There is something deeply emblematic about shopping malls in Africa. The choice of the up-market Westgate Mall in Nairobi for attack by the Somali Islamist group al Shabaab is therefore strongly significant. Malls have come to be what a columnist in the Paris daily Le Monde described as a “sacred symbol of the consumer society” – icons of Western capitalism, harbingers of globalisation. They are a sitting target, especially in Kenya, vulnerably close to the turbulence of Somalia, and being sucked more and more into the conflict.
This is a complex and dangerous issue, as if Kenya did not have enough political problems of its own. There are over 500,000 Somali refugees in Kenya (including at Dadaab, the “largest refugee camp in the world”), as well as countless others not in the official total, not to mention actual Kenyan Somalis. There have already been attacks on tourist venues near the coast and in the port city of Mombasa, but this is the first frontal incident at such a prominent target in the country’s capital. Riots in Mombasa following the killing of a pro-Shabaab Muslim cleric, and increasing evidence of the chaotic behaviour of the Kenyan security services add to the impression of a country on the edge of crisis.
A number of commentators have seen comparisons (both in location and in recklessly indiscriminate style of attack) to the Pakistan-based assault on the luxury hotel and other central points in Mumbai in India. There is something about malls in Africa that send out particularly ambivalent and disturbing signs. I first became aware of the way in which this peculiarly American concept (a kind of ‘gated’ high street) has been infiltrating Africa when on my first visit to South Africa nearly twenty years ago for the famous first democratic elections in 1994. Travelling in Kwazulu-Natal, where I did my election observation for the EU, I came to Empangeni and found a totally black African mall, in contrast to the glittering white malls already established such as that in the posh Johannesburg suburb of Sandton (“the nearest thing in Africa to Dallas”, I wrote at the time). They have spread elsewhere: Michela Wrong in her book about John Githongo’s exposure of corruption in Kenya Its Our Turn to Eat dwells on what she calls the “mall fantasy” in Africa.
In this game, Lagos has been far behind: even when I arrived for my two-year stay in 2001 malls were very new and tended to be called plazas, as in the MegaPlaza on Victoria Island, whose very novelty fascinated friends. In my own period, one tended to shop at supermarkets such as goodies, Park and Shop or, for Lebanese and French treats, Lafayette. As this column noted a year ago, Soyinka’s Beatification of an Area Boy, written in the mid-1990s, opens among street traders in front of a mall, unsurprisingly called La Plaza. And yet, even last year, as noted in this column, Governor Fashola, a purveyor of globalisation if ever there was one, lamented that Lagos had only two shopping malls (both South African- owned) while Johannesburg had seventy. We are told that more are promised next year, but the tardiness is still an interesting phenomenon, just as fast-food joints in Lagos have taken some time to ‘globalise’.
In Nairobi, however, Westgate has heightened the sense of crisis and doubt around this symbol of the march to globalisation. An international network hub, Nairobi has interestingly received much more publicity in global communications than parallel attacks by Boko Haram in north-east Nigeria, even with the higher mortality there. International identification is greater in Nairobi, and the mall phenomenon has burgeoned there, helped by a large expatriate population, as well as the Asian community, with whom Westgate was especially popular, Michela Wrong has a telling description of the material goods on display that will be familiar to mall frequenters,”…everything from dog muzzles to mattresses, artificial flowers to birthday cards, nappies to dishwashers. Slicing Parma ham and handling French cheese takes certain skills; staff had been taught them and they had been drilled to the point where they could recite the precise location of key products without a moment’s hesitation”.
While this is may be seen by some as comforting evidence of the growing presence of the African middle classes, it still strikes alarm signals. A just-published afrobarometer research survey suggests most Africans polled believe the recent ten years of growth is not trickling down to the majority of the continent’s population. Despite recent progress in human development indices, poverty is still a huge problem, and growth is more than counter-balanced by demography, seen especially in disastrously high figures of youth unemployment. The horrendous tragedy of African migrants (mainly from Somali and Eritrea, though over the part five years the victims have come from a wide range of countries) drowned off the Italian island of Lampedusa must be seen as an awful warning of the massive challenges still facing the African continent.
Kaye Whiteman
1936 – 2014
