“Good morning! I am Marcel Romdane and I’m a pilot,” I announced with the delusional confidence of a man who thought credentials still mattered outside of Western Europe. I expected reverence. I expected a hush to fall over the room. Maybe a discreet radio call to alert the Minister of Aviation that a Great White Hope had arrived to elevate East African skies with German precision and Teutonic excellence. Instead, I got Jonathan...
Jonathan, whose government-issued name badge was half melted and clinging to his shirt like a leech that had overdosed on indifference, looked up from his decades-old newspaper, possibly a Daily Nation, with all the enthusiasm of a python digesting a sheep. His eyes met mine, briefly—registering the vague shape of a Muzungu—before sinking back down into the printed abyss of soccer scores and state-sponsored delusion.
I was still grinning like an idiot. Like a man who genuinely believed that walking into an aviation authority unannounced with a laminated license and a logbook full of heroic potato-field takeoffs would earn him more than a light scorn from the underpaid undead staffing the counters. I stood there, radiating confidence like a deranged TED Talk speaker. This was the Civil Aviation Authority, after all. Surely, they lived for pilots. I expected questions. Admiration. Possibly a ceremonial dance in my honour followed by a light lunch and paperwork. At the very least, acknowledgement.
What I got was a roomful of aviation clerks who looked at me like I’d just interrupted their 13th consecutive tea break with a loud fart and a PowerPoint presentation.
Still riding the high of my imagined importance, I tried again.
“I’m from Germany,” I added, this time louder and with the cadence of a messiah. “I’m here to convert my pilot’s license. Shouldn’t take long. Chop-chop.”
Silence. The kind of silence that spreads like carbon monoxide in a locked garage. If smugness were a weapon, I’d have nuked the entire room. But instead of shock and awe, I was met with the dead-eyed, slack-jawed expression exclusive to civil servants who’ve spent their adult lives in heat, fluorescent lighting, and constant exposure to bad perfume and slow death.
They didn’t say a word.
They didn’t even blink.
One guy in the back scratched himself with a pen. Someone coughed—a sound that might’ve been tuberculosis or maybe just disdain trying to escape the lungs. A woman behind a cracked Plexiglas screen sighed so long and slow I thought she might evaporate into dust and save herself the rest of the day.
This wasn’t an office.
This was a mausoleum for ambition.
A bureaucratic black hole where time slowed, logic curled up and died, and paperwork regenerated faster than cancer cells at Chernobyl. My arrival didn’t spark reverence—it triggered the same reaction as a pigeon walking into a courtroom: vaguely annoying, entirely unwelcome, and destined to shit on something important. And clearly, I had entered during some sacred interval between morning coffee, second breakfast, and the government-mandated mid-morning stare into the middle distance.
But I kept talking, because I was still clinging to the notion that being a pilot meant something. Somewhere deep in my colon, hope still lived.
“I have all my documents here. Logbook. License. Verified hours. Should be a straightforward swap. I assume you have some kind of… process?”
Still nothing. Just the creaking fan overhead, rotating like it was powered by the dying breath of failed dreams.
Eventually, Jonathan sighed, stood up with the urgency of a depressed glacier, and took my papers like a man handed a used diaper and asked to frame it.
At that exact moment, it hit me.
I was not the protagonist here.
I wasn’t even a guest star.
In this bureaucratic circus of cracked desks, unplugged printers, and human Wi-Fi dead zones, I was just another Muzungu walking headfirst into the flaming port-a-potty that is East African bureaucracy—with nothing but a pilot license, misplaced optimism, and the blind confidence of a golden retriever trying to file taxes. If this was the gateway to aviation in Africa, then I had just strutted into a Somalia war zone with a backpack full of optimism and a sharpened spoon.
“Yes, Bwana,” Jonathan finally spoke—though “spoke” may be generous. It was less a sentence and more a low rumble of bureaucratic resignation. He’d clearly realised that ignoring me wouldn’t make me leave, only multiply. Like a fungus. Or white guilt.
He sighed the sigh of a man who had hoped to die peacefully at his desk but now had to postpone death in order to print paperwork. Slowly, theatrically, he reached under the counter and pulled out a sheet of paper that looked like it had been fished out of a swamp during a civil war. It was stained, wrinkled, possibly cursed.
“We cannot just issue a Kenyan license, Boss” he said with a smirk so smug it deserved its own diplomatic immunity. “Here is a list of the requirements you must fulfil.”
And with that, he handed me a document longer than a war crimes indictment. If I had applied for the Kenyan Intergalactic Mars Exploration Corps, it wouldn’t have been more demanding. This wasn’t a checklist—it was a cosmic punishment. A bureaucratic pilgrimage designed to strip you of your identity, your hope, and eventually your will to breathe.
Item highlights included:
- a. A full Kenyan aviation medical exam, including but not limited to:
- eyesight
- hearing
- heart function
- brainwaves
- a possible colonoscopy
- and a polite interrogation to determine if I was “mentally fit to operate an aircraft or exist in society at all.”
- b. Official confirmation from whichever obscure Teutonic overlord governed the German Luftfahrt-Bundesamt that my license wasn’t a lookalike, forged during Oktoberfest, or bartered from a Ukrainian flight school run out of a tractor shed.
