Taking the Taxi in Kenya

Taking The Taxi

Mombasa, Kenya

Spring, 1994

It was a hot Sunday day in Kenya. Mid-morning, the temperature was soaring to the high 90F. So an invitation to spend the afternoon at a plush resort with a pool and bar service was welcomed.  My friends had booked a room here for a few days and suggested I join them.  So I hopped a taxi and looked forward to a doing pretty much nothing for the rest of the day. My taxi driver was a young woman who proudly told me she had just graduated for college.

“What did you study”? I asked her.

“Languages.  I learned languages. I can speak English, French and Spanish”, she proudly told me.

I felt ashamed of myself as I can barely speak English. And here, this woman, in this very poor country,  spoke four languages and a few dialects of her native language.

“What do you hope to do now that you have your degree”?

“What do you mean”?  It was clear that she did not understand the jest of my question.

“What type of job do you hope to get where you can use all of these languages?”

“I’m doing it.  I am a taxi driver.  This is my own car. This is my business.”

“You went to college to learn all of these languages so you could be a taxi driver?” I couldn’t believe what she was telling me.

“Yes, yes.  Now, I can take the tourists because I can talk to them.  I will make more money if I can take the tourists.  If I cannot speak to them, I cannot drive them to their destination”.

I was flabbergasted.  But I could not continue our conversation because a police officer flagged her  to pulled over.  She got out of the car and had a long conversation with him. When she returned, I asked why had she been pulled over.

“I do not have a permit on my car for this area.  He said I have to have a special permit to drive on this street. So he wanted to give me a fine”.

“How much is the permit?”

“It is not much, about 2 dollars.

“Why don’t you just get the permit”?

“Because it does not matter.  If I had the permit, he would find another reason to pull me over.  Maybe my headlight is not on or I drive too fast or whatever, he would just pull me over, that’s all.

“Really, why do you think that?  Isn’t that illegal”, I asked naively.

“He pulled me over because you saw you.  When the police see us with the white people, we just get pulled over.  They think I will make a lot of money because I have a white person in my car.  So it does not matter if I have the permit or not.  He just wants to make money off of me, that’s all.  They all do it”. She spoke without judgment.

“Did you pay him”, I want to know. I found myself to be irritated by this injustice.

“No, I told him you did not pay me yet.  So he said I had to pay him when I return.  He said he would look for me.  But maybe he won’t be there when I return so that would be good”.

“Is that how it always it?”  My self-righteousness began to rear its ugly head.  I had an urge to fight back somehow.

“Yes, the police always try to make money off of the people.  They are very corrupt. You have to pay them or you get arrested.”  She spoke with a resignation to this sad state of affairs.

As she spoke to me, I sunk down in the back seat so that I was no longer visible to anyone on the street. The driver noticed my horizontal descent and laughed, “Thank you.  Yes, that is a good plan. That is a good idea.”