Kenyan Journal #7: Market Day
Habari ya wewe? - How are you?
It's been over a month since my last journal, for which I apologise. I've spent my weekends being in Nairobi, in bed with the flu and dealing with the possessions left behind by a friend who had to return to the US for a family emergency. I haven't had much time to write, but I've continued making mistakes, so this weekend when I sat down to write there was lots of fodder for the pen.
Enough apologies, let's go to the market.
Every Tuesday and Friday I come home with a backpack full of fresh fruits and vegetables from the market. The familiar Canadian staples are there: tomatoes, onions, potatoes, green peppers, spinach, carrots, bananas, limes and oranges as well as some produce that we consider seasonal, avocados, leeks and mangoes. But what I enjoy most are the ones you can't get in Canadian supermarkets: passion fruit, guavas, fresh coconut, cassava, arrow root, and on it goes. I usually spend less than four dollars Canadian for the entire back pack.
A wonderful dinner can be made by steaming a mix of chopped vegetables topped with pan browned peanuts (almonds if I'm feeling particularly gourmet), boiling some cassava and finishing with a dessert of ripe guavas.
Much as I enjoy the market, it does have some features that have taken getting used to. Nothing in the market has a price tag. You point to what you want and say "Pesa ngapi?" and you'll get quoted a price, generally twenty shillings for four large things (tomatoes, oranges, green peppers, bananas, cassava, etc.) and ten shillings for four small ones. Certain foods have special prices. Passion fruit are always ten shillings for four, regardless of size. Guavas are between three and five for a shilling, depending on size, and spinach is sold in one or two shilling bundles.
My first market visit was with Tony (a Peace Corps Volunteer) and I knew that the shillings were Kenyan, but was surprised to hear that the asking price for four bananas was a pound. "Does she mean a British pound, ie. two American dollars?" I asked Tony.
"Yup, they do that sometimes when it's a new mzungu (white). Just ask someone else." he replied.
So I did, and was happy that I got a much lower price, twenty shillings.
Those of you familiar with the British currency system are no doubt laughing at me. I still have no clue how many pence are in a farthing (or is that furlong?), but on my second market day I serendipitously discovered that there are... twenty shillings(Kenyan or British) in a pound (Kenyan or British, respectively). A perceptive vendor had seen the wince on my face when she priced some oranges at a pound and said "Pound is fair. You won't find better than twenty shillings anywhere in the market." I saw the light.
The next time I saw Tony, he complained that he'd had the hardest time finding a good price for onions and that after being told he'd have to pay a pound for four large ones by three different vendors had settled on twenty shillings for four medium ones just because the vendor hadn't tried to cheat him. I resisted making any comments about how he now knew how the rest of the world felt dealing with the American system of measurement as I explained to him what pound really meant.
The pound confusion served as a cautionary tale for me. I assumed that if I thought I was being cheated, it was actually my lack of understanding. Nagging doubts remained though. Why was it that prices were mostly consistent, but occasionally I'd find a vendor charging about half what the others were.
Two Fridays ago, it all came together. I found a nice pile of limes but there was a crowd around the stall, so I had to go around past another stall to get there. The other stall had no customers and the vendor noticed my interest and pointed to her own pile of limes and started in. "Karibu (Welcome), you like limes? How many I get for you?"
I dislike the hard sell, but I was in a hurry and the crowd at the other stall was pretty big.... "Pesa ngapi?" I said.
"Ten shillings." The price I expected. The vendor's daughter, sitting on the edge of the stall, had been in a hurry to answer as well; but she said five shillings. A glare passed from mother to daughter.
As they sometimes do in Kenya, the crowd at the adjacent stall magically disappeared as I pondered the conflicting information. The adjacent vendor had overheard the exchange and was grinning from ear to ear.
So I leaned over and pointed at her pile of limes and said "Pesa ngapi?"
"Five shillings" she grinned back.
Sold, to the man in the little round hat.
The market day had further lessons in store. I found a bundle of three nice leeks but the asking price was five shillings. "I'll give you two shillings" I said.