- c. A written exam based on material that may or may not exist in this dimension.
- d. A flight check with a KCAA examiner whose only documented qualification was surviving Nairobi traffic without sedation.
- e. One certified blood sample
- f. A voodoo blessing by a licensed elder
- g. Six copies of the last six pages of my flight log—which, by the way, only had five pages. Apparently I was supposed to manifest page six via witchcraft, hallucination, or a generous lie.
Jonathan cleared his throat like a man announcing the end of someone’s sanity.
“Only after completing all these requirements, we may—may—consider issuing you the license,” he declared, grinning like Satan at a job interview.
I blinked. Hard.
This… this might take longer than the thirty minutes I’d optimistically allocated in my head—right between “secure dream job with a respectable NGO,” “find airstrip,” “buy bush plane fuel from a guy named Moses,” and “negotiate a good price on a secondhand Land Rover.”
Hell, even shopping might have to get in line now.
My beautifully deluded fantasy—of soaring over the Kenyan plains by Friday afternoon, heroically spotting poachers through my telephoto lens while eating biltong and quoting Hemingway—deflated like a birthday balloon stabbed with a broken biro.
“What’s this test about, and where do I take it?” I asked, voice cracking, dignity leaking out like air from my ego.
“Oh,” Jonathan chirped, suddenly far more enthusiastic—like a vending machine that had just swallowed your last coin.
“The exam is held right here, every second Friday. It’s a computer-based test. Sixty minutes. Nothing big.”
He extended his hand—palm up, fingers twitching with the muscle memory of a thousand bribes.
“Twenty dollars,” he said.
The words weren’t a request.
They were a verdict.
Delivered with the casual finality of someone informing you that your pet has been sold for parts and your kidneys are next.
It was the international sign for:
“Give me money, Muzungu, or go home and try your luck herding goats.”
I stared at his outstretched palm like it was the gaping mouth of a financial black hole—one that had already consumed countless hopeful souls and three different currencies.
I wasn’t entirely sure whether to put money in it, slap it, or bite it in a rabid frenzy and flee into the mountains.
“Twenty dollars for what exactly?” I asked, a bit too earnestly—like a child asking the dentist if this is going to hurt.
Jonathan’s expression twisted into the kind of look people usually reserve for dogs wearing sunglasses or Germans attempting humour.
He didn’t answer immediately. He just judged me.
Judged me like I had walked into his church during mass and farted on the altar.
“Well, Bwana,” he said slowly, as if explaining aerodynamics to a brick, “for the application to the test.”
He paused, letting the stupidity of that sentence hang in the air like a rotting carcass. Then, with the flair of a televangelist announcing the price of salvation, he raised his index finger—holy relic of all things extortionate.
“And fifty dollars... for the test itself.”
I blinked. Then blinked again.
Trying to process the fact that I had to pay to ask permission to pay to take a test that would most likely result in me paying again. It was a bureaucratic ouroboros—an infinite loop of idiocy eating itself with government stamps and coffee-stained carbon paper.
Before I could respond—or reach across the counter and beat him unconscious with a rusty three-hole punch—Jonathan leaned in with the haunted glee of someone who’s watched hundreds break before lunch.
“There is one spot left. I can reserve it for you. Please decide, Boss.”
The hand stayed out, now drifting closer to my face like an aircraft marshalling signal. He was trained for this.
I was cracking. I knew it. The gods knew it. Even the security guard outside smoking something suspiciously herbal knew it.
If it took all day, he'd keep that hand there like a statue in the Church of Corruption.
I sighed and asked the most naïve question since Eve bit the apple:
“How do I prepare for the exam? Do you have any study material? Does the $20 cover that?”
Silence.
The room stopped. A kind of bureaucratic vacuum in which time came to a standstill and even the flies seemed to gasp.
Every half-asleep employee within a 10-meter radius turned to look at me like I’d just walked in pants-less and asked where they kept the plutonium.
Jonathan’s face contorted ever so slightly—equal parts confusion, pity, and malicious amusement.
“No, Boss. I don’t have anything. No material. So sorry.”
That was it.
No syllabus. No books. No printouts. Not even a warning label. Just a test, a date, a price tag, and a high likelihood of spiritual detonation.
He delivered this news with the calm serenity of a man explaining a toaster to a sandwich.
Still, the hand remained out, unwavering. It might as well have been mounted on a robotic arm—“Insert Dollar to Continue Bureaucratic Suffering.”
Defeated, disoriented, and dangerously close to crying, I pulled out my wallet like a man handing over ransom to the pirates who already shot the hostage.
Seventy dollars disappeared into the void, and in return, I was handed a worn, crumpled receipt that might as well have read:
“Good luck, idiot.”
The only useful information it contained was:
- Date of the test
- Time of the test
- Location of the test
- What to bring: Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
No calculator. No pen. No paper. No hope.
Just bring your fragile, overconfident Western brain and prepare to be psychologically waterboarded by a computer designed in 1986 and questions written by what I can only assume were feral accountants with a vendetta against logic.
Welcome to Africa.
