NAIROBI, Kenya—James Mwangi sits on a stone block at the edge of a dusty sidewalk along Moi Avenue, his back facing the street. His legs are stretched and spread in front of him. He doesn’t prefer to sit this way, but it is the most comfortable for his brace-supported legs. Mwangi’s customer, a light-skinned man dressed in a black suit, also sits on a cardboard placed on blocks that serve as a stool. The man’s feet rest on another block between him and Mwangi, giving a complete picture of a makeshift shoeshine booth.
For over 16 years, nearly 20 thousand Liberians fleeing a vicious civil war benefited from an American government hospitality program called “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS), a stopgap immigration measure granted to eligible nationals of designated countries. The program gave Liberians the legal permission to live and work in the United States as long as conditions in their homeland remain precarious.
It's been decades since I last heard Muhammad Ali extolling his own virtues. "I am the greatest; I said that even before I knew I was. I figured that if I said it enough, I would convince the world that I really was the greatest."
Now that I've met Roy Kapale, Ugandan musician of Souca, Lingala, and Afrobeat music, I've met a self-promoting person who just might have the same uncannily accurate sense of himself.