From Riches to Rags: An African Odyssey, Part XIII / Switzerland has the watches, Africa has the time...

“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...

KENYA, NAIROBI, The KCAA, January, 2012

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.

An opening excerpt from this chapter remains available here.
The full manuscript is currently reserved for submission and publication.

Marcel Romdane,

—cleared for departure from the flaming wreckage of reason.