratifying. The same question keeps coming up: why have they come back? Wasn’t life in the US or the UK better? It is worst for the idealists. They went abroad to help the people back home. When they got back, it wasn’t clear how to do that. This was the fate of Achebe’s Obi Okonkwo; the people of Umuofia expected him to lift them up as they had lifted him. His failure to do so was a source of communal shame.
* * *
Neither Maria nor Victoria nor Nyangie had gone back to live in Kenya. They had stayed in the US to work, where, Maria told me, she was trying to get a green card, or in Nyangie’s case, to go to Drexel University in Philadelphia to do a masters in epidemiology. Data science for diseases, she called it. She and Maria lived five minutes apart, and most of their friends in Philadelphia are Kenyan.
I asked Nyangie if she’d consider moving back to Kenya. “Only if I get paid a lot of money,” she said. In any case, her mother didn’t want her to move back. She wanted Nyangie and her older brothers to build a life somewhere else.
For Nyangie, this was made easier by the fact that she hated the way Kenya was run. But she hated the US more, she said. I wondered how true this was. She had chosen to stay there, and it felt as if she was trying to have it both ways. She hated the guns, she insisted, and the cut-throat capitalism. “At least here capitalism respects the sanctity of December. Nothing works after Jamhuri Day,” she said, referring to Kenya’s independence day, 12 December. “If you didn’t get it done by Jamhuri Day, it wasn’t important.” (When I asked her a few months later about her professed hatred of the US, she said, “While I’m young, I’m willing to handle the cut-throat capitalism if it gets me the future I want, but moving is definitely the end goal.”)
Not everyone at the villa had studied abroad. There was Juliet, who worked in finance in Nairobi, and who lounged outside. And Alicia, as I’ll call her, who worked for a tech company in Nairobi, and whose mood flitted between enthusiasm for the festival, despondency because of a recent breakup and excitement about the prospect of finding a new fling to get over the breakup.
The American-educated girls were the children of Kenya’s professional class. Their parents were pilots, doctors, teachers and professors, or worked in insurance. There was a common joke in these circles. There were two kinds of African kids in elite American colleges. The first were those like Maria, Nyangie and Victoria: comfortable middle-class kids whose high school grades had earned them scholarships, which they supplemented with student loans and part-time jobs. Then there were the other African kids. They jetted home for Christmas, and maybe Easter too, were never broke, and frequently flew to Miami or Cancún for weekend jaunts. These ones, the joke went, were funded by parents who were the reasons their countries were broke.
* * *
At around eight, we got into the car to drive to the festival. Brian, who was driving, and had got impatient at the fact that people were still drinking at the villa, said: “We have the car all night long. We can drink as we go.”
Six of us were squashed into the car as Brian sped through the town, music on the radio. “You’re Big Daddy No 2!” one of the girls said. She liked how Brian was taking care of them while in Kilifi, driving them around.
“No,” Brian said, “I’m a princess. I’m in my princess era.”
“Do you think people from Kilifi hate us being here?” Victoria asked.
“Yes,” Maria said.
In the car, they talked about their mothers, the boarding schools they’d attended, the attachment issues these boarding schools had caused, how old they were when they stopped breastfeeding, Burna Boy (“I know he’s problematic but he makes bangers”), how having a DVD player in the car used to be a sign someone was rich.
We reached the festival car park. Above our heads, the stars glistened, and in the distance we could hear the music. We walked to the entrance. “I’m trying to get some fresh dick, so you guys be on the lookout,” Alicia said.
Later, when I spoke to Matt Swallow, the creative director of the festival, he told me that Beneath the Baobabs was started by “people who are eco-aware and wanted to build unity between people”. Kilifi is perhaps the only place in Kenya where you could hold a festival like this. Kilifi has pristine white beaches, coral reefs and year-long sun. In Kilifi, you can party all night on a dhow or play golf on Africa’s only PGA golf course, or swim across Kilifi Creek. I asked Swallow what sort of people attended the festival. “Mostly 25- to 35-year-olds,” he said. There was a mix of young professionals, a lot of “Nairobi party people”, a lot of expats, and because it was held in December, which was high tourism season, a lot of international guests.
As we passed through the turnstile at the entrance, I asked Victoria how she felt. “I’m not a big afro house fan,” she said, “but I love Maria, and she’s dragged me to enough house festivals in New York, and we had fun, and this is Kilifi so I’m excited.”
“Are you trying to make friends here? Y’all not trying to make friends here,” Maria said.
“I am trying to make friends,” Alicia said.
“We all know you’re trying to make friends,” Maria said.
Inside the site, the girls moved into the crowd by the main stage and disappeared. The festival did not look much like the rest of Kenya. The crowd was about 50% white, though white people account for less than 1% of the national population. No less important, there was a far greater ratio of sheer tops to non-sheer tops. That is, in those cases where attenders were wearing tops. As far as I could see, approximately 80% of the men were topless. There was a deluge of pecs and biceps and chests and bellies. People gathered at the bars, and at the meal counters, and at the counters where a person could get condoms, lube, HIV testing, morning-after pills, coils and implants. They were here to have a great time, to listen to great music and to have safe, responsible sex.