"Ten shillings" she replied, holding up two bundles.
"No, not two bundles. I'll give you two *shillings* for one" I said.
"Ok" she said, in the most painless haggle I've yet to experience. If only every haggle could be solved by specifying which objects you mean when you say a number.
She took the leeks, hunted around for a plastic bag, wrapped them up and handed it to me. I paid up and walked off, unslinging my back pack to put the leeks away as I went.
The bundle of leeks didn't look quite right though. Upon closer examination, I found that it wasn't a bundle at all, but a single, solitary leek. Not exactly what I meant when I said "I'll give you two shillings for one".
The biggest lesson came just before I left the market. At one of my favourite vendors, I was haggling over the price of cabbage. She wanted twenty shillings for a cabbage and I said that I could get a kilo for twenty-five shillings. To which she replied that the cabbage in question WAS a kilo.
Well, I may not know how many shillings are in a pound, but I do know that one litre of water weighs exactly one kilogram. A happy side effect of this is that whenever I carry around a Nalgene bottle full of water, I'm carrying approximately one kilo. Since I've carried quite a few full Nalgenes, I have a very good sense for just how heavy a kilo is, and the cabbage in question did not meet the grade. So I laughed and said "If this cabbage weighs a kilo, I'll give you twenty-five shillings for it."
She pulled out her scale, hooked on the cabbage then turned it to face me. The pointer was just under one and a quarter kilograms. So I paid up the twenty-five shillings, went home and weighed the cabbage against a full Nalgene.
There is no way that cabbage was anywhere close to weighing a kilo.
I've decided that the best practices for market shopping are to pick up the produce I want, hold out the amount I want to pay (unless I don't have the right change, in which case I state my price) and haggle from there.
Not that being cheated is particularly expensive (ten cents for an orange really isn't bad), or even that it is really cheating (except the cabbage incident) since I'm a willing, if coerced, participant. It's just irksome that I'm paying twice as much as the locals.
What is most interesting in all of this is that even when I know what the "fair market value" is, I usually can't get the vendor to agree to it. Back at the market on Tuesday, I spent five minutes haggling over the price of four limes, but couldn't get the vendor to budge downwards from ten shillings. Further experiments have lead me to the conclusion that the primary factor in the high prices I get isn't my ignorance, but my perceived wealth. While the vendors know that many villagers can't afford ten shillings for four limes, they know that I can and they won't give me a better price because they know it.
This leads to some interesting questions about how this "rich"-guy-pays-more form of socialism has ingrained itself into the capitalism of the Wundanyi market. It also leads to some interesting questions about why this particular example of socialism irks me.
Pesa ngapi uhuru - What price freedom?
Yaacov
P.S. In Journal #5, I asked why the British had colonised Kenya instead of the other way around. Four readers, representing four countries on three continents, wrote to tell me that the answer is to be found in the book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. Two of the four offered to send me a copy, another put his copy straight into the mail and the fourth informed me that a copy was waiting for me in Nairobi.
So I'm now the proud owner of two copies of Guns, Germs and Steel and would highly recommend it to students of history, politics, archeaology or development. For those who won't be picking up a copy, the short answer to my question is that 11,000 years ago Eurasia was the unique continent that had easily domesticable large mammals and an East-West axis allowing agriculture to spread without climate barriers, giving Euroasians a huge head start on the path to guns, germs and steel, as well as large populations, writing and political organisation.
A rather shocking revelation is that in the Americas any one of guns, germs or steel would have been enough. The advantage of guns is obvious, but ninety-five percent of the America indigenous population was killed by epidemic diseases transmitted by European explorers and conquistadors. That's not ninety-five percent of the people killed, that's ninety-five percent of the total population. As for steel, on November 16, 1532, without a single gun, the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and his 168 troops, defeated an army of 80,000 Inca soldiers, killing between six and seven thousand without loss of a single one of his own soldiers.
Anyone can be added to the list by sending an email to kenya-subscribe@yaacov.theorem.ca
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
License.
Valid XHTML &
CSS . Last updated: June 9 2007
. Hosted by: theorem.ca. Email: