* * *
At Nairobi Academy, the roster of students was an amalgam of Patels and Richardsons and Kariukis. All our parents were intent on providing us with a sound British education. Every morning we would start the day by singing the Kenyan national anthem. Then we would recite our times tables by rote. ‘Three times one is three. Three times two is six. Three times three is nine.’ We spoke as one. Those who stumbled were rapped on the knuckles. We only stopped when we had done the twelve times table. The ones who sat at the front, with their uniforms orderly and neat, were always correct. Mrs Richards kept her eyes on the ones who sat at the back. They mumbled and messed up though they were less afraid of the ruler than I ever was.
Although we read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and idolised them all, it never occurred to me to want to be blonde and American. No one at school was as confident or as beautiful as Ethel Wanjiku. While my socks inevitably drifted down to my skinny ankles, Ethel’s stayed up all day, every single day. Her legs were straight and brown and slightly plump in that perfect way. She had calves that were not too skinny and her pinafore never seemed to crease. She had plaited hair that touched her shoulders and was held in place by two immaculate dark-green barrettes that perfectly matched our dark-green cardigans.
When I tried to get Mummy to do my hair like that she said it wasn’t long enough. I had to be content with six scrappy cornrows going backwards. No ribbons, no barrettes. Not even a hairpin. When I begged Mummy at least to let me have green rubber bands to go with my uniform she said, ‘School is not a modelling competition. Concentrate on your books, not your looks, my girl.’ Often by the middle of the week there were little kinky balls at the nape of my neck and the lines of scalp between each braid were no longer so clear. It was hard not to be jealous of Ethel.
Still, I had a few things going for me. One of them was my love of reading. I don’t remember a time I didn’t know how to read. When I was still very small – maybe four or five – I would crawl into Baba’s lap and read along silently, not understanding the meaning of the words but knowing how to put them together.
Shortly after we started at Nairobi Academy, Mummy came up with a new rule. If there were no visitors, then we would do our chores and play, and then, by 3 p.m., we would be in our bedroom, reading. Mandla and Zeng would sometimes giggle and try to talk. Often, they would fall asleep.
I never did. I curled up and read, even if my eyes were droopy. The stories were a respite – I could be a dragon or a princess, a beggar or a thief. And after a while I realised I could write, too. In real life, I may have envied Ethel, but on the page I could be her or Gogo Lindi. In the stories I scribbled on those quiet Sunday afternoons I could be anyone, anywhere.
We could afford to go to Nairobi Academy because Baba was now an employee of the United Nations. In Lusaka he had volunteered for the United Nations Environment Programme. After he finished his degree, he had been offered a chance to go to Kenya as a proper employee. The transition served us well but it wasn’t enough to allay the bigger fears he and Mummy had.
The ANC had a tenuous presence in Kenya. The community that had nurtured us in Zambia simply didn’t exist here. For one thing, Zambia was geographically much closer to South Africa. It was a leading member of the Frontline States, so the threat and fear of apartheid among ordinary Zambians and within the ANC community had been more significant. But more importantly, unlike President Kaunda, President Moi was not invested in the future of black South Africa, so our fate was not inextricably linked to the fate of his own country. Moi was hardly enthused by the idea of educating and ministering to the health needs of his own people. Like many of Africa’s rulers in the 1980s, he had no great moral agenda and was interested in little beyond maintaining power.
Kenya pulsed with money. It was East Africa’s regional financial nerve centre, yet it had no real political heart. Mummy and Baba knew that, unlike Zambia or Tanzania or Mozambique – countries where the Big Men understood the power of ideas – Kenya would not defend or protect them if times got rough. It would offer nothing on the basis of solidarity.
Our situation was compounded by our legal status, which was ad hoc and tenuous. It was clear that my sisters and I would need citizenship. The older we got, the more urgent this issue became.