This was my first real encounter with a bureaucratic system so glacial it made the DMV look like NASCAR, so twisted it made Orwell weep, and so tragically efficient at wasting time, I swear I saw actual hours of my life evaporate off my skin like steam in a war zone sauna.
And this was just the application.
“So,” Shlomi asked with the kind of cheerful innocence that only someone truly committed to watching you unravel can muster, “How was the KCAA? Did you get your license converted, Mr. Pilot? Find an airstrip yet? Maintenance shop? NGOs lined up? Save any orphans along the way?”
I stood in the doorway like a man who’d just crawled out of a trench, dazed, sunburnt, and lightly concussed by the bureaucratic mortar fire of East Africa.
My shirt was untucked, my soul was leaking out of my ears, and I smelled like despair and mild printer toner.
I considered throwing one of his tortoises at him.
Or drowning him in the ornamental goldfish pond.
But I lacked the energy and possibly the motor skills.
He was smiling.
Smiling the smug, serene smile of someone watching a Lufthansa-certified ego bleed out on the linoleum floor of a government office.
And yet—I responded like a true idiot.
Bright. Perky. Delusional.
The dead-eyed optimism of someone who hadn’t quite accepted that the walls were closing in.
“No problem!” I chirped like a cult member on day three of dehydration. “Just a slight delay. I’ll take the test, ace it—no biggie. I’ve never failed a test in my life! Worst case, I get some study material for next time. It’s fine. I’m fine.”
Shlomi blinked.
Possibly trying to determine if I had already suffered a minor stroke or if I was just in the full grip of aviation-induced denial.
“Besides,” I added brightly, “Nicole and I are heading off on safari tomorrow. Booked our own vehicle. No driver. I’ll drive. You know—explore the land, breathe some dust, reconnect with purpose. All that.”
A silence followed.
The kind of silence normally reserved for courtrooms, intervention circles, or when someone announces they're hiking into an active volcano because “it’s part of their healing journey.”
“You rented a Land Cruiser,” he repeated slowly, like trying to teach existential dread to a goldfish, “and you’re going to drive all the way to the Maasai Mara... by yourself?”
“Yep,” I grinned. “Piece of cake. Got it next door from Gaby at Sunworld Safaris. She gave us a great rate. I just need a map. Or a globe. Maybe a compass. But a map would be best.”
Shlomi said nothing. He just looked at me. Really looked. Like a man watching his favourite sitcom character walk into a wood chipper in slow motion.
I smiled back, unfazed and grinning like a retriever who’d just eaten a stick of dynamite.
The optimism was terminal. The denial—weaponised. Because of course I was going to drive across rural Kenya with no map, no experience, no plan, and a woman who still thought “safari” meant drinks with umbrellas and optional wifi.
What could possibly go wrong?
As it turns out—everything could go wrong. Shockingly, though, not during the safari.
That part? Surprisingly flawless. Which, in hindsight, should’ve triggered immediate suspicion.
We glided through the Maasai Mara like smug colonial re-enactors—roof tent popped, wine uncorked, and hippos yawning ten meters away like they’d seen it all before. The Land Cruiser—God bless its diesel-soaked soul—performed like a battle tank possessed by the spirit of a Japanese engineer who’d been raised on grit, shame, and engineering perfection. It never missed a beat. That alone should’ve been the first omen.
If anything, the Land Cruiser’s flawless behaviour should’ve tattooed a flaming warning across my forehead:
“Do NOT buy a Land Rover.”
But of course I wouldn’t listen. Not to logic, not to reason, and certainly not to any whisperings of fate.
But we’ll get to that British disaster monument later.
We returned from safari tan, smug, slightly dust-infused—and in my case, foaming with the kind of delusional overconfidence normally reserved for religious zealots and people who think they can fix Land Rovers themselves.
Nicole was heading back to Germany, to our sunlit beach house and civilised plumbing, while I… I remained behind. Alone. Why? Because apparently, I’d looked at the looming bureaucratic apocalypse of Kenyan aviation and thought:
“Yes. This seems like a good time for personal growth.”
With nothing but a German logbook that could be used to swat flies, a pilot license no one gave a dead mosquito about, and a personality inflated to Hindenburg levels of idiocy, I strutted into the rectal furnace of the KCAA, ready to take my written exam.
First Task: The Written Exam.
I showed up at KCAA’s training and test facility buzzing like a meth-addled rodeo clown hooked to jumper cables. Giddy. Determined. Brimming with an overconfidence so inflated it could’ve floated a Zeppelin.
Prepared?
Absolutely not.
Why would I prepare?
This was just Africa, wasn’t it? A charming bureaucratic comedy sketch. A banana republic with uniforms and a power grid held together by elephant dung and expired wall paper glue. How hard could it be?
Let’s not forget—I was German-trained. A graduate of the aviation system where even sneezing in the cockpit required a certified observer and a three-step checklist. I fully expected to blaze through this test, leave the building to rapturous applause, maybe even be hoisted onto someone’s shoulders. And if time allowed, I figured I’d offer the other pilots some free tutoring—something humble and dignified, like:
“Ja, I flew fifteen hours over cornfields und wind turbines. You’re welcome.”
