“Put him down.”
The mayor spoke to Ntoto in a warm, avuncular tone that left the urchin even more terrified.
“Well, well, well,” he said. “You disgusting reptile who eats dog shit.”
Ntoto began sobbing. Soon the boy’s wails were interspersed with the sounds of fist on flesh.
A few hours later, limping after a succession of thrashings at the hands of the mayor, Ntoto dragged himself away from where the flood water had dumped him, and sought sanctuary under a broken-down refuse truck. He gathered scraps of cardboard and old newspapers, made a temporary resting place for himself, collapsed, and dreamed about the family he would never see again . . .
Titus was far more resilient than his skinny frame would suggest. He had emerged from one of Africa’s toughest schools of life, hardened by neglect, toughened by abuse, and emotionally calloused by cruelty. But he did not blame his parents, even though he had been left to fend for himself by his mother when he was seven, in a city where street life was based on a hierarchy as complex as a medieval court. At the bottom of the pile were the street urchins, almost invariably orphaned by Aids, or war or poverty, and described as “abandoned” – though this was a cruel and thoughtless use of the word.
The parents of Ntoto and countless other urchins had not so much abandoned their children as surrendered them, in an act that marked their own defeat in the daily battle for survival. Although thousands of children wandered the streets of the city, eking out their wretched existence by sifting the rubbish dumps or engaging in petty thievery, it was a wonder that there were not more of them.
This was a tribute to the tenacity of their parents, who were driven not simply by paternal and maternal imperatives of love and selflessness, but by an awareness that their children were their only stake in life’s lottery. Lose one of your children to disease and deprivation, and you lost a pair of young, able-bodied hands that could help in the family struggle for survival, or provide the labour for the shamba that might be your diminishing dream; and you lost one of the slim chances that one of your children could achieve the nigh impossible – a paid job, perhaps as a house steward; and with the loss of a child went any chance of care when you were old and frail.
For years, Titus’ parents had struggled to keep a growing family on less than a hectare of land, a four-hour bus journey from the capital. Within two generations rural life in Kuwisha was transformed, as the population doubled and jobs became scarce. In a hazardous attempt to start again, Titus’ father sold his share in the family shamba to his four brothers, and took his wife and children to the capital, where they had paid an extortionate rent for a home that was no more than a plastic sheet stretched over a wooden frame.
They might have managed but for the brutal politics of Kireba. Encouraged by the city politicians, pursuing an agenda based on the ethnic arithmetic of power in which tribal allegiance came first, neighbour was encouraged to turn on neighbour. The methods were simple and effective. Landlords threatened to terminate leases, longstanding financial debts were called in overnight, or temporary allegiances were bought for a few ngwee.
People from the west of Kuwisha turned on people from the east of the country, people from the south set alight the homes of people from the north. And above all, decent people did unspeakable things to other decent people: not necessarily because of tribe, or religion, or region – although these differences did play a part – but because homes and jobs were at stake. Titus’ family, comparative newcomers to the slum, were amongst the most vulnerable. Within days, much of Kireba was in flames, and the Ntotos – but without Titus – were part of a stream of refugees that sought sanctuary back in the countryside.
So Ntoto’s parents did not “abandon” him. Rather they surrendered the unplanned child to fate, to the spirits, in the hope that without a seventh mouth to feed, his six brothers and sisters would have a better chance in life.
Every now and then, encouraged by the euphoria induced by sniffing glue, and curled up somewhere safe and private, he allowed himself to think back to the days when he was part of a family, unfolding his recollections like a scrapbook. But as he grew older, he did it less and less. The past had become hazy as time passed by; and recollection of that past left him feeling disorientated and vulnerable. Instead he felt he had to prepare for the next phase, and be ready to grasp any opportunity to pull himself up the ladder of life.
