by Ian McDonald
‘Too much, too much,’ he said in bad Swahili. ‘You must leave something.’
Mr. Kuria frowned, measuring all the space in the back of the truck with his eyes. He lifted off a bundle of clothes.
‘No no no,’ the soldier said, and stood up and tapped their television with his pencil. Another soldier came and took it out of Mr Kuria’s arms to a truck at the side of the road, the tithe truck.
‘Now you get on,’ the soldier said, and made a check on his clip-board.
It was as bold as that. Wide-open crime under the blue sky. No one to see. No one to care. No one to say a word.
Our family’s lax was the motorbike. My father’s face had gone tight with anger and offence to God’s laws, but he gave it up without a whisper. The officer wheeled it away to a group of soldiers squatting on their heels by a smudge-fire. They were very pleased with it, poking and teasing its engine with their long fingers. Every time since that I have heard a Yamaha engine I have looked to see if it is a red scrambler, and what thief is riding it.
‘On, on,’ said the tithe-collector.
‘My church,’ my father said and jumped off the truck. Immediately there were a dozen Kalashnikovs pointing at him. He raised his hands, then looked back at us.
‘Tendeléo, you should see this.’
The officer nodded. The guns were put down and I jumped to the ground. I walked with my father to the church. We proceeded up the aisle. The prayer books were on the bench seats, the woven kneelers set square in front of the pews. We went into the little vestry, where I had stolen the money from the collection. There were other dark secrets here. My father took a battered red petrol can from his robing cupboard and carried it to the communion table. He took the chalice, offered it to God, then filled it with petrol from the can. He turned to face the holy table.
‘The blood of Christ keep you in eternal life,’ he said, raising the cup high. The he poured it out on to the white altar cloth. A gesture too fast for me to see; he struck fire. There was an explosion of yellow flame. I cried out. I thought my father had gone up in the gush of fire. He turned to me. Flames billowed behind him.
‘Now do you understand?’ he said.
I did. Sometimes it is better to destroy a thing you love than have it taken from you and made alien. Smoke was pouring from under the roof by the time we climbed back on to the truck. The Sudanese soldiers were only interested in that it was fire, and destruction excites soldiers. Ours was the church of an alien god.
Old Gikombe, too old and stupid to run away, did his “sitting in front of the trucks” trick. Every time the soldiers moved him, he scuttled back to his place. He did it once too often. The truck behind us had started to roll, and the driver did not see the dirty, rag-wrapped thing dart in under his wing. With a cry, Gikombe fell under the wheels and was crushed.
A wind from off the Chaga carried the smoke from the burning church over us as we went down the valley road. The communion at Gichichi was broken.
I think time changes everything into its opposite. Youth into age, innocence into experience, certainly into uncertainty. Life into death. Long before the end, time was changing Nairobi into the Chaga. Ten million people were crowded into the shanties that ringed the towers of downtown. Every hour of every day, more came. They came from north and south, from Rift Valley and Central Province, from Ilbisil and Naivasha, from Makindu and Gichichi.
Once Nairobi was a fine city. Now it was a refugee camp. Once it had great green parks. Now they were trampled dust between packing-case homes. The trees had all been hacked down for firewood. Villages grew up on road roundabouts, like castaways on coral islands, and in the football stadiums and sports grounds. Armed patrols daily cleared squatters from the two airport runways. The railway had been abandoned, cut south and north. Ten thousand people now lived in abandoned carriages and train sheds and between the tracks. The National Park was a dust bowl, ravaged for fuel and building material, its wildlife fled or slaughtered for food. Nairobi air was a smog of wood smoke, diesel and sewage. The slums spread for twenty kilometres on every side. It was an hour’s walk to fetch water, and that was stinking and filthy. Like the Chaga, the shanties grew, hour by hour, family by family. Siring up a few plastic sheets here, shove together some cardboard boxes there, set up home where a matatu dies, pile some stolen bricks and sacking and tin. City and Chaga reached out to each other, and came to resemble each other.
I remember very little of those first days in Nairobi. It was too much, too fast—it numbed my sense of reality. The men who took our names, the squatting people watching us as we walked up the rows of while tents looking for our number, were things done Lo us that we went along with without thinking. Most of the time I had that high-pitched sound in my ear when you want to cry but cannot.
Here is an irony: we came from St John’s, we went to St John’s. It was a new camp, in the south close by the main airport. One eight three two. One number, one tent, one oil lamp, one plastic water bucket, one rice scoop. Every hundred tents there was a water pipe. Every hundred Lents there was a shit pit. A river of sewage ran past our door. The stench would have slopped us sleeping, had the cold not done that first. The tent was thin and cheap and gave no protection from the night. We huddled together under blankets. No one wanted to be the first to cry, so no one did. Between the big aircraft and people crying and fighting, there was no quiet, ever. The first night, I heard shots. I had never heard them before but I knew exactly what they were.
In this St John’s we were no longer people of consequence. We were no longer anything. We were one eight three two. My father’s collar earned no respect. The first day he went to the pipe for water he was beaten by young men, who stole his plastic water pail. The collar was a symbol of God’s treachery. My father stopped wearing his collar; soon after, he stopped going out at all. He sat in the back room listening to the radio and looking at his books, which were still in their tied-up bundles. St John’s destroyed the rest of the things that had bound his life together. I think that if we had not been rescued, he would have gone under. In a place like St John’s, that means you die. When you went to the food truck you saw the ones on the way to death, sitting in front of their tents, holding their toes, rocking, looking at the soil.
We had been fifteen days in the camp—I kept a tally on the tent wall with a burned-out match—when we heard the vehicle pull up and the voice call out, ‘Jonathan Bi. Does anyone know Pastor Jonathan Bi?’ I do not think my father could have looked any more surprised if Jesus had called his name. Our saviour was the Pastor Stephen Elezeke, who ran the Church Army Centre on Jogoo Road. He and my father had been in theological college together; they had been great footballing friends. My father was godfather to Pastor Elezeke’s children; Pastor Elezeke, it seemed, was my godfather. He piled us all in the back of a white Nissan minibus with Praise Him on the Trumpet written on one side and Praise Him with the Psaltery and Harp, rather squashed up, on the other. He drove off hooting at the crowds of young men, who looked angrily at church men in a church van. He explained that he had found us through the net. The big churches were flagging certain clergy names. Bi was one of them.
So we came to Jogoo Road. Church Army had once been an old, pre-Independence teaching centre with a modern, two-level accommodation block. These had overflowed long ago; now every open space was crowded with tents and wooden shanties. We had two rooms beside the metal working shop. They were comfortable but cramped, and when the metal workers started, noisy. There was no privacy.
The heart of Church Army was a little white chapel, shaped like a drum, with a thatched roof. The tents and lean-tos crowded close to the chapel but left a respectful distance. It was sacred. Many went there to pray. Many went to cry away from others, where it would not infect them like dirty water. I often saw my father go into the chapel. I thought about listening at the door to hear if he was praying or crying, but I did not. Whatever he looked for there, it did not seem to make him a whole man again.
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bsp; My mother tried to make Jogoo Road Gichichi. Behind the accommodation block was a field of dry grass with an open drain running down the far side. Beyond the drain was a fence and a road, then the Jogoo Road market with its name painted on its rusting tin roof, then the shanties began again. But this field was untouched and open. My mother joined a group of women who wanted to turn the field into shambas. Pastor Elezeke agreed and they made mattocks in the workshops from bits of old car, broke up the soil and planted maize and cane. That summer we watched the crops grow as the shanties crowded in around the Jogoo Road market, and stifled it, and took it apart for roofs and walls. But they never touched the shambas. It was as if they were protected. The women hoed and sang to the radio and laughed and talked women-talk, and Little Egg and the Chole girls chased enormous sewer rats with slicks. One day I saw little cups of beer and dishes of maize and salt in a corner of the field and understood how it was protected.