Then I’d return triumphantly to KCAA headquarters where—naturally— a gift basket and a lukewarm apology from the Director General would be waiting, along with fresh coffee and a commemorative plaque etched with:
“We’re Sorry We Didn’t Recognize You, Marcel.”
Naturally. None of that happened.
What happened was this:
I got obliterated.
Nuked. Annihilated. Emotionally waterboarded.
I failed the test so hard I’m convinced the computer flinched.
I failed it with such enthusiastic incompetence that for a brief moment I wondered if I had even spelled my name right.
There was no applause.
No cake.
No chairs pulled out or backs slapped.
Only the faint whiff of shame and printer toner.
The test administrator—let’s call him Bureaucrat #47—handed me the results with all the solemnity of a morgue assistant delivering the cause of death.
“Good luck next time, Boss,” he said, grinning like a malfunctioning animatronic from a haunted Burger Kings.
“Maybe... a little practice, yes?”
His colleagues snorted behind him, already muttering what I can only assume were Swahili punchlines involving planes, Germans, and catastrophic system collapse. I was almost certainly the Muzungu of the Month—destined to become one of those timeless stories retold around aviation office campfires for years to come:
“Remember that time the smug white guy thought he could ace the KCAA test on his first try? Hah! He actually brought his German license—like it was a wand. Poor bastard.”
And yet—I remained… optimistic. At least now, I thought, I’d seen the questions. That was progress, right? All previous attempts to secure any kind of prep material—short of storming the KCAA with zip ties and a list of demands—had failed spectacularly. Next time, I’d know what was coming. I had hope.
(Rookie mistake.)
“So,” Shlomi asked, coffee in hand, eyes twinkling as we sat at ArtCaffé in Westgate Mall—the very mall that would later become centre stage for a terrorist siege in 2013 when a band of rogue Somali goat herders stormed the place, and killed everybody on the spot who couldn’t recite or read the Koran.
(Thankfully, when that happened, I was sipping espresso elsewhere, blissfully unaware. Because apparently, even bullets respected my denial bubble.)
But I digress.
“So?” he asked. Tone light. Smile sharp. The kind of smile you’d expect from a man who just watched your parachute fall out of the plane without you.
“I thought it was just a written test? What happened? Did you fail like a toddler in a knife fight?”
“Relax,” I chirped, clearly suffering from some late-stage optimism tumour. “I’ve got it figured out. Next time, I’ll crush it.”
Shlomi leaned in, using the tone normally reserved for potty-training livestock.
“Listen, Marcel,” he said, with the solemnity of a man about to explain why the moon landing was staged, “Here’s what you’re going to do.”
He bent forward like he was about to whisper the nuclear codes, “before you get permanently banned from Kenyan airspace, go see James at Wilson Airport. Tell him I sent you. And for God’s sake, stop thinking you can Lufthansa your way through this.”
Then he paused—long enough for a small existential crisis to blossom inside me—before continuing with surgical precision:
“There are… things… you should understand about how the system works here. Especially how it treats overconfident, sunburnt muzungu who walk in flashing laminated licenses and asking logical questions. Go now. Before you end up banned, blacklisted, or declared legally incompetent to operate a paper plane.”
His eyes said “I care.”
His tone said “You’re already a cautionary tale in someone’s group chat.”
And I?
I was halfway to Wilson Airport, praying James didn’t charge extra for emotional triage.
Nairobi Flight School,
Where Hope Comes to Be Smothered With a Clipboard
“Of course you failed the written test, Marcel. Almost everybody does the first time,” said James, the local flight instructor, with the calm smugness of a man who had watched Western dreams die on laminated desks for sport. He tilted his head, studying me with the cold detachment of a CIA analyst watching a Soviet experiment detonate prematurely. “Unless you know the secret questions, you always fail.”
“But I have a german pilot license,” I stammered, as if this was going to mean anything. I was utterly confused. How could this glorious german piece of aviation document don’t be regarded as a golden door opener to anything relating to planes here?
“Yes,” he deadpanned, “and I have a goat. Both are equally relevant here.”
I stared. This man wasn’t a flight instructor. He was the gatekeeper to a bureaucratic underworld, and I was about to pay him in blood, cash, and mental stability.
“But what are the secret questions?” I asked, whispering now, like I’d stumbled into a conspiracy.
He lifted a single finger in the air with the pomp of a man quoting scripture from the Gospel of Corruption and said:
“Don’t worry, my friend. I can teach you how to pass—and I’ll even throw in a week of classroom time so you might survive longer than your first few landings. There’s a glitch,” he continued with a smile worn by people who’ve tortured souls in soundproof rooms with fluorescent lighting and lukewarm Fanta.
“Some questions give you zero points for the correct answer. You only pass if you know which ones to answer wrong.”
I blinked.
In one hand, I held my test result—an embarrassing slab of paper that felt less like an exam and more like a damp sock full of shame.
In the other, I held the crumbling remnants of my self-worth. James leaned forward, like he was about to implant a microchip in my molar.
“I can give you the secret questions… for $500.”