Before long hunger made him rise. He forced his skinny legs to carry his battered, aching body on a journey that would take him to Cambridge House. It was opposite the central market, where with luck he might find some rotting fruit. Perhaps Pearson would be there. He dropped in to collect mail on most days, and he could offer to wash the journalist’s car for a few ngwee. And it was possible that Rutere might be heading there for the same reason – assuming that Cyrus had not drowned in the flood.
He stumbled the mile or so from the scene of his beating in Kireba to the city centre, taking regular sniffs from the glue bottle still dangling from his wrist. Sustained by the fumes, he continued the walk into the city.
To his huge relief, halfway to his destination he encountered another bedraggled figure, driven by the same instinct for survival. It turned out to be the missing Cyrus, whose response to Ntoto’s greeting was immediate, warm and unambiguous:
“Phauw, Ntoto! You stink! Have you been sleeping with dead dogs?”
Given that all street boys smell, Ntoto realised that he must smell really badly. But without soap and clean water there was little he could do.
Ntoto ignored his friend’s jibe, and gave Rutere a brief account of his ordeal at the hands of Mayor Guchu. Cyrus shuddered. Like Ntoto, he had been swept away by the wall of water, but had ended up further downstream. Otherwise he would have shared the same fate. But he discouraged Ntoto’s talk of revenge. The power of the establishment – defined as just about anyone who was not a street boy – was too enormous to contemplate.
Anyway, he warned, any immediate response would surely lead to even worse disaster. They could get away with defecating in the Mayor’s official Rolls Royce when the finger of suspicion might point at several gangs of urchins. But anything that went amiss over the next few weeks would certainly be blamed on the Mboya Boys. And did Ntoto want another round-up of street children? This time the police would not be caught napping. All they needed was to have a fire hose handy, and they would deal harshly with children who covered themselves in their own shit for a second time.
Cyrus’ bloodshot eyes contained the wisdom of years of survival in the tough city, and the stunted boy urged his leader and his friend to be careful.
“Do not poison the ugali (Kuwisha’s staple food) until your belly is full,” he said, the Kuwisha equivalent of “revenge is a dish best eaten cold.”
Ntoto scowled. As usual, Rutere spoke sense.
“But one day,” Titus vowed, “one day I will make that Guchu squeal.”
They walked on together in silence.
Cyrus, sensitive to his friend’s mood, changed the subject.
“What are you going to do when you are a man?” he asked.
It was not a question that had to be taken literally. Adulthood was not a concept they could readily grasp – rather the question marked the start of a game, in which the two boys explored careers that with hard work and good luck, could be within their grasp.
There was no shortage of options. Ntoto entered into the spirit of the exchange.
“I have decided not to sell newspapers,” he said, and Cyrus nodded.
“Not enough money,” he agreed. “There is not enough future, no promotion. What about a matatu boy?”
Ntoto paused. It was glamorous work, hanging out of minivans, those unofficial taxis on which public transport in Kuwisha depended, eyeing the girls, taunting the opposition, yelling out the destinations while soliciting passengers and taking the fares. But it was a job for youths; no one ever saw an old matatu boy.
“No.”
“A pickpocket?”
Ntoto snorted in disgust, and gave Rutere a hard look.
“If I thought that you, Cyrus Rutere, would ever become a pickpocket . . .”
Cyrus hastily intervened.
“It is just a question,” he said defensively.
It could be a lucrative business, Cyrus knew, especially if one worked the tourists on Uhuru Avenue. But pickpockets were despised, for they preyed on rich and poor alike, whether the widow who was struggling to bring up her family or a beer-drinking blusterer whose money hung out of his pockets.
Ntoto and Rutere both knew that if a pickpocket was caught, whether dipping a tourist or a local, rough street justice was inevitable. The outcome was not simply a sound thrashing from the victim and members of the public, but often a public lynching.
“What about a burglar, a proper thief who steals money from the banks?”
This time Ntoto was tempted, but not for long.
“No.”
“An askari, then,” said Cyrus.