* * *
On one of the bales of hay by the side of the crowd at the main stage, I sat with Audrey, a 28-year-old Princeton graduate who had moved back to Kenya after graduation. She was wearing black shorts and a sheer top, and sucking on a lollipop. She had come to the festival with her partner and a few friends. I asked her what it felt like being back in Kenya. Was she happy?
“It’s never enough,” she said. “People have different ideas of what you should be, of what success is.”
She had moved back to Nairobi because she wanted to be in a place where she felt that she understood how everything worked. In Princeton, she kept on asking herself if she was brilliant enough to be there, but now those questions were gone. Her friends who stayed in the US were working for investment firms. “I don’t think I would have been happy working in finance or at a place like McKinsey,” she said.
I asked if she hangs out with Kenyan returnees from universities like hers. She did. “There’s a shared understanding of the experiences we had, and you don’t have to explain yourselves.”
She added: “A lot of times I feel guilty that I’m able to access the world in ways most Kenyans can’t.”
Around us, the crowd had begun to chant along to the music, and Audrey had to raise her voice. She listed some of the worries that played on her mind about her suddenly becoming upper middle-class. “How do I think about how I’m engaging with other people? How am I paying my Uber drivers? How am I paying my boda person? Am I paying my housekeeper more than usual?”
She paused. “You’re interviewing me when I’m high as fuck,” she said.
I asked her how it felt.
“I feel as though I’m connected to the earth and also above it.”
As I left the festival that night, I thought about my friends who had made the same journey Audrey had – coming back home instead of staying in the US or the UK. So many of them had dreamed of helping shape their communities, or of being artists. They had written for their college journals, organised gallery shows, put on plays – but now, back in Kenya, they found themselves unable to become the people they wanted to be. They felt the pressure of the degree, a pressure that meant, as Audrey and Bilha told me, they had to get a high-status job that matched the high-status degree. Sometimes, this still wasn’t enough. They would look at former classmates who had gone to New York to work in finance or in management consultancies, and feel that they’d been left behind, and would never catch up.
* * *
The girls stayed at the festival until 7am. When I went to their villa later in the day, they were all lying down, nursing their hangovers. There was a new person there: Claudia. She had arrived in town early that morning. Claudia had grown up in Kilifi before attending Wesleyan, then Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, then Columbia. Now, she was in an orange swimsuit, lounging on a daybed on the patio, her two younger sisters next to her.
When Claudia talked, everyone stopped to listen. She talked about class, race in Kilifi, and how events like Beneath the Baobabs created bubbles that separated attendees from the lives of black residents of the town. When she was in her early 20s she had been a local activist, but now, she said, “I don’t know if I have the right to speak on behalf of people here since I don’t live here.”
She felt like a transplant, she said. After landing at the airport, she had met up with some of her family who live nearby, and when she expressed her anger at an instance of racism she had experienced, an aunt scoffed and told her that it was her American attitude that was making her upset.
Maria said: “It’s like you’ve gone to America and come here to tell people how to live.”
“It’s like I’ve brought my race politics here,” said Claudia.
“There are so many microaggressions you couldn’t notice until you moved abroad,” said Maria.
They talked about how eerie it was to be back in Kenya and find themselves in spaces where they were the only black people.
Alicia: “Like yesterday we were in the pool and the white guy comes and asks us, ‘Who are you here with?’”
Maria: “We didn’t know what was happening and we said, ‘We are here by ourselves.’ Then he brought his black wife out to talk to us.”
Alicia: “Almost like he knew he had to placate us.”
Claudia’s sisters got up. They were going home to freshen up before returning for the second night of the festival. “If mum has cooked something great, like chapati, tell me so that I come,” Claudia told them.
After they left, the conversation returned to race. They discussed white Kenyans, who are still commonly referred to as “settlers”. During the colonial era, white families newly arrived from Britain were handed large chunks of land. Today, these land grabs remain a source of wealth, and of anger. In Kilifi, one of the few parts of Kenya with a substantial white population, this history of colonial dispossession is visible everywhere. “There’s a difference between settlers and tourists,” said Claudia. “The settlers don’t mingle with black people.”
She mentioned a popular bar next to the villa that had been accused of offering preferential services to white patrons, and ignoring black customers. “The reason I go to these places is to support the locals working there. And I’ll tip them a lot directly. Help them support their children and families. Even if you boycott the place …”
Maria sighed. She didn’t feel at home anywhere, whether in Nairobi, or in New York, where she’d lived since finishing college. “I don’t know the lives of my people, in the village. And in New York I don’t know the people in my building. That’s not my community.”
Claudia said, “I’m still involved. Whenever I come, I talk to the people.”
A little later, they returned to this question of connection. Claudia said, “Maybe it’s the thing about living abroad. You get so used to discourse, and people aren’t used to that.”
Maria said, “Yeah, and we can do it, and it’s not even an effort.”
Alicia was silent, not responding to any of this.