At the same time, inside South Africa the fight against apartheid was heating up. The regime was getting more brutal and, in response, activists were becoming increasingly militant, as were millions of ordinary black South Africans inside the country. Week after week there were funerals for murdered activists. Hundreds gathered to mourn, and each event turned into a rally. There were strikes and burning tyres, round-ups of comrades, reports of the dead and the tortured.
It was a dark and difficult time, yet it was imbued with a spare sort of hope. Our life in Kenya seemed many miles away from South Africa and freedom seemed to be just a faint outline – a sort of hologram we could put our fingers to but couldn’t feel.
This Africa held nothing in store or us. Kenya was not Zambia. There was no revolutionary spirit; there was only the sort of crass mobility that would never protect us. So, Mummy and Baba made a plan.
In 1984, as South Africa began its final paroxysms, the last decade before independence when freedom seemed both very far away and impossibly close, we got on a plane headed for Canada. Mummy and Baba left, seeking a place where we might have more secure tenure in the future – where we might have a chance at the kinds of opportunities that accompany the terrain of citizenship and belonging.
We left for yet another country, a place where everything would be clean and new and where Mummy and Baba thought nothing could hurt us.
O! Canada
The impetus for the move to North America was practical. We had a good life in Nairobi, but Baba was technically stateless, which meant that, in time, my sisters and I would be too. In addition, as a woman, Mummy – who wasn’t a terrorist and had a perfectly legitimate passport – couldn’t pass her Swazi citizenship on to us.
When we were babies, Mummy had managed to wangle favours and talk to Big Men. She would smile sweetly in a waiting room, she would speak softly and not say a word about her accounting diploma or the Toyota Corolla she drove. She would arrive in a doek and look down and they would nod brusquely and say, ‘Okay ntombazana, sizobona.’ Not a definitive ‘yes’, but not a ‘no’ either. Sometimes they would speak sternly, reminding her that it wasn’t their fault that she had married a guerrilla, which they would pronounce ‘gorilla’. And in time, Mummy knew, the Big Men would demand more from her than she was prepared to part with, or that someone in the machine would simply say ‘no’ and her children would be stranded without identities.
Leaving Nairobi to seek a future that could guarantee us documents and a certain stability could only have been Mummy’s choice. Ever the accountant, she was prudent but knew when to champion a short-term venture that would have long-term payoffs. Baba had probably resisted because freedom would one day come; because the kids would be fine; because we would find a way. In the end, her logic and determination would have worn him down. ‘Freedom will come,’ I can hear her say, ‘but in the meantime, there is life.’
We needed to be somewhere, to rest in safety while the drums of war beat elsewhere.
* * *
In photographs taken in the early weeks after our arrival in Canada, in the muggy summer of 1984, my sisters and I were moon-faced with the trepidation of kids who had just found themselves in an unfamiliar place. We were not Hansel and Gretel in the dark forest but Sally and me in The Cat in the Hat, suddenly let loose on a holiday that seemed to have no end. It was liberating but unsettling.
We were listless in the heat and the stillness. Mummy and Baba had no work and were with us day and night. There was no way to detach from them. No watchmen teasing and admonishing us when we strayed too far from the motel we found when we arrived. No one, really, who was all that interested in us.
The days stretched from sunup at six
to sundown at ten and each new day was as hot as the last so that you had to forgive everyone for wearing shorts. They had no choice: grannies with their veiny legs, old women with their sun-beaten wrinkled thighs, teenagers firm and lithe and pale in the humid torpor. We learnt not to stare. We learnt to hide our amused glances when a fatty bopped down the street in flip flops and denim shorts. No one batted an eyelid.
Everything was big – larger than it really should be, like the Slurpees at the 7-Eleven and the super-long cars that, for all their length, couldn’t carry any extra people. We marvelled at the parking lots. The cars were treated like gods. Unlike in Nairobi, where the roads were lumpy and you sometimes had to squint to see how a parking bay was marked out, here, the lines on the ground in parking lots were immaculate and each space was well lit and spotlessly clean.
We arrived in the wheat belt of Canada, the Prairies, in June. At the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi, Mummy and Baba had asked the portly middle-aged man behind the counter if he had any suggestions for where they should settle our family. He said Saskatoon was a great place to raise children and they took his advice.
Upon arrival it was immediately evident that there were very few prospects for work or for making the kind of life they wanted in Saskatoon. So, Baba got busy applying for jobs in Toronto and Ottawa. He scoured the papers and got on the phone with recruiters. It didn’t take long. He found a job at a place called World University Service of Canada (WUSC) and, just six weeks after we had landed in Saskatoon, we packed up again and made our way east across the country. It took us a week to reach Ottawa in our tiny little brown Datsun that held most of our belongings.
Staying in the Prairies hadn’t been an option. In small, quiet towns where getting along is everything, Baba’s pride would have hampered our progress. We girls would have been fine in the way that one must be fine in the end, even if bruised and somewhat broken on the inside, but Baba would have been like a caged bull. He would have become angry and frustrated and not like our father at all, only a shadow of himself, crippled by rage. So, we forestalled the drama we might have endured and slipped out of that place that was too small for such a big man and his wife. We left as quietly as we had arrived.
Baba had been hired by the team that planned and delivered humanitarian assistance to some of the poorest places in Africa. In Lusaka, Baba had worked at the World Food Programme and knew the ins and outs of food distribution, and then, at the UN in Nairobi, he had spent a lot of time assisting with Ugandan refugees. So, his experience was tailor-made for the drought that hit Ethiopia in 1984.
There was no place as bad as Ethiopia in the terrible years that followed. The famine killed so many and in such heartbreaking ways that even pop singers noticed. ‘We Are the World’ was our anthem the following year. Whenever it played, we would think of Baba, far away feeding skeletal babies with vacant eyes and distended bellies.
Although Ottawa had more colour than Saskatoon, we were still one of only a handful of African families that had settled in the suburbs of the capital city. Our presence was as conspicuous here as that of the Rhodesians we had seen striding across Independence Avenue in Lusaka in our childhood. We stuck out like those white NGO workers in downtown Nairobi.
In Canada the whites were just as confident as all the whites I had known but, here, I noticed that the few black people we came across were much less certain of themselves. We seemed to shrink; all of us were trying to fit in and do things the way Canadians did things.
We were cautious and wary of everything. Late that summer, a few weeks after we had unpacked our things in Ottawa, a colleague of Baba’s, a woman named Marianne, rang us and offered to take us out. She and her two sons David and Nick had been back in Ottawa for a few years. The boys were the same age as we were and they taught us how to fish and how to not be scared of swimming in the lake.
‘No crocodiles here!’ Marianne shouted cheerfully from the water. The three of us stood doubtfully on the pier. The water was clear but you couldn’t see the bottom. Zeng shook her head and Mandla cried and said she wouldn’t do it and I – too proud to admit fear – went in. Slowly.
That first year, Canada was full of these sorts of moments. There was always something unfamiliar around the corner, some never-before-imagined circumstance that was suddenly unfolding around me. Sometimes the event would be innocuous and I would stumble but recover quickly. Other times though I felt as though the air was too thin and I would gulp, vertiginous and sick with worrying about fitting in.
That summer I felt it acutely. Between the move to Saskatoon and the move to Ottawa and the swims in Lake Manotick and visits to Zellers, which was the largest department store I had ever seen, I was often overwhelmed by how strange this new place was. I couldn’t compare Canada to anywhere else I had been. The people and their customs and habits were so different from anything I had known.
I lay awake sometimes listening to the rise and fall of Mummy and Baba’s voices downstairs, unable to sleep, incapable of even finding a vocabulary for my out-of-depthness.
When school started in September I was anxious. Another new school, another set of few faces. I wondered whether there would be an Ethel here. I wondered when I would stop being the new girl all the time.
On the first day of school I kept my tears in check because I knew Mummy needed me to be strong. If I started crying then Mandla would too. Zeng was still in kindergarten and too small to really understand – she was always fine. But the two of us knew what was going on and we were old enough to worry. That morning we drove to school so that Mummy could take us in. Baba was at work, and Mummy had to get to her office too. So it was a rushed affair – no time for drama. Mandla and I feigned bravery. We waved as she got in the car with Zeng, then stood in front of the building for a while aching with sorrow and desperate with expectation.
That day was hard because first days are always hard, but we managed. And after a few weeks we started to feel more settled. School no longer felt like a foreign place and the streets we crossed to get there every morning no longer seemed indistinct. Even the house – which still smelled a little bit like the last people who had lived there – was starting to feel like home.
Fall came and I liked it. The leaves were not just leaves – they were like little pieces of paper someone had scattered in the air and on the ground as they had turned yellow and then red. I began to feel as though I may be okay here. We got into a routine of school and play and homework and it was still different but no longer seemed like an odd and misshapen life, the way it had at first. And then, one day, in the middle of everything that was becoming mundane and ordinary, on a day just like the ones that had come before it, I was called an African monkey.
The culprit was a boy who had not seemed at all sinister before he said it, so he caught me off guard. The scene remains vivid in my mind mainly because it was brutal and I was the only one who cared. Perhaps it was because I was the one he intended to wound. What mattered then, and still matters now, was that nobody came to my defence. They heard him. They all heard him. There were snickers and there was laughter.
I stood there, frozen. Then someone said, ‘Oh! Burn,’ as though this were just an ordinary slight, an insult from which I could recover if I thought of a comeback quickly enough. I couldn’t, of course – and, worse, I began to cry. So that they didn’t only see the insult, they also saw, in the big fat tears that fell down my face, that I had been wounded. Then the taunts began. ‘Ooh ooh, ahh ahh!’ The boy began it and a few others joined in. There was more laughter. They all seemed to join in. And then, as though my inability to respond wasn’t bad enough, I lost my nerve and I turned and fled. Mandla trailed after me, too scared to catch up but too worried to stay away. We were both too hurt to speak. I raced ahead, angry with her for having witnessed my humiliation.
I still hate him. I am a grown woman and wouldn’t recognise him on the street but there are some hurts we nurture to guard against forgetting. So sometimes, even
now, as I watch my own children make their way towards resilience, I sometimes run my fingers over the puncture wounds left by racism’s sharp little teeth. I like to remind myself that I was once surprised; that there was a time when I was still young and couldn’t recognise malevolence as it walked towards me. I turn these memories over in my mind and refuse to flinch because remembering is a form of preparation; because, one day soon, one of my children will come in crying because their skin will have captured the attention of someone’s pink child and I will have to hold them through the awful discovery that something as simple as skin has been perverted by so many.
They will recover and be tougher for having encountered the venom, but in anticipation of that moment, which is as inevitable as the blue skies and cloudy days, I remember that boy and that day and everything that happened afterwards.
I told Mummy. She looked like she was going to cry but didn’t. She just said, ‘I’ll talk to your father,’ and when he got home they went into the bedroom and when they came down Baba called me to him.
We sat in what Canadians called ‘the den’, which, in our small townhouse, was also the TV room and the dining room. I could hear Mandla and Zeng and Mummy go quiet in the kitchen, straining their ears as Baba started to speak.
He was not gentle. ‘What happened today at school?’ His voice was already impatient, as though I had done something wrong.
‘We were just playing,’ I said. I was afraid of something, now, though not quite sure what. ‘We were just playing and then this boy just all of a sudden pushed me from the monkey bars.’ I began to cry. ‘Then he said, “Oh, you’re a good African monkey.” Then he started making funny noises like a monkey.’
Always Another Country Page 7