Vagabond

by Mogoatlhe, Lerato

  I hang around at the waterfront in Old Town and maintain my sanity by hanging out with a group of middle-aged friends who spend hours at a dhow shop chewing mirar, as qat is called in Kenya, then walk the shore before joining a small crowd of people gathered around a taraab ochestra putting on a free show outside the museum.

  One of the mates who are romancing their way out of Kenya has ditched his potential girlfriend after she falls for another holiday fling. He’s going to party at Diamond Beach and I’m invited. I cram into the dhow with a big crowd of local boys and a few backpackers who also stay away from their kind’s false sense of superiority; this time, there are no life jackets.

  I love travelling in Africa for the predictable clichés that infuse mundane moments with magic. On our way to the party, it happens when someone starts singing ‘Malaika’, the Swahili love song I first know as a Miriam Makeba song. We all sing along, clapping our hands to create a beat. And as I look up to the dark, starry sky, I realise once again that our beauty as a people comes from our hearts and spirits. More than anything, it’s these simple moments that keep me on the road and in Africa.

  The club is already packed when we arrive, and the deejay is blasting ragga, zouk and bongo flavour hits. I never make it to the bar to buy a beer. Instead I join the bodies grinding against each other in rhythm with the beats; this is my scene, when the dance floor becomes playful and we run our hands on each other’s bodies to add more fire to the lust-soaked atmosphere.

  When the deejay plays RDX’s ‘Bend Over’, we lurch onto each other and dance the dutty wine like we’re in the Caribbean, dry humping and frisking each other. When the song chants ‘now let me push in’ we prop our bodies doggy-style and simulate the lyrics. We’re dripping sex appeal but we know it’s just fun. Our laughter rises above the song. My ragga high wears off and I leave the club to wander around the beach.

  Groups of people sit around bonfires passing bottles of vodka and tequila and spliffs; some people dance to the beat of the drummers in the mix. I’m sleepy but the only boats leaving for Old Town are private ones. I ask someone to wake me up when a public boat leaves.

  I’ve spent two years across three regions in Africa, sleeping at taxi ranks and border crossings, napping in strangers’ houses while waiting for transport to my next destination. My safety has never been on the line, even when I pass out at the most remote spot on the beach. When people do come over, it’s to check that I’m still fine and, finally, to let me know that the public boat is leaving. This is why I return to Lamu two years later after its reputation is tainted by pirates who kidnap a European. The Lamu I know and love is not hateful or unsafe.

  1 January 2011

  Surprise, surprise – the town that believes that life must unfold pole pole, slowly without any urgency in how we move, is hyperactive this morning. It’s just gone past 8.30am and the air is already thick with the smell of samosas, chapati and thick coconut pancakes called vitumubua. The slow shuffles around the square on the Kenyatta road have been replaced with quick steps. There are no people huddled around news stands or squeezed into shops. Donkeys aren’t shaking with the weight of goods that have just been offloaded from the main land. We greet each other in passing and keep moving. It’s the day of the dhow race – one of three times in the year when the island puts on a massive party. The others are to celebrate Prophet Mohammed’s birthday and the Lamu cultural festival, when the island explodes with music and dancing that culminates in a donkey race.

  On the first day of every year, the best boatmen in a town where half the population spend their time in the water leave their fishing nets at home and sail to Shela Beach. I walk there and for the first time since my arrival, the three old men I drink coffee and chew mirar with are not in the shop, the Maasai market is also closed and the morans walk around empty-handed instead of waving trinkets they sell to beach bummers.

  In Shela, people have already taken their places at the beach and along the walls that separate hotels from the beach crowd. Rooftops and patios are filled with hotel guests in bikinis and beach shorts, beers and cocktails in hand. The usual beach crowd in swim wear is joined by women and children with boubous; their ice lollies melting in the sun. There are no windsurfers in the water, only boys frolicking between boats that are lined up for the race. They have names like Upendo, Beyonce, Subira and declarations like Nakupenda and Friends Forever and are decked with national flags from different countries. One dhow has the flags of Kenya and Sweden, another has the flag of South Africa. Many flags feature Bob Marley’s face. A dhow with a sound system and Aladdin’s Genie as a mascot sails behind them to set the party mood.

