A Newspaper Clipping

It was a hot afternoon at the end of November 1980. The private detectives office of Tim Tutts was going through a rough patch. The closeness to Christmas, a relative social calm pressure thatmounted in the cooker, the slow affluence of tourists shocked by the recent murder of a couple of old European women, all this made Nairobi seem like the world's most boring metropolis. The capital of Kenya, reputed to be the most important in East Africa, appeared like a landing strip, or worse, a trampoline to cheap adventure. This is what the city had become, from two lines of rudimentary tents erected at the beginning of the century by the fevered engineers of the Mombasa-Uganda Train Company.
Tutts had always thought it a miracle how the city could be approaching half a million souls. Thinking of those clichÈs in 1900 of Nairobi as a campsite, he reflected unenthusiastically: "And all that titanic effort to let some rich and obese European colonialists go safari hunting, and display the heads of the most beautiful animals of Africa as trophies on their living room walls."