James—or anyone else for that matter— clearly wasn’t impressed with my meticulously earned German pilot license. Nor with the 15 hours I’d flown over Germany’s scenic collection of potato fields and bratwurst-shaped counties. He looked at me like I’d shown up to a gunfight armed with a butter knife. To him, I was just another Muzungu sucker—another wide-eyed missionary of optimism about to be spiritually mugged by the civil sadists at Kenya’s Civil Aviation Authority.
You see, the KCAA, in case you’ve been lucky enough to live a life of blissful ignorance, is not so much an aviation authority as it is a long-form psychological experiment designed to measure how many forms, signatures, and soul-crushing delays it takes to break a man entirely. It’s where hope goes to be chloroformed, zip-tied to a chair, and waterboarded with decaf instant coffee while a clerk stares at you like you invented aircraft just to personally inconvenience them.
Officially, it operates on a hybrid model of Soviet-era bureaucracy and village sorcery, lightly seasoned with professional spite, industrial-strength apathy, and a concept of urgency best measured on a geological timescale. Every action—no matter how minor—requires five copies, nine stamps, and three blood samples, all handed in person to a man named George who went on lunch break three months ago and never returned.
Now, to be fair, this isn’t unique to Kenya.
No, no. Aviation authorities everywhere—from the infamously miserable FAA, to Europe’s equally unpleasant EASA, all function on a plane of passive-aggressive indifference that defies the laws of both logic and customer service.
But there is one critical difference.
In Africa, the second you strut into the aviation authority office with that smug Lufthansa pilot grin—you know, the one worn by dentist’s wives in toothpaste commercials—and flash your laminated license like it’s the Ark of the Covenant, you’re not a professional.
You’re not even a person.
You’re a walking ATM in cargo pants. A clueless Muzungu-shaped dollar dispenser with delusions of aeronautical grandeur. You came in thinking you’d be greeted with respect. Maybe even a handshake.
You leave feeling like someone just mugged your soul and peed on your logbook. Every question is answered with a smile so knowing it feels like they’ve already seen your bank account. Every delay is not a bug in the system—it is the system. And every solution? It has a price.
Always in cash.
Always now.
$50 to find your file. $20 to “speed things up.” $100 to make sure it doesn’t get mysteriously lost again in the black hole between ‘in-process’ and ‘missing.’
Ask about a timeline?
They look at you the way a crocodile looks at a dog that just jumped in the river.
“You want when?”
Time here is not linear. It’s interpretive. Metaphorical. Sometimes mythical.
And then—just as your hope starts to expire like a sandwich left in a glovebox—you hear about them:
The Secret Questions.
No official syllabus. No materials. Just the phrase:
“You’ll fail unless you know the secret questions.”
But I digress…
“What do you mean, ‘secret questions’?” I asked, my voice rising—part confusion, part mild existential panic. I was still trying to grasp the absurd reality that neither my name—which once opened doors back home like a VIP pass to smug self-importance—nor my meticulously laminated civilised pilot’s license was even worth a raised eyebrow in this sunburnt Banana Republic.
Not ignored. That would require effort. Not even dismissed. Just… noted, snubbed, and filed under 'irrelevant muzungu noises.'
“Is this the Da Vinci Code?” I snapped. “I thought I just had to tick a few boxes and walk out of here with a golden handshake and a shiny new Kenyan license!”
James said nothing.
Just smiled. That slow, predatory grin of a man who’s watched better men than me—clean-shaven, overconfident, smelling faintly of Lufthansa loyalty lounges—melt into bureaucratic compost before the second coffee break.
In that moment, the illusion died. My hard-earned, holy-roll-of-German-aviation-credentials—which I’d waved around like it was a magic sword dipped in engine oil—was worth less than a roll of single-ply toilet paper in this part of the world. Possibly less, since toilet paper at least cleans up messes—my license was clearly here to make them.
“You see,” he began, speaking slowly, “there are a couple of questions in the test that are... let’s say… deliberately sabotaged.”
I blinked.
“Due to a convenient and totally accidental computer glitch—never fixed, of course—some questions give you zero points for the right answer. But—and here’s the part where your dreams die—if you don’t know which ones to answer incorrectly, you fail. Every time. Like clockwork. Like German trains used to.”
My brain short-circuited.
I blinked.
I stared. My tongue tried to file for asylum.
“You’re telling me this is a trap?” I gasped.
“Yes,” he said, calmly. “But for $500, I’ll show you where the tripwires are.”
He smiled again. Like a used car dealer watching a man try to barter with bottle caps.
I was done. Mentally, emotionally, spiritually. A husk in Ray-Bans.
“Fifty bucks,” I croaked. “Final offer. I’ll sign up for your class.”
He paused theatrically, clearly enjoying my mental unraveling. Then came that smile again. The life insurance-timeshare-salesman smile. The smile of a man who’s traded in hope, confusion, and foreign accents for decades.
“Make it a hundred,” he said, eyes gleaming with the kind of joy normally reserved for prison wardens and DMV employees.
“We start today.”
I was stunned. My negotiation strategy—straight from Shlomi’s Sacred Scroll of Scams (“Always offer 10% and see what happens”)—had actually worked.
I felt like Gordon Gekko in Crocs.
First lesson learned.
No limbs lost.
No bribes paid in livestock.