  When the race gets going, anyone who isn’t a fish in water screams and blows whistles from the sidelines while more than twenty boats race across the sea and back. They tilt and sway from the weight of several boatmen hanging on the poles.

  Team Peponi wins the race, and the beach turns into a party with small groups of people jamming to whatever floats their boat; like a series of parties that are happening at the same time instead of one massive jam session.

  I leave for Nairobi the following morning and call Arrot for the second time in three weeks to ask for a favour. I’m running out of money again and need a free place to stay until a pay cheque shows up in my bank account.

  She meets me in town a few hours later to take me to the house she shares with her friend Nick in Ongatha Rongai on the outskirts of the city. The name means small wilderness or plains in the Maasai language. Rongai of 2011 is chaos, with rows of low-rise apartment buildings that haven’t been painted, leaving them looking like their construction is still in progress with large concrete bricks and splatters of dry cement. The open drains have rusted zinc and nailed planks used as walk ways over them. The shacked kiosks are squeezed between business centres with dental and medical offices, internet cafés and kinyozis that sell their haircutting services on hand-painted boards that show clippers and different haircuts. Beauty salons use old-style hairdryers, and the verandas in front of shops are occupied by gas cylinders.

  There are as many kiosks of M-pesa mobile money agents that move cash around the country to places where banks don’t go, as there are other types of businesses. The stretches of dusty pavements have been taken over by vegetable stalls, wheeled carts with slices of watermelon and pineapple, hardware shops and welders melting metal into gates.

  Hawkers walk slowly between them with buckets of boiled eggs they serve with a teaspoon of kachumbari. Women sit on stools fanning braziers to grill mealies or cook githeri, the hearty Kikuyu dish made with boiled maize and beans. Butchers hack fatty goat carcasses that hang on hooks nailed in front of their counters with machetes. The air is dusty and black from the smoky, loud, colourful matatus that stop abruptly. This makes cars honk furiously at them while bicycles and human traffic weave seamlessly in between. At the market area, vendors pile bundles of kale, called sukumawiki, which translates into stretch the week, as a nod to its affordability and popularity, on the ground. It smells like the bountiful fresh coriander that’s always on sale.

  It’s love at first impression. On the walks I go on to explore my new home, herds of cattle and goats vie for space with residents, who include women tottering over mud puddles in high heels. I always smile when I run into the chic woman who walks the white Pomeranian poodle she keeps at hand with a studded red leather leash. Gravel roads give way to footpaths between grazing fields and open skies where birds swoop freely. Here, there are no apartment buildings or walled gates. Houses have yards with fruit trees, and my solitude gets broken by herders walking their flocks back home at sunset, when the sky becomes dark blue and the full moon rises behind flat zinc roofs. This side of Rongai smells like soil after the rain.

  The Maasai market travels around different parts of the city to sell art, crafts, cloth, jewellery, shukas, kitenges, kangas and kikoyis. It’s at Prestige Plaza on Tuesday, Capital Centre in South B on Wednesday, Junction Mall in Dagoretti on Thurd
ay, the Village Market in Gigiri on Friday, the High Court parking lot downtown on Saturday and the Yaya Centre in Hurlingham on Sunday.

  It makes economic sense for me to shop on Saturday, when Arrot’s status as a resident gets me better prices. Even though they sell a variety of goods, including beautifully coloured calabashes for home decor and carved masks from the DRC, I’m only interested in Maasai trinkets. Arrot and I walk around the section with old women who sit on kangas on the ground; their goodies laid out in front of them while they turn beads into necklaces, crowns, earrings, bracelets and anklets. I point at what I want and let Arrot do my haggling in case my accent gives away my mzungu status.