Maria said, “Like yesterday at the line, I wanted to reload my thing, and I wondered if they accept Apple Pay. And I wanted to ask Alicia, ‘Is it dumb to ask if they need a physical card?’”
“And I told you, you can ask. That’s your reality,” said Alicia.
“I feel so out of touch,” said Maria.
“That’s exactly how I feel,” said Claudia.
Nyangie came out of the house, dressed to go. Maria said, “Oh wow! Yeah, we should get ready.”
After a time, Claudia, Alicia and Nyangie went inside, and soon it was just me and Maria.
“I’m searching for what Claudia has with Kilifi,” Maria said. “I don’t have a place like that. Because we moved a lot when I was a kid, and I went to boarding school, so I don’t have a central place. I don’t have a place where I don’t have to use Google Maps.”
When Obi Okonkwo had been in England, Achebe wrote, “his longing to return home took on the sharpness of physical pain”. But that had been in the 50s: he could only afford to come home by ship, and the difficulty of that journey meant that he hadn’t done so before graduating, and so, when he returned, he felt lost in the new Nigeria. It was different for Maria, Nyangie and Victoria. This was the 21st century. There were direct flights from New York to Nairobi. A person could travel home a few times a year, if they wished to. Still, this didn’t prevent the displacement they felt from being far from where they had grown up. Their loss, different from Obi’s, throbbed.
* * *
At 9pm, Nyangie and I stood on the lawn, looking up at the stars. I pointed out Taurus and Orion, its belt easy to spot. Easier still was Jupiter, which glowed vibrantly. A few minutes later Nyangie stood on the veranda, waiting for her friends to come out. “It’s fucking New Year’s Eve,” she said. “Can we get some energy please?”
Victoria and Claudia came outside. “We have two hours to get those New Year’s kisses,” said Nyangie.
We walked to a nearby bar. There were crowds of young people, more white than black, and everyone was young and beautiful, and even if you couldn’t see their wristbands you knew they were all going to the festival. As we stood at the entrance, Alicia, who had never lived or studied in the US, said, “You know what I don’t like? How after a while I adopt you guys’ accents.”
We hailed two tuk-tuks. I sat at the front of one, sharing the seat with the driver. It was so tiny that I sat half-suspended in the air, my legs brushing awkwardly against the steering wheel and irritating the driver. There was no door, and when we drove along curved roads, I was scared I would fall out. At one point, the other tuk-tuk caught up, pulling next to us. This was Tokyo drift on tuk-tuks. Tuk-tuk drift. Alicia was seated at the front with their driver, and she waved at us. Then the driver gunned his engine and they’d left us behind.
We crossed the bridge over Kilifi Creek. The moon was aglow, gigantic. It had been hot all day, but now here was the breeze from the sea, light and cool enough to lift the spirits. I thought about how much I would have enjoyed it if I wasn’t afraid of falling out of the tuk-tuk. The driver swerved round a corner, and another, each shift sending more of me out of the seat.
When we arrived at the venue, it was 45 minutes before midnight. Inside, there were people walking on stilts, and a guy wearing horns who came to say hi to Nyangie. He lived in Wembley, he said. She used to live in London.
Everything smelled of weed and sweat. We moved near the stage. The girls bought their drinks. There was sand everywhere. Alicia had disappeared on her quest.
Closer to the main stage, Victoria and Nyangie stopped to dab perfume on their wrists. It was 22 minutes to midnight. “I’ve given up on trying to find a New Year’s kiss,” Nyangie said.
On the stage, a DJ was on the decks, a group of dancers swirling around him. Nyangie and Victoria swayed on the spot, cups in their hands. Maria held her bottle of water. None of them seemed excited. They’d had an argument in the tuk-tuk, and all their energy seemed to have gone. It had been important for them to come back to Kenya together, to celebrate the new year together. All three of them, studying in the same university in a country so far from home, had bonded over their feelings of homesickness. And, after college, they had stayed in the US, and stayed united by the sheer ambition that had brought them there and the sense of displacement they now felt, having achieved their goals.
Around us, the crowd cheered. The song shifted into a call-and-response, the DJ getting people hyped for the new year.
Ten minutes to go, and everyone had gathered around the main stage. The crowd was thick. There were flashing lights, a booming bass, and I was getting a headache.
Five minutes to go, and Nyangie was moving with more vigour now. “Come closer!” the DJ yelled. Maria was swaying on the spot, as was Victoria, who had her eyes closed as she swayed, her head turned upwards.
Two minutes to go, and the crowd was blazing. The lights were going wild. The phones were out.
A minute to go, then we were counting down the seconds. Maria, Nyangie and Victoria looked at one another as they danced. They spoke to one another, but I couldn’t hear what they said. Perhaps the tragedy of Obi Okonkwo was that he’d had no one to share his experiences with. No one to understand the guilt, ambition, loneliness and responsibility his education brought him. Maria, Nyangie, and Victoria had one another. It didn’t matter that they’d had a fight. Here they were, near Kilifi Creek, listening to oontz-oontz music, counting down the seconds to midnight, together.
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