Young upwardly-mobile suburban professionals taking over Nairobi

Yuppyism has arrived in Kenya. Young upwardly-mobile suburban professionals (commonly referred to as yuppies) in Nairobi are deserting their roots and getting together to live affluent lifestyles marked by strange addictions and affectations. Their ancestors must be turning in their graves. This new group of Kenyans are self-absorbed and see themselves as too sophisticated for the local scene, too sexy for Kenya.

The first defining element of the Kenyan Yuppy is an affected aversion to politics. Our yuppies pretend to hate politics forgetting politics affects everything around them. They do this but secretly wish their own tribesman would become president. But this very Kenyan, very primordial wish is kept under carefully-constructed exteriors that seem to speak of an urbanite far above the common man’s yearning for political goodies.

foreign-sounding accent

A good yuppy, the story goes, is one who doesn’t know who his MP is. The aversion to politics is expressed in a well-crafted, foreign-sounding accent. This is learnt and re-learnt by listening to certain urban radio stations whose presenters, despite being Kenyan, proudly showcase a strange inability to pronounce Kenyan surnames – right alongside an astonishingly good ability to pronounce obscure Western wordss like “hors d’oeuvre”.

To belong to the yuppy class, one must work hard — and that includes working hard on one’s tongue and its ability to say the right things in the right way: “Blankets and Wine” is okay, “beer” is not. No self-respecting yuppy would be caught dead without a gym membership and a bicycle riding group.

The very definition of yuppy includes an oversized desire to grow extremely thin, even when nothing is done towards that end. To ensure this side of their image is covered, yuppies show off gym memberships like honour badges. And it cannot be just any old gym — no, no, no.

metrosexual men

It has to be a gym so expensive that the yuppy takes out a bank loan just to pay the membership fees. One of those sky-high gyms in Nairobi or Mombasa hotels where the gym instructors are all metrosexual men, complete contradictions of nature as they show up with bulging muscles and the most feminine of mannerisms.

Villagers will tell you for free that gyms are passing fads. Memberships are for show, and after a few months the motivation to keep running on stationary machines sort of wears off. This is when the yuppy needs a bicycle group.

The villager interprets ‘bicycle’ to mean the age-old means of transport, the Iron Horse, that allows the rural economy to flourish in the absence of motorised transport or railway services of any sort. Kenya, the villager will tell you, abandoned the railway shortly after independence, and high taxes have meant that motor vehicles are only for the rich.

Fancy names

The yuppy bicycle, however, is not the “Raleigh” variety that ordinary mortals buy to ferry bananas to the market. It is, instead, some strange contraption that is not even metallic. Fancy names like “carbon fibre” are bandied about. This is apparently some form of plastic — how a grown up man can ride around on a plastic bicycle is something only the yuppy can explain.

A bunch of these yuppies will get together in a group of twenty or so, buy colourful helmets and tiny little water bottles, and then ride around Nairobi’s forests on their plastic bicycles, all in the name of exercise. Of course, proper exercise would mean they go to their fathers’ farms and weed sugar-cane, but yuppies are too lazy to lift a jembe more than one foot high.

But nature, in its wisdom, allows such things to happen — while in the woods cycling for health, the yuppies get jumped by streetboys and thugs, which helps redistribute wealth and keeps the earth going round. Kenya, sadly, seems to need fewer yuppies and more real people.