Salim Lone turns the car down a winding driveway in Nairobi’s diplomatic enclave to a bright bungalow with a terraced garden. The house is separated from the thick overgrowth in the back by a high fence topped with electric wire. There’s a gate and guard.
”When I was a young journalist,” he says, ”I never came back here. This area was all white.”
Today, he says, he lives here by accident. He and his wife, Pat, rented this house because it was one of the few they could find that had a downstairs bedroom, which they needed for his mother. But it is a peaceful spot for a man who has spent his forty-odd years in journalism making other people uncomfortable.
For his political commentary and muckraking style, he ran afoul of both the Kenyatta and Moi regimes in the 1970s and ’80s. He was jailed, stripped of his Kenyan citizenship, exiled in 1982, and made stateless. He went back to the United States, where he had attended Kenyon College in the 1960s and where he had worked for the United Nations. Later, President Moi sent word that all had been forgiven and that he was free to return. He did so, only to find himself in jail again.
Kenya has matured politically since the return of multi-party elections in 1992 and the end of Moi’s reign a decade later, but Lone still takes to the pages of the Kenya’s Daily Nation to criticize the current president for failing to complete his promised reforms and to call for greater participation in opposition politics.
He’s also fighting bigger battles. In 2003 Lone served as spokesman for the United Nations Mission in Iraq when Sergio Vieira de Mello, the Brazilian diplomat in charge of the mission, was killed along with 23 other UN personnel. A suicide truck bomb demolished the building.
”The United Nations should never have been there,” he says. “This was just cover for the United States and the Bush administration’s illegal war.” He resigned in protest after the incident and returned to Nairobi, where he has become a popular figure in the media for the stridency of his views.
His recent article in the International Herald Tribune about the new US involvement in Somalia has struck a chord in this part of the world. He called the American attacks on alleged al-Qaeda sites in Somalia “a reckless proxy war [whose] real goal is to obtain a direct foothold in a highly strategic region by establishing a client regime there.”
He is in demand as a speaker and commentator, especially as Kenya finds itself on the fringes of an American military operation and has sealed its border with Somalia against the flow of refugees and the Islamists of Mogadishu’s toppled regime. Kenya was a victim of terrorism in 1998 when the American embassy was bombed in Nairobi, killing some 200 Kenyans, and in 2002 when an Israeli-owned hotel was bombed near Mombasa. The Pentagon initially said it had killed one of the perpetrators of those attacks, but has since backed away from the claim.
”It’s the same pretense as the Iraq war,” he says. “The United States is using charges of terrorism as a pretext for another illegal war.”
For all his pique, Lone is quick to laugh and is a generous host. When I met him for lunch, we had a delightful chicken, rice, and somosa meal prepared by his American wife, who works for UNICEF. “After Pat and I were married, we lived for a time with my parents, and she really learned to cook traditional food very well. Now she is as good as the other Pakistani Kenyan daughters-in-law.”
We talk a little about Indians in Nairobi, if there is any sense of insecurity as a minority community. “Ten or fifteen years ago, that was true, but not today. There are now more blacks than Indians in the middle class, so there is less resentment at the community’s wealth,” he says.
Lone spends his time consuming all the newspapers he can get his hands on. Internet connections in Kenya are slow and unreliable, so he pores over newsprint, clipping articles and keeping files. His study is strewn—not piled but strewn—with newspapers, as if they have been blown off the desk by a strong wind. ”I’m thinking about hiring an assistant to help me organize these files,” he says, his voice trailing off, perhaps at the sheer scale of the task ahead.
I think he is secretly drawn to the disorder of it all. It hasn’t been easy for him to be a Kenyan Asian, gadfly, progressive journalist, political prisoner, UN official in Iraq, and campaigner against what he perceives as the Bush administration’s imperialism, which has now arrived at Kenya’s doorstep. His job as a writer is to probe that chaos, cut through the lies and propaganda, and produce something revealing and often unpopular with the powers that be.
All images by Preston Merchant
Salim Lone with Biscuit (blond) and Tea (brunette).
