Nairobi

The European woman travelling in a much too warm jumper, by contrast, looks far less composed with her nose to the glass of the airplane window a few thousand kilometres further on and higher – at the Sahara. She sees sand hours long, eternities broad, now Libyan, then Nubian, but always sand. She cannot see enough of it.

The desert from above is striped, straight or crosswise, it is dotted, like a relief, the Braille of the wind or a work by the German artist Anselm Kiefer. Suddenly it is populated on the smallest space; it is neither hot, nor dangerous. When you fly to the Frankfurter Rundschau, Jackson Mutinda, pay attention to it.

But, now first of all, the airliner gets ready to land at Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi, a good hour late. Up front the Maasai woman disappears. I myself stand and stare. All are black, all are busy and many are laughing. Behind a pane, three men are praying in a Mosque glass box; the Holy Bible lies, all alone, in the box next to it. A child runs past.

Frankfurt is incredibly far away.It was there that paleoanthropologist and director of the Centre of Interdisciplinary African Studies at Goethe University, Friedemann Schrenk, advised me: “You’ll have seat 24 A on the plane? Then, when you land, look to the left and you’ll see the Ngong Hills lying there like the knuckles on a hand.” But, as I said, the flight was late, and it gets dark in Nairobi at 6:30 p.m. I couldn’t see my own hand in front of my eyes. In Germany it’s still only 4:30 at this time, but now in autumn even there it’s almost dark.

Together with Barbara Reich, the organizational angel of the Goethe-Institut Nairobi, I travelled on – in the dark – along the border of the National Park towards the city. “Depending on the time, a giraffe might be standing here watching,” says Goethe’s angel. And suddenly an elephant is standing there. It is gray, medium sized and a model in front of a supermarket. In we go, after the hours-long flight to the unknown, to hunt for some breakfast for my first morning. What it was like in the supermarket and how Nairobi can make an adult turn into a child will be the subject of my next story.

Swahili of the Day: Mtoto means child.