My mother pretended it was Gichichi but I could see it was not. In Gichichi, the men did not stand by the fence wire and stare so nakedly. In Gichichi the helicopter gunships did not wheel overhead like vultures. In Gichichi the brightly painted matatus that roared up and down did not have heavy machine-guns bolted to the roof and boys in sports fashion in the back looking at everything as if they owned it. They were a new thing in Nairobi, these gun-gangs; the Tacticals. Men, usually young, organised into gangs, with vehicles and guns, dressed in anything they could make a uniform. Some were as young as twelve. They gave themselves names like the Black Simbas and the Black Rhinos and the Ebonettes and the United Christian Front and the Black Taliban. They liked the word black. They thought it sounded threatening. These Tacticals had as many philosophies and beliefs as names, but they all owned territory, patrolled their streets and told their people they were the law. They enforced their law with kneecappings and burning car tyres, they defended their streets with AK47s. We all knew that when the Chaga came, they would fight like hyenas over the corpse of Nairobi. The Soca Boys was our local army. They wore sports fashion and knee-length Manager’s coats and had football team logos painted in the sides of their picknis, as the armed matatus were called. On their banners they had a black-and-white patterned ball on a green field. Despite their name, it was not a football. It was a buckyball, a carbon fullerene molecule, the half-living, half-machine building-brick of the Chaga. Their leader, a rat-faced boy in a Manchester United Coat and shades that kept sliding down his nose, did not like Christians, so on Sundays he would send his picknis up and down Jogoo Road, roaring their engines and shooting into the air, because they could.
The Church Army had its own plans for the coming time of changes. A few nights later, as I went to the choo, I overheard Pastor Elezeke and my father talking in the Pastor’s study. I put my torch out and listened at the louvres.
‘We need people like you, Jonathan,’ Elezeke was saying. ‘It is a work of God, I think. We have a chance to build a true Christian society.’
‘You cannot be certain.’
‘There are Tacticals…’
‘They are filth. They are vultures.’
‘Hear me out, Jonathan. Some of them go into the Chaga. They bring things out—for all their quarantine, there are things the Americans want very much from the Chaga. It is different from what we are told is in there. Very very different. Plants that are like machines, that generate electricity, clean water, fabric, shelter, medicines. Knowledge. There are devices, the size of this thumb, that transmit information directly into the brain. And more; there are people living in there, not like primitives, not, forgive me, like refugees. It shapes itself to them, they have learned to make it work for them. There are whole towns—towns, I tell you—down there under Kilimanjaro. A great society is rising.’
‘It shapes itself to them,’ my father said. ‘And it shapes them to itself.’
There was a pause.
‘Yes. That is true. Different ways of being human.’
‘I cannot help you with this, my brother.’
‘Will you tell me why?’
‘I will,’ my father said, so softly I had to press close to the window to hear. ‘Because I am afraid, Stephen. The Chaga has taken everything from me, but that is still not enough for it. It will only be satisfied when it has taken me, and changed me, and made me alien to myself.’
‘Your faith, Jonathan. What about your faith?’
‘It took that first of all.’
‘Ah,’ Pastor Elezeke sighed. Then, after a time, ‘You understand you are always welcome here?’
‘Yes, I do. Thank you, but I cannot help you.’
That same night I went to the white chapel—my first and last time—to force issues with God. ft was a very beautiful building, with a curving inner wall that made you walk half way around the inside before you could enter. I suppose you could say it was spiritual, but the cross above the table angered me. It was straight and true and did not care for anyone or anything. I sat glaring at it some time before I found the courage to say, ‘You say you are the answer.’
I am the answer, said the cross.
‘My father is destroyed by fear. Fear of the Chaga, fear of the future, fear of death, fear of living. What is your answer?’
I am the answer.
