Nairobi Heat

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  ‘It would not be easy, he told us. We would have to walk through the forest, hiding ourselves from anyone we might encounter along the way. And just in case we were stopped, we were, the headmaster had told my son, to tell the butchers: “We are the children of Moses.” Then the sea of violence would part. The headmaster had even given my son a wad of francs to bribe our way through in case the secret code failed. Joshua Hakizimana had given us a way out; we would not fail him.

  ‘We took our elderly, our sick and the children and started our journey. It was slow. We could only manage about fifteen kilometres a day, but we kept moving. Finally, we could see the school. It was on top of a hill, about half a day’s walk from where we were. But before we could get there we walked right into a trap. We should have known … Why was there a clearing in the middle of a forest? But we were excited, and more than that we trusted the map drawn by the hand of the headmaster.

  ‘We found ourselves surrounded by young men, who just days earlier would have called me mother. They asked for the leader and I raised my hand. I in turn asked for their leader, and he stepped from the crowd holding his machete as if he was simply going to his plot of land to garden.

  ‘ “We are the children of Moses,” I whispered to him.

  ‘He asked me to repeat what I had told him out loud as he had nothing to hide from his troops. “We are the children of Moses,” I repeated. And that was when they started laughing.

  ‘Unsure of what to do, I collected whatever valuables we had carried with us and offered them to him in addition to the money from the school. He took our jewellery, thanking me and telling me that it would look good on their pure-blood wives, then he took the wad of money and for a moment it looked like they were going to let us go. But what he said next stopped us from gathering our belongings.

  ‘ “The old man always uses the same wad of notes,” he said to his boys. There was more laughter and the young men encircling us moved a little closer, some of them raising their machetes in the air.

  ‘ “My son, what do you mean?” I asked

  ‘ “How can I be your son, you old bitch?” He laughed in my face. “How can your blood run in my veins? You are only fit to wash my mother’s feet. You hear?”

  ‘I apologised again and again. I had no pride. I just wanted my children to live.

  ‘ “The headmaster uses honey to trap the ants,” he said, waving the money up in the air.

  ‘The circle was getting tighter and we huddled together. I looked back at my son. I wanted to catch his eye so that he knew that I loved him, but he was too scared to do anything but stare blindly at the young men. By now almost everyone was crying out: “We are the children of Moses. We are the children of Moses.”

  ‘ “What do you mean? I don’t understand,” I yelled at the young man in front of me.

  ‘ “You don’t understand? Then find out in hell!” he said.

  ‘The last thing I remember was the flash of his machete.’

  Mary Karuhimbi removed her headscarf to reveal a deep scar that ran across the side of her head, so deep that no hair grew there.

  ‘My son did not make it …’ Muddy said, her voice filled with emotion as Mary Karuhimbi continued. ‘The school was the honey, and we were the ants. Only a handful of us, left for dead, survived.’

  It made perfect sense. The black Schindler, as the media had called him, had saved a few in order to use them as bait and reel in whole villages searching for refuge. It was a brilliant set-up because no one would have expected such evil, especially from a man who a few weeks earlier had been educating their children. I had met rapists and murderers, but this kind of evil was something else. It takes a cold heart filled with nothing but contempt for others to do what Joshua had done. And it takes a strong will not only to continue living, but to also enjoy life. How could a human being who has slaughtered thousands continue living, and even flourish as Joshua had done? Now I was beginning to get him in focus I knew that he had killed the white girl. I just didn’t know why yet.

  I rushed outside to throw up but nothing came out. As I leant against the wall of the house, trying to pull myself together, I remembered Lord Thompson’s words: ‘To catch ants, you use honey,’ he had said just before O had shot him. ‘You use honey to catch ants.’ Did he know? Was this what he was trying to tell us? Surely it was too much of a coincidence that he and Mary Karuhimbi would use the same words?

  I went back inside where the women were sobbing quietly. O was sitting with his hand on that of Mary Karuhimbi.

