Twenty years of Kenya

I first flew to Nairobi for work in my second year in Dubai. I remember thinking it would be a trip. Twenty years later it is the place I have spent more time in than anywhere except home, and I am no longer sure which one is home.

How it started

Most of the families I work with are African, and a good number of them are Kenyan. In the beginning that was a professional fact. I learned the banks, the regulators, the way a company is registered and the way a piece of land is held. I learned that a meeting that starts forty minutes late can still be the most important meeting of the year.

Somewhere in the first five years the professional fact became something else. I started staying the weekend. Then a week. I started being invited to things that had nothing to do with money, and then to things that had nothing to do with me, which is when you know.

What it taught me about the work

Working with families across Africa changed how I think about my job, in ways I would not have learned in Dubai or Mumbai.

The first is that continuity matters more than growth. The families I admire most are not the ones who made the most in a good decade. They are the ones who kept what they had through a bad one. A business that survives a currency shock, a political turn and a succession, and is still there for the grandchildren, is a rarer and better thing than a business that doubled.

The second is that the paperwork is never just paperwork. Who holds the land, whose name is on the shares, which country the trust is in: these decide whether a family stays a family after a death. I have seen it go both ways.

The third is patience. The good decisions in this work are made slowly, over years, with people you trust. There is no shortcut, and the people selling one are usually the problem.

The other Kenya

And then there is the Kenya that has nothing to do with any of that. The Mara in the late afternoon. A table of friends in Karen that starts at eight and finishes when it finishes. The drive out of Nairobi on a Friday when the air changes.

I do not know how to explain this part to people who have not been. I have stopped trying. I just go back.