This is about an all too familiar story. A young black man or woman walking into a restaurant and then not being served because his skin colour bears an excess concentration of melanin.
These prejudices have been with us for some time. It is absurd that 47 years after Kenya’s independence in many “business” circles being black, young or not having the right sir-name equals receiving poor service or none at all because most likely you are broke.
I recently referred a friend who still has a reasonable amount of chedars in his pockets to buy a flat to a real estate agent in town. He was quickly dismissed and told that all the flats had been sold off. A week later I meet the same real estate agent complaining of how he has not been getting “reliable customers” and that his business was slow. All I could do at that point was laugh.
This lack of reliable buyers in a big way explains why houses that were completed more than two years ago are in most of Kileleshwa, kilimani and other areas in Nairobi are still vacant. The original business model was to construct apartments for the expatriate community. It makes no business sense to target a handful of white and other white at heart expatriates in a country with 37 million indigenous residents. Most of these so called expats are broke students who have been sponsored for internship experiences in the bush who then refuse to go back home after their terms are over or some retired plumber from Cumbria. But as long as they are white, they are more reliable than a highly educated professional black man or woman who refuses to wear suits or a foreign accent.
These dying breed of bigoted, stealers should realize that the ground is quickly shifting beneath them. And that posers are more likely to come in suits or speaking in foreign accents and that being lean is more likely that the person is health conscious rather than an indication of the status of his balance sheet.