  ‘Mother, when it was all over, how come you did not report him?’ O asked.

  ‘My son, who would have believed us?’ she answered, Muddy still translating. ‘I have seen his evil, but can I take that to court? It almost killed us when we went to the Foundation and they offered us money to keep quiet. We knew we could do a lot of good with it, and that is what we tried to do, but now another person is dead because of our silence.’

  She waited for the other women to nod in agreement.

  ‘Detective Ishmael, we want to hire your services,’ Mary Karuhimbi finally continued, looking in my direction as the women reached into their purses and each produced several large wads of hundred dollar bills. ‘This is three hundred thousand dollars,’ she said as they passed the money to her and she piled it up neatly in front of me on the coffee table. ‘You have our blessing. Let the beast walk this earth no more.’

  A few thousand dollars laid out like that looks manageable. Three hundred thousand looks a lot more scary and a lot more tempting. Every detective, when offered a bribe, thinks about it – two thousand dollars, no one will probably ever know; three hundred thousand and the risk of getting caught is worth it. I thought about everything I could do with the money. I could buy a house and still have a lot of change left over. Muddy and I could leave Kenya and set up shop on some island I had never heard of. But this would be no ordinary bribe, if there is ever such a thing – a million people had died and I wasn’t going to become part of yet another secret related to the genocide.

  ‘This cycle has to end,’ I said as I shook my head. ‘I swear to you that I’ll get him for the murder of the white girl, but I won’t kill for money.’

  The women looked over at O, who after some silence smiled and also declined.

  ‘Then, my sons, you have what you came for,’ Mary Karuhimbi said as she stood up to walk us out. ‘Now you know Joshua.’

  At the front door she gave O and me a brief hug, but she held on to Muddy for a long time. I wondered how someone could be as wounded and as wronged as Mary Karuhimbi and yet still be so dignified and loving.

  Finally, breaking away, Muddy thanked her and we left.

  Somewhere on the way to Muddy’s, I said jokingly that Mary Karuhimbi reminded me of my mother.

  ‘Is she also corrupt?’ Muddy asked, to O’s obvious amusement. But I could tell I had spoken for them too. Sometimes, no matter how hardened we are by life, we miss places where we once felt warm, safe and wanted – and if such a place never existed we made it up.

  ‘Did you know his last name, Hakizimana, means “God saves”? Now there is some irony,’ Muddy said bitterly.

  We were lying in her bed idly, lacing our fingers together.

  ‘Did you have any idea?’ I asked her.

  ‘No, but now that I know it makes sense. There was always something about him …’ her voice trailed off, but I knew exactly what she meant.

  ‘I understand about the bribe,’ she said a couple of minutes later. ‘You’re right, there is too much blood on the money, but you have to do something about Joshua.’

  I agreed, but unless I was able to tie him to the murdered girl he was going to get away with yet another murder, and after almost a week in Kenya I still had no idea who she was. What I did have, however, was enough to rattle his cage – I now knew who he was and what he had done in Rwanda.

  I talked it over with Muddy and then called O. They both were in agreement – there was nothing mo
re for me to do in Kenya, it was time for me to return to the United States. The key now was Joshua. I called the Chief from Muddy’s, and when he called me back I explained the situation. After I was done he agreed that whatever else we needed would have to come from Joshua and he confirmed that he would arrange me a seat on a flight the following afternoon. There was no time to think about what Africa had come to mean to me. I was trying to solve a murder – I had followed a lead to the continent and now it was time to try and rattle my main suspect.

  I hoped that Muddy and I would work something out. We just had to keep talking. I told myself that between Skype, e-mails and jet planes she might as well be a state away. If we both wanted it, we could make it work, somehow.

  Just before nine am O knocked on Muddy’s door. I hadn’t been expecting him until midday, but he wanted to take me to Maasailand before we left for the airport. I did not protest – I was going to get to be a tourist after all. No breakfast, only a hurried kiss from Muddy, and I was back in the Land Rover.

