By Ogova Ondego
Published April 22, 2018
Nothing gets a family out of abject poverty in Kenya faster than a daughter as old as 12 with a white ‘boyfriend’ as young as 70 or 80.
Mombasa, Kenya’s second largest city, conjures up images of leisure and pleasure. To stress this image of paradise on the East African Indian Ocean coast, Kiswahili sayings like ‘Mombasa Raha‘ (Mombasa is a haven of Pleasure) or ‘Kuingia ni Harusi‘ (Visiting Mombasa is as enjoyable as attending a wedding) have been coined.
Eye-pleasing tropical beaches have made Kenya’s coastal region, whose headquarters is Mombasa, the home of hospitality and tourism industry that attracts tourists with Dollars, Pounds and Euros like nectar attracts bees. An El Dorado of sorts, many young people with dreams of ‘making it’ for themselves and their poor families flock to the place in droves to have a share of these Euros, Pounds and Dollars that abound in Mombasa.
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This is the setting of Mombasa Raha, My Foot!, a 328-page novel by Haroun Risa Kimani Shani, a young Kenyan actor, scriptwriter and novelist who pulls the lid off the insidious side of the lucrative tourism industry that is built on tropical African Sun, Sand and Sex.
Risa, using the art of storytelling, presents the story of how abject poverty drives children and youth into the trap set by rapists, pimps, sex pests and human traffickers operating out of Mombasa. Though it is poverty that drives many youngsters to Mombasa, Risa writes, quoting statistics provided by sources like US State Department Trafficking in Persons Reports and United Nations International Children’s Education Fund (UNICEF), argues that other youth get into it due to unemployment, peer pressure or mere desire for some ‘fun’.
This novel, that is currently selling on Amazon, also touches on sex tourism in Dadaab Refugee Camp in north-eastern Kenya, Kisumu in western Kenya and Nairobi where girls and boys are forced to engage in all forms de-humanising sexual acts, including ‘unnatural sexual activity'(read bestiality, homosexuality and paedophilia) by those who pay them in hard currencies such as Unites States of America’s Dollars, European Union’s Euros and British Pounds.
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Girls, from as far as Mumbai in India, are trafficked into Kenya for sex tourism during events such as cultural festivals, fashion weeks, lotteries and conferences in leading tourist hotels across the coast.
Risa writes that though child sex tourism may be considered a big problem by right thinking people across the world, poor Kenyans condone it.
‘Sex tourism is real. Sexual slavery is real. It is happening in Kenya, and this is my input in joining the fight against this vice,’ Risa writes in the introduction to Mombasa Raha,My Foot!
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However, don’t rush into any conclusion concerning the novel that Risa says is based on his interviews with ‘people who have lived in Mombasa, and witnessed sex tourism with their own eyes, even participated in it.’ His novel is not just a catalogue of what they told him. Mombasa Raha, My Foot! reads like real life and not made-up events that are told in prose and poetry. To be precise, he writes as if it were a screen or stage play, complete with acts and scenes that could easily be shot as a movie on the dreams, nostalgia, dashed hopes and regret of some of the characters in the novel that, like any good fiction, has a surprise ending.
What I also find refreshing in this novel is Risa’s attempts at restoring the fast diminishing public faith in media and journalism in the age of fake news, misinformation and corruption. It is that good old trade known as investigative journalism that appears to triumph in its service to social good, standing on the side of the voiceless. Another positive thing about the novel is that the youth themselves take the initiative in addressing perseived injustice.
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The quality of Mombasa Raha, My Foot! could be greatly enhanced with some tight editing, though. It may also call for fewer but well developed characters, complete with the novelist’s style of engaging a reader’s complete attention by using words that appeal to all the human senses: see, hear, smell, taste, and feel.
Risa, who was born in 1994, says he has been acting and writing all his whole life.
“I started off in stage plays such as 3:02, Once Upon a Parable, Keng Herod: The Man Above, before going on to feature in a television series called Lies That Bind and short films such as Plastic Maasai, Homecoming, Come We Stay, Pumwani, Saidia and Sticking Ribbons,” he says.
Saying he has featured in TV Commercials, Risa says he has also won Best Narrative award in Igiza Christian Theatre Festival for his narrative titled Simple Farming Tools.
