Profiled

It’s three in the morning as the plane from Cairo lands in Nairobi. My fellow passengers are bleary-eyed and grouchy, mostly Kenyans and stone-faced Egyptian businessmen with a few excited tourists sprinkled like salt on a plate of tired beans. It’s pouring rain, so it’s hard to explain why the ground crew parks the passenger bus a hundred feet from the base of the aircraft’s exit stairs. Everybody gets soaked running through the downpour to the bus. Nobody’s mood improves as we crowd into the transport, drenched and sticky, clutching our soggy carry-on bags. It’s standing room only, and we lurch into each other as the bus starts off toward the terminal.

The Nairobi airport is clean and tidy, but very small. The arrival hall is in a high-roofed metal building with exposed insulation and concrete floors. The passengers who are regulars here either race off through the exit marked Kenyan Citizens or to one of the stalls marked E-Visas. The rest of us mill around trying to figure out what to do.

We face a row of tall, glass-faced booths where the immigration officers sit waiting. We’ve all been encouraged by Kenya’s tourism web sites to have purchased an electronic visa in advance to speed our way through airport arrival, and sure enough, all but one of the booths are marked E-VISA ONLY. The remaining booth, small and forlorn in the far-right corner like an ostracized kid on a playground, is marked VISA ON ARRIVAL.

Many of my fellow passengers, like me, neglected to purchase an e-visa, or like me, they couldn’t get the official government website to work (see my previous blog post). We approach the booth, but one passenger has already been turned back. He advises us that we must fill out the application paperwork first. He points to a table around which crowds several dozen weary souls, all jockeying to locate the required form, find a writing implement, and then locate a horizontal surface on which they can fill out the complicated, 2-page application.

Resigned to a long ordeal, my wife and I join the queue, but as we approach the crowd, we are intercepted by a stern-looking man with a laminated and official-looking ID badge dangling around his neck. He points at us and says “Passports, please.” We hand him our passports. He gives them a suspicious examination, comparing our faces with our passport photos.

“Why are you here in Kenya?”

A couple of the other passengers are watching from the corner of their eyes.

“Um, we’re tourists,” I say.

“Come with me, please,” he says.

Uh oh. What have we done? I give my wife a glance of concern, which she returns. Why are we being singled out? Are we about to be taken to some dimly-lit back room of the airport to be questioned? Will we be searched? Maybe I match the description of some international criminal.  I shake off a fleeting mental image of a Kenyan jail cell and follow the man.

He motions us around the crowd and toward the immigration officer. He shoulders past the long queue and interrupts the officer, who is busy processing one of the other arrivals. He hands her our passports and whispers something in her ear. She looks at us and nods grimly.

The people waiting in line, especially the man who was already at the booth, watch incredulously as she examines our passports, and without a word, stamps them and hands them back. She asks for the fee. One-hundred dollars. We hand her the money, a crisp new hundred dollar bill dispensed from an ATM back in the States. She examines it skeptically, shows it to a colleague, who nods. She motions us through. We are approved.

Wait. We haven’t filled out the application form or answered the questionnaire. We haven’t done anything. We look at her for confirmation, and she motions us through again, this time quite vehemently. The man who we interrupted, an Egyptian man in an expensive but rumpled suit, is shaking his head and glaring at me with disbelief. In fact, everyone in the line, a sea of brown and black faces, are either glaring at us or watching with resigned disappointment.

My wife and I hurry through the exit to baggage claim, glad that we hadn’t had to fight the crowd or stand in the long lines, but mostly mortified that we’ve been singled out for special treatment at the expense of all our fellow passengers.

We’ve been profiled. I don’t know if it is our race (we’re white), our appearance (we’re obviously dressed like tourists), our nationality (American), or a combination of these factors, but there is obviously some unwritten policy to speed people like us through the lines.

Because of our special treatment, we are first to the baggage claim and first to the stall that sells SIM cards. While the woman in the stall prepares our phones to work in Kenya, a line forms behind us. It takes almost ten minutes. The people behind us fidget and fume. The moment we are done, a man with an umbrella materializes out of nowhere and whisks us to a waiting taxi, which guns away from the terminal without even asking where we are going.

By now it’s four in the morning, still raining, with no sign of dawn in the pitch-black sky. The streets outside the airport are flooded and unlit. People are milling around in the rain. I see a stalled car in the road ahead of us, leaning at an odd angle, one rear wheel dangling high in the air. It seems to have fallen in a hole hidden by the standing water. We divert around it.

“Don’t worry, sir,” the Kenyan driver tells me. “I will get you to your destination safely.”

UPDATE: Two weeks later, I meet a Kenyan who explains the truth behind why we were profiled and given special treatment. Read what he says here.