  As we pulled up to Muddy’s gate her guitarist was just coming in, driving a beaten-up Toyota, his guitar in the back seat. We pulled over, so that he could pull through, and as he drew alongside he paused to chat for a minute or so. As we drove off I decided I envied him. His life was all about expression and passion, whereas mine was about giving the dead one last word – justice. Oh, well, without people like me and O, there would be no people like him, I concluded by way of consolation.

  We drove through Limuru, then Nairobi, way past the airport and about an hour or so later we were in Maasailand. Every now and then we came across young Maasai boys, who looked very much like they do in the magazines, herding cattle along the roads. Finally, we came to a Maasai village. Here there were some young Maasai men milling around dressed in red sheets with their hair braided and dyed red. Taller than the average Kenyan, they were nevertheless mostly around my height – the only difference being that my frame was huge in comparison. It is the slimness that gives the Maasai their extra-tall look. As to be expected, there were some white tourists taking photographs, alternately dishing out candy and money.

  ‘There was this story in the Daily Nation sometime back of a Kenyan woman who went to India, as a tourist,’ O said as we watched the white tourists. ‘Don’t ask me why India when there is the Bahamas … Anyway, in the Indian villages that she passed through they had never seen a black person, let a lone a black tourist with dreadlocks. They followed her in droves, some touching her skin, others tugging at her locks. She said she became the tourist attraction and the villagers the tourists. It’s almost the same here,’ O said, pointing at the tourists who were laughing and gesturing at the Maasai, who were in turn watching them in amusement. ‘Look at that.’

  We kept walking until we came to a mud hut, a manyatta. It looked more like a clay Winnebago without wheels but I did not say that to O. Urban chaos and poverty, these were things that I could relate to – it was within my experience, even when as extreme as it was in Kenya – but the Maasai and their manyattas, that was the first time I had ever been confronted with a completely different culture to mine – whatever that was. True, my first instinct was not to take photographs and buy trinkets – I did not view the Maasai as if they were wildlife – but I would be lying to say that I did not feel a wonderment that was also condescension, summed up in one thought: How can a people live like this in the twenty-first century? But even as the thought popped into my head I realised that it is exactly this kind of thinking that forms the building blocks of hate.

  ‘Did you know that the women build the houses around here?’ O asked, interrupting my thoughts as he stopped at the door to the manyatta. Then, before I could respond, he said something in Kiswahili and an elderly female voice answered. We were obviously welcome, and without another word I followed O inside.

  Once my eyes had adjusted to the darkness the first things I made out were a number of framed photographs of a game warden, most of them taken out in the forests and bushland. In one the game warden was posing: gun pointed at the photographer, at his feet the carcass of an elephant with bloody stumps where its tusks had been. The warden was smiling, and I imagined that when he and his fellow wardens caught up with the poachers they would have posed over their dead bodies in exactly the same way.

  Turning away from the photographs I made out an old woman, whom I took to be the mother of the slain warden, lying in bed. O spoke to her and she nodded and swallowed whatever it is that toothless old people chew all the time. I heard him mention Lord Thompson’s name several times, then the old woman started smiling at O, her glassy eyes filling with tears. With great effort she managed to get out of bed and hold O, who just sat there impassively, his hands still on his knees. Finally, she pulled away and walked to the photographs of her son. She picked up one of them and held it to her chest even as she gestured to O, beckoning him to take it. But O just smiled and walked out.

  The old woman hobbled to where I was and pressed the photograph to my chest, lifting up my hands one at a time to my chest so that I embraced it. She ululated several times, sobbing and laughing – she had justice at last, but her son was still dead.

  O asked me for the warden’s photograph as he drove back to town. He looked at it; holding it in one hand, steering with the other.