There was a time when Ntoto would have considered that job. In the old days, it was an honourable occupation, and the askari, or watchman, was respected. Over the past few years, however, their status had fallen. Many askaris were suspected as being little more than a burglar’s stooge, who gave information about the house he was supposed to be protecting in exchange for a share of the goods that had been stolen.
He shook his head.
“What about a money changer?”
There were opportunities on Kuwisha’s flourishing black market, but realistically Titus could only expect to be the last in a chain of command that in all probability ended with a businessman whose parents had originally come from Asia.
“An area boy?”
Rutere was getting warmer. Ntoto was ambitious. He had set his heart on a job for which the competition was even tougher: he was determined to make it as an area boy, in charge of territory which could extend for several blocks. It was not chance or accident that determined whether you were fortunate enough to be one of those lads who guide the motorist’s car to a vacant parking slot on the busy streets. You inherited a patch, or bought it, or fought for it; and having won it by all or any of these ways, you would have to defend it, to wage a constant battle against usurpers, who might have forged an allegiance with the newspaper vendor, or the night-time security guards, not to mention the police themselves.
The complexity of the capital’s underclass did not end there. Alliances forged by the area boys controlled the city, block by block, suburb by suburb, slum by slum. Empires rose and fell, and ethnic loyalties began to take precedence over personal loyalties, even loyalties as deep rooted as those of Ntoto and Rutere. And an area boy’s life was becoming much more complicated and dangerous. Prospects were clouded by ever-changing challenges, some from unexpected quarters.
Traditional Christian churches were being taken on by a breed of fundamentalist street preachers, silver-tongued critics of a manifestly unfair world, who offered the stark choice of salvation or damnation, as dangerous as their fundamentalist Moslem counterparts. Associated with this clash of values was there was the rise of the dreaded mungiki, with their simplistic vision, rough justice, and – if newspaper reports were to be believed – obscene ceremonies in which they took oaths of loyalty.
All were players in a world not guessed at by the outsider, seen dimly by even the most curious and perceptive of commentators, a world of temporary loyalties and transient allegiances, rough, tough, and hard to survive.
Yes, there were risks. But to be an area boy! That was a reasonable target. And after that, who knows? Stay on the ladder, and climb the rungs, and before you knew it, you would be in the running to become a member of parliament:
“Titus Ntoto, MP,” he said aloud. It sounded so good, he said it again.
They were still quarrelling, albeit amicably, about which would smell the worse – a dead dog or a dead hyena – when they spotted Cecil Pearson passing Cambridge House in his Land Rover.
The boys went into action.
Cyrus trotted to the nearest vacant parking lot, and stood with his arms raised, defying other motorists to occupy it. Ntoto waved frantically, attracted Pearson’s attention, and redirected him to the vacant space. Pearson stepped out of the car, and just as Cyrus had done, recoiled as Ntoto approached.
“What’s up?” But before Ntoto could respond, Cecil gave a moan of disgust: “What on earth have you been rolling in?”
Ntoto retained his dignity.
“It is waste matter, sir,” he said gravely.
“Waste matter? What do you mean, waste matter? It’s shit,” said Cecil.
Ntoto nodded.
“Phauw!” said Cecil. “It may be shit, Ntoto, but goodness knows what you’ve done to it.”
The comment took a while to sink in. Cyrus could not help but giggle, although immediately felt ashamed of himself. It dawned on Ntoto that Pearson’s response was unkind and disparaging. It was the last straw. His final reserves of courage gave out. Exhausted, hungry, demoralised, and aching in every joint, Ntoto collapsed onto the pavement, and started to weep. What began as occasional snuffles, degenerated into prolonged sobs. It was a spectacle that would move the hardest and coldest of hearts. Pearson was no exception.
“You really are disgusting, Ntoto,” he said, recoiling.
“Wipe your nose, for God’s sake. And stop wailing. What on earth is the matter?”
He turned irritably to the second boy.
“And you smell almost as bad, Rutere.”
Pearson took a 50 ngwee note from his wallet:
“I want ten mangoes, wrapped, not too ripe. Bring them to my office.”