‘We are refugees, we live on wazungu’s charity, my mother hoes corn, my sister roasts it at the roadside; tell me your answer.’
I am the answer.
‘An alien life has taken everything we ever owned. Even now, it wants more, and nothing can stop it. Tell me, what is your answer?’
I am the answer.
‘You tell me you are the answer to every human need and question, but what does that mean? What is the answer to your answer?’
I am the answer, the silent, hanging cross said.
‘That is no answer!’ I screamed at the cross. ‘You do not even understand the questions, how can you be the answer? What power do you have? None. You can do nothing! They need me, not you. I am going to do what you can’t.’
I did not run from the chapel. You do not run from gods you no longer believe in. I walked, and took no notice of the people who stared at me.
The next morning, I went into Nairobi to get a job. To save money I went on foot. There were men everywhere, walking with friends, sitting by the roadside selling sheet metal charcoal burners or battery lamps, or making things from scrap metal and old tyres, squatting together outside their huts with their hands draped over their knees. There must have been women, but they kept themselves hidden. I did not like the way the men worked me over with their eyes. They had shanty-town eyes, that see only what they can use in a thing. I must have appeared too poor to rob and too hungry to sexually harass, but I did not feel safe until the downtown towers rose around me and the vehicles on the streets were diesel-stained green and yellow buses and quick white UN cars.
I went first to the back door of one of the big tourist hotels.
‘I can peel and clean and serve people,’ I said to an undercook in dirty whites. ‘I work hard and I am honest. My father is a pastor.’
‘You and ten million others,’ the cook said. ‘Get out of here.’
Then I went to the CNN building. It was a big, bold idea. I slipped in behind a motorbike courier and went up to a good-looking Luo on the desk.
‘I’m looking for work,’ I said. ‘Any work, I can do anything. I can make chai, I can photocopy, I can do basic accounts. I speak good English and a little French. I’m a fast learner.’
‘No work here today,’ the Luo on the desk said. ‘Or any other day. Learn that, fast.’
I went to the Asian shops along Moi Avenue.
‘Work?’ the shopkeepers said. ‘We can’t even sell enough to keep ourselves, let alone some up-country refugee.’
I went to the wholesalers on Kimathi Street and the City Market and the stall traders and I got the same answer from each of them: no economy, no market, no work. I tried the street hawkers, selling liquidated stock from tarpaulins on
the pavement, but their bad mouths and lewdness sickened me. I walked the five kilometres along Uhuru Highway to the UN East Africa Headquarters on Chiromo Road. The soldier on the gate would not even look at me. Cars and hummers he could see. His own people, he could not. After an hour I went away.
I took a wrong turn on the way back and ended up in a district I did not know, of dirty-looking two-storey buildings that once held shops, now burned out or shuttered with heavy steel. Cables dipped across the street, loop upon loop upon loop, sagging and heavy. I could hear voices but see no one around. The voices came from an alley behind a row of shops. An entire district was crammed into this alley. Not even in St John’s camp have I seen so many people in one place. The alley was solid with bodies, jammed together, moving like one thing, like a rain cloud. The noise was incredible. At the end of the alley I glimpsed a big black foreign car, very shiny, and a man standing on the roof. He was surrounded by reaching hands, as if they were worshipping him.
‘What’s going on?’ I shouted to whoever would hear. The crowd surged. I stood firm.
‘Hiring,’ a shaved-headed boy as thin as famine shouted back. He saw I was puzzled. ‘Watekni. Day jobs in data processing. The UN treats us like shit in our own country, but we’re good enough to do their tax returns.’
‘Good money?’
‘Money.’ The crowd surged again, and made me part of it. A new car arrived behind me. The crowd turned like a flock of birds on the wing and pushed me towards the open doors. Big men with dark glasses got out and made a space around the watekni broker. He was a small Luhya in a long white jellaba and the uniform shades. He had a mean mouth. He fanned a fistful of paper slips. My hand went out by instinct and I found a slip in it. A single word was printed on it: Nimepata.