  ‘The old woman said, “My hands are burnt, my heart died with my son, my tears will not bring him back, but for justice alone I am happy to shed these tears …” ’ O said, his voice shaking with emotion. ‘I will tell you how that makes me feel: if I went to hell and found those fuckers there, I would kill them all over again.’

  The old woman was right. Justice is always after the fact, but justice after the fact is still justice and it counted as something, if only as a final act of love from those left behind. Lord Thompson, given his age, would have died soon enough, but, for O, Lord Thompson’s life was worth taking so that the old woman could die with a semblance of closure. A semblance, because full closure demands the participation of society – in the guise of judge and jury. But that wasn’t an option, and from the moment Lord Thompson had been acquitted of the second murder charge O had understood that he would kill him. He had been waiting for the right moment, and if he could wait for several years until an opportunity presented itself, then he would have also rehearsed whatever guilt one might feel for killing a man like Lord Thompson out of his system.

  ‘As a kid I wanted to be a singer,’ O said, handing the photo of the game warden back to me and breaking into an off-key version of Billie Jean. ‘But that did not go down too well,’ he continued in response to my laughter. ‘I got kicked out of choir when I was five.’

  And with that we were onto the next item on our agenda – getting me to the airport. We made it back to O’s place just in time for a late lunch, after which I called Muddy and told her where we were. She, in turn, called a cab while I packed quickly, and as soon as she arrived we were on our way to the airport.

  THE ROAD TO HELL AND REVELATIONS

  O was driving, I was sitting in the passenger seat and Muddy was sitting between us. Anyone seeing us would probably have thought we were old college friends off to a reunion, especially as once again Kenny Rogers was blasting through the squeaky speakers, Muddy and O singing along happily. We were happy with ourselves and with life. For the first time it looked like we might not only survive the case but also break it. All I needed was to get Joshua a little rattled. My phone rang. It was a Nairobi number that I didn’t know. I answered. It was Abu Jamal, and even before I heard what he had to say I knew it was going to be bad news.

  ‘Listen, man, you are in hot soup, as you Americans say,’ he began.

  In spite of his convoluted way of speaking there was an urgency in his voice and I immediately turned down the Kenny Rogers so that I could hear him properly. O and Muddy started to protest but the look on my face silenced them.

  ‘What are you saying, Jamal?’ I asked. ‘I’m on my way out?’

 
; ‘Look behind you.’

  I looked at the traffic behind us in the wing mirror but could see nothing out of the ordinary.

  ‘You see a beautiful Alfa Romeo five or so cars behind you?’ Jamal asked. ‘That is me.’

  ‘Very nice, but why the fuck are you following us?’

  ‘Business makes strange bedfellows, as you Americans say. Do you see the red Peugeot two cars behind you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you see the Range Rover behind it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Those are the bad guys, okay … the really bad guys,’ he said.

  ‘And who are the really bad guys?’ I asked, trying to match his calmness.

  ‘You have become a man of many enemies. If we are both alive in a few hours we can sit down, have a beer and exchange notes, but for now, do as I say: pull over at the next opportunity.’ He hung up.

  ‘Not sure how Jamal got my number but he says we are being tailed … Red Peugeot and Range Rover,’ I reported. But even as I finished speaking I remembered that Abu Jamal had had my wallet and cellphone for several hours after his giant had knocked me out.

  There was a service station just ahead of us. We slowed down to pull in and the two cars, each containing four men, whizzed by. As they passed us I tried to make out their faces, but all I could really see was that the occupants were almost all white – only the Peugeot had a black man in the back, his Rasta hat clearly visible through the back window. Seconds later Jamal’s Alfa Romeo, containing the man himself and three bodyguards, also whizzed by without him even as much as looking at us. I started to call the Nairobi number that had registered in my cell to tell him he was wrong – the men in the Range Rover and the Peugeot were probably white tourists; they had not even slowed down or looked in our direction – but O stopped me. ‘If they are following us they are not stupid,’ he said. ‘Let’s get back on the road and see what happens.’