Just a hundred dollars and a front-row seat to the bureaucratic meat grinder known as African aviation.
God help me.
Looking back, that was the moment the old me began to die. Slowly. Painfully. Like being stuck in an office with flickering fluorescent lights, waiting for a man named Stanley to initial your form, only to learn that Stanley retired in 1994 and nobody ever replaced him.
In the beginning, I went to bed buzzing with grand ambitions—lists of tasks, spreadsheets of solutions, a brain lit up like a NASA control center. But little by little, the bureaucracy gnawed away at my resolve like termites with a cocaine habit. Within weeks, my mental checklist had shrunk from ten things… to five… to “remember to breathe and don’t scream at the janitor.”
Eventually, I woke up with one objective: survive. And if I could do that without committing a felony, it was a goddamn Olympic gold medal of a day. But that revelation came later. First, I had to be psychologically mugged..
Over the span of the next two years, I would be metaphorically—and occasionally emotionally—dropkicked into the migraine-inducing, soul-liquefying reality that:
a. My overinflated confidence—carefully sculpted in the echo chamber of a successful German business, fed by tax breaks, compliments, and overpriced cheese—meant less here than a weather app in a volcano. Not even the goats looked impressed. Hell, even the flies stopped mid-fornication to give me a look that said,
“You done yet, Captain Lufthansa?”
b. “Marcel Romdane,” a name that once unlocked VIP lounges, landed contracts, and got me free champagne on flights, was now worth approximately the same as a used tissue soaked in malaria sweat. Doors didn’t open. People didn’t bow. At best, they squinted and waited for the cash to materialise. At worst, they looked through me like I was just another Muzungu-shaped ATM leaking entitlement and Sun Protection Factor 50.
Unless I had cash or cattle, I was about as useful as an inflatable dartboard.
c. My prized, platinum Amex card—symbol of ultimate Western purchasing power and a status beacon among the insecure elite—was more useless here than a pasta strainer for hauling water. Nobody knew what it was. Nobody cared. One guy thought it was a calling card. Another used it to scrape mud off his shoes. I might as well have waved a Game Boy Advance and asked for clearance to enter restricted airspace.
My ego—once gold-plated, Tag-Heuer wrapped, and more bloated than a corpse in the Nile—was about to be systematically disemboweled, flayed alive by red tape, and roasted over an open fire fuelled entirely by my own arrogance.
Each interaction peeled another layer off like a sentient onion of delusion.
Each form, fee, fingerprint, and fabricated test shattered another illusion that I had any idea what the hell I was doing.
And only then—stripped bare, bleeding pride, smelling faintly of jet fuel and despair—could I even begin to rebuild into something resembling a functioning human.
But of course, I didn’t know that.
No.
I wandered into the abyss like a motivational poster on legs.
Smiling. Grinning. Believing.
Full of that intoxicating, Western-born poison: “positive mindset.”
I was convinced that with the right smile, a few crisp bills, and some heartfelt pilot jargon, the system would welcome me like the second coming of Amelia Earhart. I truly believed that if I just stayed upbeat enough, the entire continent would bend to my will like a Disney montage. I thought Africa would welcome me with dusty arms and an immigration stamp that read:
“Welcome, Oh Glorious Sky-Warrior of the North.”
It didn’t.
Instead, it backed up slowly, cracked its knuckles, and slapped the soul out of me in broad daylight.
And it was glorious.
Tragic.
Biblical.
The kind of disaster you don’t walk away from—you crawl, bleeding irony and muttering apologies to your past self for being such an oblivious jackass.
Imagine David Attenborough whispering over the footage:
“Here we observe the Western man—sweating gently, optimism bleeding from his pores—approaching the bureaucratic kill zone with misplaced confidence and a briefcase full of irrelevant credentials.... Unaware that he’s about to be spiritually dismembered by a secretary named Gladys who’s been on her lunch break since 1997…”
This wasn’t a learning curve.
It was a nosedive into the Mariana Trench of post-colonial absurdity.
I didn’t fail gracefully.
I failed spectacularly.
With the kind of overblown drama that makes Shakespeare look like a parking ticket.
And reader—this was only the warm-up.
The following day, I found myself squeezed into a classroom the size of a moderately ambitious coffin—dimly lit, oppressively hot, and faintly smelling of chalk dust, desperation, and the slow decay of dreams.
There we sat: myself, James the instructor-slash-smiling black market dealer of “government secrets,” and two sunburnt specimens of post-colonial karma—18-year-old white Kenyans who had just wrapped up their flight training in America.
Though proudly native-born, they were what locals and themselves called Kenyan Cowboys—descendants of colonial settlers with last names like Abercrombie-Churchill-Henderson IV and accents that screamed boarding school trauma and undercooked chicken.
They too had returned to the Motherland in hopes of converting their FAA licenses, only to smash face-first into the same nightmarish KCAA meat grinder.
Unlike me, though, they had the intellectual depth of a flight briefing scribbled on a cocktail napkin.
Watching them attempt basic reasoning was like witnessing two toasters try to play chess.
Their presence, oddly enough, gave me hope.
Because if these bipedal golden retrievers with pilot licenses could one day fly commercially, then surely—surely—I too could scrape through this bureaucratic exorcism with at least a shred of dignity.
