Kenya was my home for ten years, from 1985 to 1995. I was sent there as an anthropological researcher for McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I was tasked with chronicling and understanding social change among a non-literate, non-industrialized group of camel nomads called the Rendille, who live in the desert wastes of Northern Kenya.

Simply put, the Rendille, like their other pastoral neighbors the Samburu, Turkana and Somali were living in a manner that had not changed for centuries. They were part of what is called “Old Africa,” a way of life that was transformed first by missionaries, then colonial administrators and finally independent African governments bent on modernization.

Until the late 1980s the Rendille and their pastoral neighbors had avoided these modernizing trends. That is now changing, for rapid, accelerating social and cultural change is one of the leitmotifs of post-colonial sub–Saharan Africa. Each generation is often radically different from the one that came before them.

After two years of living among and studying the Rendille and their changing social environment (they were settling down and sending their last-born sons to school) my wife and our first-born son moved full time to the capital city of Nairobi.

Nairobi in those days was and still is a bustling, turbulent, dynamic capital city which also serves as a regional node in the relief and development world for Kenya’s less fortunate neighbors such as war-torn Southern Sudan, the Congo, Rwanda (during and after its civil war), Ethiopia (when in periodic turmoil) and the constant civil war of Somalia (in contrast to peaceful Somaliland which has just been recognized by the State of Israel-may other sane nations follow suit!)

In Nairobi I worked under the direction of the late world-famous paleontologist Richard Leakey. Soon after, the Museum appointed me Head of the Department of Ethnography and Special Projects Advisor to the Director of the Museum. During the careers of most thirty-something anthropologists who become even more specialized, in contrast I was thrown into an institution which had a wide, almost universal pure science research agenda with a public education dimension.

And so I became, through much trial and error, somewhat of an expert in the development of a national research institution in a developing country, which included a Ford Foundation grant that I co-wrote and got funded to develop a strategic plan for the Museum, where I functioned as the assistant project director. Our second son was born in Nairobi in1990.

Because of the regional functions of Nairobi it became a home for many thousands of expatriates from Europe, North and South America and parts of then non-communist Asia, giving Nairobi an international, multi-cultural “icing on the cake”  feel amongst the majoritarian, modernizing African middle class and wealthy political elites.

When we lived in Nairobi there was an American School, a German school, a Swedish School, numerous British styled schools as well as German, British and American cultural institutes and libraries. All of this was amplified by the presence of various UN institutions and their outrageously overpaid employees and wasteful bureaucracies.

Because of Richard Leakey’s fame and charisma (and the absence of opera and major theatre) the Museum became one of the main centers of public life in Nairobi through its “Know Kenya” lecture series presented to the public each autumn. There, once a week, starting with Richard’s standing room only lectures, each head of a department regaled the audience with a lecture on the cutting edge science that was used to make sense of this natural wonder; a multi tribal, multi-cultural, modernizing African state situated in the spectacular Rift Valley, bordering the Indian Ocean, the Sudan and the Horn of Africa to the north and northeast.

I had the privilege of being one of those lecturers. And so socially and professionally I got to know scores of Kenyans who had been born some time before independence, as well as a growing number of younger researchers,........

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