  My first buy is a necklace with seventeen colour-blocked triangles in green, red, white, orange and blue between the white beads and loose, green strings with cowrie shells at the end, a blue and white choker with chains that have small metal disks, two bracelets and anklets and a crown I buy after the old woman says it brings out my eyes with the red beaded strings that frame my cheekbones. The effect makes a car full of fellows in Westlands call me ‘Maasai mrembo’ – beautiful Maasai. It’s not unusual for me to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror during the day and recoil at how I look. I hate mornings, and dress to cover instead of adorn my body. I wear little black dresses to be practical instead of being chic and often, the only thing I like when I catch these glimpses is the kanga or kintenge I drape across my neck as my only accessory. I don’t stop traffic. People don’t use the fractions of seconds when they see me in passing to holler that I’m beautiful. This moment is the beginning of a new relationship with clothes; one where I’m a traffic-stopping beauty without looking like a product of a mass marketing fashion campaign. Besides being my home, the source of my Pan-African politics and the scope of my work, Africa becomes my standard of beauty.

  I’m in the affluent side of Nairobi to apply for permission to visit Kakuma refugee camp at the offices of the Refugee Affairs Secretariat. After decades of fighting to become their own nation, South Sudan is voting for secession from North Sudan. I want to write the historic moment from the perspective of the largest community of Sudanese refugees in the world, in Kakuma.

  XVI

  A NEW SUDAN

  February 2011

  BUSES TO KAKUMA ARE in Kitale, where my pick of coaches have names like Western Emirates, Palm Dam, Happy Safari and Climax Coaches. The usual cacophony of travellers and hawkers with boxes of snacks, posters of Jesus and Christian books that comes with my wait for the bus is broken by a woman who keeps whacking her toddler’s head whenever the baby cries. My heart is in my hands for more than sixteen hours, including overnight, on roads that get smaller and sandier as we put more distance between us and the hills of Kitale.

  This is the worst bus I’ve been on. Some cushions have fallen off the seats, windscreens have cracks and broken windows have been covered up with plastic and cardboard boxes. Those that still have glass are covered in layers of grime and dust blanks out the landscape unless we force them open with twigs. The dust that rises when we drive comes back into the bus, and settles on us.

  The Turkana region is rural semi-desert. The spare and desolate villages we pass are populated by men and women who hang out in separate groups; the men sitting on stools they walk around with and the women leaning against mud houses and shacks. Layers of beads cascade down their necks, and their hair is styled into mohawks with shaved sides.

  Without the hills that look indigo in the fading darkness, the trip to Kakuma wouldn’t be worth the trek. We arrive just after sunrise, when the light proves that the town lives up to its name. Kakuma means nothing in Swahili. It’s a one-road town with some shops, a bus office, a dilapidated hotel with grime-stained walls and a Somali restaurant that only sells rice, boiled goat stew and chips. There’s a police station and an office complex where newly arrived refugees go to register their presence. The path to the camp has signboards for campaigns that promote safe sex and ending gender-based violence. Signboards without campaigns have logos of the United Nations and aid agencies that work here.

  When the boda boda drops me off at the camp, the thing that stands out the most is how inhospitable it looks. People live in UN-branded tents and mud houses that don’t all have windows or doors and yards are marked with enclosures made with shrubs.

  I arrive at the polling station covered with dust and sweat, and the nasty whiff I catch in the air is from my armpits. The only people around are Augostino Loro, the head of the polling station, and a voting officer called Joseph. Most of the voters made their mark in the first two days of the voting process, and while the polls are still open, everyone is meeting at the Southern Sudanese section of the camp for a celebratory lunch; I’m invited. ‘It hasn’t started yet, maybe you should go to your hotel to freshen up,’ Joseph suggests. I don’t even have enough money to buy my ticket back to Nairobi; ditto a hotel room. ‘I want to start working. Do you mind if I go with you to the camp? Besides, waiting for the party to start will give me time to just hang out and get to know people,’ I tell him.

  A tall, upright woman with bushy white hair strides into the compound with a gun in one hand and a cross on her back. Moving between the gathering crowd and the mud huts, she crouches behind a wall of dry shrubs to shoot at her enemies. ‘Free Sudan,’ screams a woman in the crowd, her fist punching the air. ‘Free Sudan,’ everyone roars back. Dripping with sweat, the old woman returns from her war and stands in the middle of the crowd. She points her gun at the sky and pulls the trigger. Her body shakes when she fires her gun. ‘New Sudan,’ the crowd yells before falling into a lull the old woman breaks again when she jumps away from the crowd to start running around the yard.

