The country has made great strides in transforming itself for the better.
The wizened witch-doctor was bang on!
Rolling out his beads, bones and stones onto an upturned crate he told me I would one day return to his beloved homeland Kenya.
Aye right! The man was obviously insane. There was no way I was going back to a country that required you to become a human pin cushion with inoculation after inoculation just to gain entry. A country where everything seemed to bite, sting or poison you. A country so rampant with disease, corruption and poverty you thought you had entered the Twilight Zone.
Rioting, killing and maiming seemed a way of life a fact witnessed first hand by me and my wife, shocked newlyweds, from our hotel window.
Well, that was 16 years ago, and times and people do change.
The witch doctor was right here I was again, back in Nairobi for the third time!
The differences from that first time to this were both striking and genuinely uplifting.
Gone was the fearful, ignorant and naive young man of then, replaced instead by someone who has lived and travelled a bit. Also gone was the apprehension and dread etched on the faces of those who lived there.
The place seems to have been transformed and that can be seen and felt across the country.
New roads, new schools, housing and hospitals are springing up like Thomson’s gazelles. Clean water and sewage plants, as well as massive engineering projects providing electricity from volcanic thermal vents, are underway and large swathes of arid land have now been replaced with fields of maize, corn and wheat.
There is still much to do, the majority of the population still lives on a pittance, there are still disease-ridden slums, corruption is still a way of life and where the African wildlife meets the humanity there are huge problems.
But hope has, in the main, replaced despair and for most Kenyans the new world order has them included, not cast aside.
So what has caused the transformation?
Well for one thing, unlike the shambles that is Zimbabwe, Kenya has embraced a new political system.
All politicians now have to declare their financial interests in advance and throughout their term in office or face the wrath of newly elected President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Ethics and Anti-Corruption Committee.
But the main reason by far is the billions of dollars Chinese industrialists’ are ploughing into the nation. It is staggering, and almost all the major projects have Chinese backing or influence.
And Kenya is not alone. A host of other African nations are benefitting from Chinese investment and people’s lives are being transformed for the better.
Should we be worried? Certainly not if Chinese investment means an improvement in education, health, welfare, employment and sanitary conditions for the ordinary man in the street and is not just lining the pockets of the greedy and unscrupulous few.
Maybe we should have more of it here! Time will tell, but the signs are very encouraging,
As they say, safari so good!
As for the safari well, it was absolutely fantastic and the guides, the hotel staff and, in fact, every Kenyan I met were wonderful, hospitable and a joy to be with.
The scenery was staggering and being able to watch the migration of the wildebeest was something I will never forget. I cant wait to go back!