Rutere could not believe his luck. He was confident that he could get at least a dozen mangoes for that amount. That left him with two mangoes for himself. Two fresh mangoes! He could sell them to the tourists at the nearby Intercontinental Hotel for at least 20 ngwee. Twenty ngwee would be more than enough for a serving of pig’s feet and ugali at Harrods! Things were looking up, and he sped off.
Pearson turned his attention to the snivelling boy at his feet, who poured out his tale and his inchoate thoughts of revenge. He searched in his wallet for another 100 ngwee note. He gave it to Ntoto, who had brought himself under control, apart from an occasional shuddering sob, which he quickly stifled.
“Buy some food, Ntoto, have a wash. Use the tap at the market. Then come up to my office.”
He looked at the pathetic figure in front of him, and changed his mind.
“On second thoughts, wait in the corridor, outside the canteen. I’ll call you when I’m ready.”
The smell that hung around Ntoto like a cloak was really dreadful, and there was no guarantee that there would be water in the market taps.
As Pearson listened to Ntoto’s tale, their row over the timing of the warning call of “ack-ack-ack” and his outstretched foot was forgotten. If he was handled properly, Cecil realised, the boy could become the tool he needed to put his plan to wreck Nduka’s election campaign into effect.
The young victim of the president’s henchmen personified all that was wrong in the society over which Nduka presided, and which he had fashioned. And the cholera outbreak was the last straw.
There was no point in tackling the symptom, if one failed to root out the cause. So while he admired Lucy’s energy, he doubted whether her clean water scheme would succeed.
Clean water would only flow as long as the reservoir from which it was pumped was properly maintained by the state-owned water authority. And the job of chairman of that authority was in Nduka’s gift, part of the president’s network of patronage.
Now coming to the end of his posting to Kuwisha, Pearson had concluded that behaving decently and discharging what he saw as the responsibilities of a white man in Africa was not enough. Necessary but not sufficient, was the phrase that came to mind. Even though on balance, he reckoned that he did more good than harm, and that the lives o
f a dozen or so Kuwisha were measurably better as a result of his actively benign role.
He was, for example, paying for the school fees of one of the daughters of his steward. He had paid the medical fees when the gardener’s wife became pregnant. He willingly, even happily, paid what he called the white man’s tax, the informal levy imposed by the citizens of Kuwisha on any foreigner from Europe who came to their country, and usually exacted in the form of inflated bills for services rendered.
Indeed, he paid over the odds. He tipped generously. He seldom bargained with curio sellers, tending to pay the asking price. He only occasionally disputed the taxi fare; and he paid Ntoto and Rutere 100 ngwee a month to run errands and find him a parking place outside Cambridge House.
These acts of decency however were no longer enough to satisfy his conscience. Pearson had reached a dangerous stage in a journalist’s career: he wanted to do good, to make a change for the better in an unfair world. And he had become impatient with the tortoise-like pace at which the continent was changing.
“Why Africa?” he had asked the foreign editor when the job in Kuwisha went up on the board at the FN offices. He knew he had a fair chance of becoming the FN’s accountancy correspondent if he was patient. The reply had seemed convincing at the time:
“There are about 650 million people on the continent, and about 65 people who shape the debate about Africa’s prospects. Nowhere is the fate of so many influenced by so few,” he said, with the complacent air of someone who had come up with a good line.
It had certainly been enough to convince Pearson, and it sustained him during times of doubt about the continent’s capacity to recover from its trials and tribulations. But the longer he stayed in Kuwisha, the more frustrated he became with the slow pace of change – if change it was.
The network of corruption that embraced Kuwisha was killing its economy and enfeebling its people as effectively as the web of a spider traps its victims. Pearson knew that Nduka was no lone predator. He sat atop a system that permeated the society. But the journalist believed passionately that if President Nduka were to lose the coming election, Kuwisha would have a fighting chance to become a better place.
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