I made a mental note: if all else fails, I’ll just move to America and become a commercial pilot there. Clearly, the only real requirement was having a pulse and a firm handshake.
But for now, I was trapped in this glorified Tupperware container of a classroom, trying to rewire my brain from metric to imperial and back again—litres, gallons (but which kind?), nautical miles, and feet.
The UK system.
The US system.
My system.
God’s system.
All of them screaming at each other in different units while I tried to calculate fuel burn rates in gallons per donkey mile.
We were still only on day one of my classroom purgatory at Wilson Airport when we found ourselves deep in theoretical terrain—wading through lift coefficients, Newton’s third law, navigational aids, and the generally agreed-upon concept that we all live on a rotating sphere known as Earth. You know, basic physics. The sort of things humanity figured out a few centuries ago when people still wore powdered wigs and thought leeches cured syphilis.
James was doing his best to explain the fundamentals of flight:
— How lift works.
— Why gravity isn’t just a vibe.
— That magical, often misunderstood Third Law of Newton: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”
Just as I was about to escape into a comforting daydream of low-level flight over acacia trees in my (as yet nonexistent) bush plane—chasing poachers and cinematic glory—reality yanked me back by the nose hairs. I was trying to focus, really, I was… but my brain had switched to standby mode, flickering between outdated fuel units and calculating how long it would take to tunnel out of Kenya using nothing but a compass, raw despair, and questionable life choices.
That’s when it happened.
He furrowed his brow.
The Cowboy.
The one who had, until this moment, remained relatively silent—his face locked in that default setting of permanent confusion typically reserved for people trying to program a microwave in Swahili.
With the genuine, open curiosity of someone about to ask the most catastrophically stupid question in aviation history, he raised his hand and said:
“So… if the Earth is round, why doesn’t the plane like… roll off?”
Silence.
Cosmic silence.
The kind of silence that stretches time, peels back dimensions, and makes angels consider alternative employment.
The fluorescent light flickered in shame.
Even the air conditioner stuttered.
James blinked.
I blinked.
The other Cowboy blinked—but not in confusion. In awe. Like he was proud of his friend for finally articulating their shared theory of gravitational betrayal.
I, meanwhile, entered a spiritual crisis so profound I briefly left my body and hovered above the classroom, watching myself contemplate pouring jet fuel into both ears just to end the pain.
James, to his eternal credit, didn’t even flinch.
He just sighed the sigh of a man who had accepted long ago that his job was less “flight instructor” and more “emergency therapist for functional morons.”
To clarify:
We had just finished discussing lift.
Gravity.
The rotation of the Earth.
Why a Boeing doesn’t simply fly off the planet like a confused frisbee when you hit V2 on takeoff.
And yet—this was the question that made it through the mental checkpoint.
Not "How do VOR radials work?"
Not "What’s the difference between IAS and TAS?"
No.
This guy was out here wondering why we don’t just slide off the Earth like an egg on a tilted frying pan.
James eventually responded with the calm, dead-eyed professionalism of a man whose job has broken his spirit into granular powder:
“Because gravity,” he said, “is not optional.”
He then launched into a painfully slow explanation about gravity, lift, and how we weren’t, in fact, in a Bugs Bunny cartoon where things fall off when they reach the edge.
The Cowboy nodded slowly, satisfied.
The other one looked amazed, as if he'd just witnessed Einstein explaining time travel using farm tools.
I, however, just sat there.
Wishing someone would throw a hydraulic jack at my temple.
Wishing I had chosen a simpler life—like yak herding in Siberia or joining a cult in the Nevada desert. Desperately checking under my chair for the trapdoor that might lead to a bar—or at least a vodka dispenser.
But no.
Here I was.
In a plastic chair.
Trying to convert my European pilot license in a bureaucratic dystopia.
Surrounded by people who thought planes were held aloft by positive energy and vibes.
Cramped in a heat-box, decoding archaic units, surrounded by aviation’s answer to the cast of Dumb and Dumber, and silently wondering if I was part of an elaborate CIA experiment on psychological endurance.
And I—Marcel Romdane, former businessman, German-trained aviator, delusional optimist—was becoming a character in someone else’s bureaucratic hallucination.
God help us all.
Especially the passengers.
Because the KCAA sure as hell wouldn’t.
The entire week unfolded like a migraine in slow motion. We slogged through dull aviation theory, made even more idiotic by the genius minds at the KCAA—specifically, whichever puffed-up civil servant with the IQ of boiled cabbage had decided that a hundred years of proven Western aeronautical science simply wasn’t good enough for Kenya. No, no—we needed extra procedures. Unnecessary manoeuvres. Pointlessly reworded regulations. Why? Easy.
a. To prove he existed and was, allegedly, employed.
b. To earn brownie points with the Director General by reinventing aviation with crayons.
c. And to express his deep, Freudian hatred for aviators—especially ones arriving with laminated licenses and a faint whiff of colonial guilt.
It was Kafka with a headset, and I was trapped inside it with two half-baked extras from Top Gun: Nairobi Drift.