  She hides behind a hut, then creeps between trees to get to another hut, like a soldier on the battlefield. She stands in the middle of the crowd again when she returns from war, and holds her gun with both hands before pulling the trigger for the last time. Her weapon is a cracked plank with a rusty nail in the place of a trigger and her war gear is the cropped camouflage jacket she is wearing over a pastel pink two-piece.

  15 January 2011 has lived in the prayers of Southern Sudanese people for more than three blood-soaked decades. To the thousands of Southern Sudanese refugees who call Kakuma refugee camp home, today is a balm on the wound that festers every time they go to the town’s main road, where a sign reminds them that they’re only five hundred and sixty-two kilometres away from Juba; their capital city and a home that’s become too volatile and poor for them to follow the road for one hundred kilometres to the Lokichoggio border.

  We are gathered here on this sweltering afternoon to celebrate what everyone tells me is inevitable: Africa is getting a new country. Speakers keep their words short, recalling the heartbreak of fleeing their villages and the farms and livestock they lost to war. Several decry that while some forty-four per cent of their land is rich with gold, diamonds and ore, among other minerals, they live in desperate poverty. More than the hunger and fear they feel trekking to Kakuma, some on their feet, they remember the countless loved ones who paid with their lives on and off the battlefield for South Sudan’s independence.

  The tears and chants of a new and free Sudan are followed by lunch. Meals are usually a flat bread called gorrassa served with beans or boiled corn kernels. Money is scarce, and almost everything people in the camp live on is from the World Food Programme. They have pooled their few shillings together to feast on gorrassa with beef cooked in water and fried in its fat, cabbage that’s been fried brown, and an okra and spinach dish that slides off my fingers. I only eat what I like when I want to, but I feel rude for letting myself be disgusted by the okra, so I tuck in. We toast to freedom with warm Fanta Orange and Coke.

  I hang around Joseph when the crowds start getting thin, waiting patiently when people ask him when they can go back to the station.

  ‘It’s not as if we need the votes, mind you, we know that South Sudan is going to be free after today, but people want t
o vote because we have all waited our whole lives, so we want to be able to say “I voted for our freedom”,’ he tells me.

  And then that awkward question again: ‘Are you going to your hotel? Things are going to be quiet until the evening.’ The only plan I have for now is waiting until the hotel closes at night, so I can steal a place to sleep on the porch, or get the bus that’s leaving for Nairobi in the morning if I can sell my phone. I tell him I just need a place to shower instead. He passes me off to a teen girl called Elizabeth.

  She shares four mud huts with her grandmother, aunt and several siblings and cousins. Elizabeth loves beauty and order, and her bedroom matches her taste. They are among the better off families here with huts that have doors and windows and floors made of cow dung. Elizabeth’s hut has a double bed, three white plastic chairs, a dressing table, and a square mirror that only shows her face. Her ceiling is an orange and green kitenge covering a grass roof.

  Act two of the celebrations is a parade that grows in numbers on the way back to the polling station. It starts with a group of women who form a dancing circle while waiting for their friends. The old woman who had a gun at lunch is centre stage again, and her weapon replaced by jazz fingers she waves in the air. A group of drummers turn the station into a party zone, and as a small group of voters make their mark, the large audience dance and sing some more. People cry, holding onto each other in long embraces. Augostino addresses the crowd before final votes are cast. ‘It’s obvious that most of us voted against unity. Like everyone, I have lost family members. My uncle was killed when the plane he was travelling in on his way to Khartoum was shot down. This is why I grew up wanting freedom,’ he says, to cheers and chants of ‘new Sudan.’ He adds: ‘Some are questioning if a free South Sudan will be a success. Well, I believe it’s better to be a free dog than a caged lion.’ The crowd cheers. ‘We are not talking about “if we get freedom”. We know we will separate from the North, so we’re talking about the future. It will be bright for us but there’s a lot of work to do. Infrastructure is poor, hospitals and schools are in a poor state and there is a lot of rehabilitation to be done but we’re optimistic that everything will go well.’