By day four—Thursday, because Friday was unofficially considered the pre-weekend where people showed up only to gossip and microwave leftovers—James finally produced what we’d all been waiting for: The List.
A collection of deliberately sabotaged, bureaucratically blessed trick questions—the aviation equivalent of bear traps—that we were expected to answer incorrectly in order to pass the exam. Yes, you read that right. The secret to success was failure. Strategic, sanctioned failure.
The two Kenyan Cowboys beside me—failed test-takers and self-declared graduates of the American flight school system—stared at the list like it had just confessed to killing their childhood dog. Their brains stalled, eyes wide, jaws slack. The kind of expression you see on people realising, mid-life, that their retirement plan hinges on becoming mango farmers in the Philippines.
One of them blinked and muttered, confused:
“Funny… I think that’s how I answered them anyway.”
I wanted to scream. Or cry. Or walk directly into a spinning propeller and save myself the long-term trauma.
Because here’s the real kicker: the reason those two Darwin Award nominees failed the exam wasn’t the rigged questions.
They managed to get those right—by accident.
No, their real crime was answering the remaining questions so catastrophically wrong it looked like they’d prepared using interpretive dance and disco hits.
I sat there, spiritually unraveling, making a solemn mental vow:
If I ever heard their voices over the radio again, I would immediately alter course, abandon my flight plan, and evacuate the airspace—or the country—whichever exit was faster.
Judgment Day at the KCAA Test Facility
Bureaucrat #47 eyed me with the enthusiasm of a man spotting a turd on his wedding cake.
“Oh look, it’s the Muzungu again,” his expression said, “just in time to ruin my day.”
I ignored him and slapped down my paperwork—painstakingly assembled, kissed by a notary, and marinated in $50 worth of official grease. Plus $20 extra, just to ensure it wouldn’t vanish into the KCAA’s vortex of oblivion known as: ‘Pending Review By 2030, Perhaps.’
With the swagger of a man who’d just cured cancer using only a paper clip and a grin, I breezed past bureaucrats #48 through #51 and took my seat at the nearest test computer. Inside, I was glowing. Radiant. Unhinged with joy.
Behind me, chaos.
The two cowboy dimwits were already arguing with Admin #47. Something about “approved licenses,” “misplaced files,” and a vague demand for justice.
Then it happened.
The taller one puffed up like a pufferfish on cocaine and dropped the line:
“Don’t you know who my father is?”
#47 didn’t even blink.
“No,” he said, dry as a Bond martini. “Does your mother?”
The silence hit like a blunt object.
Cowboy #1 stormed off in a rage. Cowboy #2 looked like he’d just witnessed a live colonoscopy. Five minutes later, the first one slunk back in with a crisp $20 bill, fuming, and handed it over like a schoolboy surrendering a forged permission slip.
I would’ve bet my last functioning neurone that they’d fail again.
And I was right.
They both flunked.
Repeatedly.
Three more attempts, zero improvement. One had his license “mysteriously misplaced,” the other’s entire application was swallowed by the KCAA-void, delaying their conversion process another five months. Why? Two rookie mistakes:
- They refused to haggle the bribe.
- They threatened a bureaucrat.
And in Kenya, that’s how you die in administrative purgatory.
I’d see them again in June—polo match in Nanyuki—proudly flashing their hard-earned Kenyan licenses like survivors of a war no one asked them to fight. They smiled. I nodded. No words. Just the quiet knowledge that pain had finally taught them what IQ couldn’t.
Meanwhile, back in the Test Room of Doom, my screen flickered to life. It was time. I navigated the questions like a desert wind through a birdcage—effortless, dusty, and mildly annoyed. The “Secret Questions” came. All five of them.
And with the kind of internal nausea usually reserved for war crimes, I answered them wrong. Just like James, the oracle of shady aeronautics, had instructed me.
Thirty minutes later, I stepped into the administrator’s office.
#47 stared at the screen, typed in my ID, hit enter. The computer sputtered, whined—possibly tried to reject the result out of sheer disbelief—and then printed:
85%. Passed.
Admin #47 turned pale.
Like vampire-in-a-lightning-storm pale. His colleagues shuffled over. They squinted. They muttered. They cursed in Swahili and English and probably in tongues lost to time. I could see their day collapsing in real time.
And I?
I just stood there. Smiling like a crocodile in a kiddie pool.
Reluctantly, he handed me the test results, fingers trembling like I’d just broken the Matrix. I left them behind—baffled, bitter, and forever haunted by the Muzungu who’d cracked their rigged game on the second try.
I headed straight to KCAA Head Office.
Jonathan—clearly tipped off via a secret network of hushed calls and bureaucratic smoke signals—was waiting. He didn’t say much. Just slipped me the officially stamped results, offered a limp handshake, and sent me on my way.
Next steps:
✔ Find a doctor to forge my sanity.
✔ Print 6 logbook pages so it looked like I’d actually flown more than a houseplant.
✔ Bribe the right official—thanks again, James—to magically erase the “check ride” from existence.
Mission status: Passed.
Pilot status: Upgraded.
Ego status: Singed, but smug.
Chapter status: Nuked.
Marcel Romdane,
cleared for departure from the flaming wreckage of reason.
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