Black Star Nairobi

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  “I wonder where our guy fits into all this mess,” O said to himself.

  “Which mess, O?” I asked.

  “All this shit—he is somehow connected with everything—elections, U.S., Kenya,” he explained his gut feeling.

  O called Hammer to us and he glided over.

  “What time is it?” he asked us.

  “Hammer Time,” I answered. He laughed and sat down.

  “Have you heard any ghost stories about Ngong Forest lately?” O asked him.

  Hammer paused.

  “My throat is very dusty, full of cobwebs—the only cure is nectar from the gods,” he said finally.

  O ordered a Tusker for him. Hammer waited without saying another word until it came and he took a sip.

  “This particular ghost was manufactured with a shot to the head and the heart—very clean,” O explained.

  “We don’t do clean—a foreigner killed him … haven’t heard anything, but it sounds like the kind of business Hammer does not want here—when it comes to crime, I am a nationalist. Let Kenyans do other Kenyans.” He took his beer and glided off. If he found out something, he would let us know—maybe.

  “Our guy fits nowhere until we know more. We find out who he is, and we break this case open. For now, we don’t know shit,” I said to O.

  “I need some fresh air,” he said, and stepped outside to smoke a joint. This was a strictly no smoking bar, cigarettes, weed, or anything else.

  I was tired. I needed to go home. I wasn’t worried about leaving O here, high and drunk; someone, friend or foe, would make sure he got into his Land Rover okay. I took a cab home to Limuru and asked the driver to drop me off a few wooden gates from home. It was a useless precaution because in this small town, all someone had to do was ask where the American lived. Still, I thought it was better than leading someone who wished me ill straight home.

  I woke up the following morning to find Muddy at her desk, writing, a joint and coffee in hand. I stared at her for a few moments, mesmerized by her dead-serious beautiful face appearing through the ebb and flow of smoke as she puffed and typed. At times like these, I fantasized about getting old with her—the world remaining this still beauty of streaming sunlight, the only change being Muddy and I getting older and older.

  She was wearing a red, green, and black wrap, long beaded earrings, and, unlike during performances, she had her dreads up, so that they seemed to shower around her face. All things being equal, she should have died in Rwanda. Often she wished she had—surviving the death of everyone she loved in a body that no longer felt like hers, joining the resistance and killing over and over again; it was hard to make a life out of those memories.

  Older now, her face had lost that innocence I had never known but imagined, and the hardness I had come to know now changed easily into a smile. She cared more about life, hers and the lives of those around her. When I’d first met her, she was trying to figure some things out and hence was more sure; now that she had figured them out she was less sure, like me and everyone else.

  There was a knock on the door. It was O, who, after a few puffs from Muddy’s joint, offered to make breakfast. We groaned, knowing it was going to be an omelette, the same one he had been making for years now, adjusting the ingredients to a degree only he knew. For years, he had been trying to perfect it. Still, it was food, and the seriousness with which he prepared his omelet made me feel better about my life.

  “How is your long-lost wife? After the show we should all go out, no?” Muddy asked. She had a performance coming up at the Carnivore Hotel for the Kenyan elite and the tourists who liked to go there to sample Kenya’s wildlife—crocodile, zebra, and, for the right price, a protected animal.

  Why did Muddy and Mary get along? I had asked myself that question many times. Mary had done everything right, except for marrying O, Muddy and I joked. There was some truth to that. But eventually I had come to understand that O was just the man she happened to fall in love with—and she had less control over that than over the choice to go a teachers’ college and dedicate her life to saving one pupil out of a hundred each year at Kangemi Primary School. I suppose, like Mary, I didn’t have much choice either—Muddy was the woman I loved.

  “Yeah, she’s almost done teaching … I can see the Promised Land—and Ishmael, we are going to paint it red,” O said, and laughed between puffs.

  “And Janet? Is she coming?” Muddy followed up. Janet was Mary’s unofficially adopted daughter, now a first-year at Nairobi University. Her real parents still lived in Mathare, still drank copious amounts of the illegal changaa. Rwandan refugees, they had found their salvation in self-destruction. Years ago, O and I had rescued Janet from a rapist and a life that would have spiraled down to hell. Muddy had given her hope, but it was Mary who became her surrogate mother.

  “She can’t make it, exams … so she says. I suspect she has other plans—your performance or having fun with her friends?” O answered.

  “My piece, I want it to carry some righteous anger and hope. What do you think, O? Can hope and anger co-exist?” Muddy asked. Now I knew they were both high. This was what they enjoyed the most—philosophizing over a joint—and O stopped chopping the red onions.

  “Yeah, they can. Hope in a time like this,” he waved his hands around, “hope alone has nothing to hold it to the ground … it has no anchor, and it has no action. You need some anger in there to keep hope burning. To give it some oomph …” He forgot about the onion and starting chopping some garlic.

  “This piece—I am angry that motherfuckers can’t see that Chinese machetes are not for farming—and the rhetoric, I know it too well,” Muddy was saying.

  “Muddy, you see Rwanda in fucking everything. This is Kenya. We know violence—remember, when other Africans were begging for independence, we were out in the forests fighting,” O responded.

  “Well, Castro Mao Guevara, I know the rhetoric—people were saying similar things in Rwanda—‘a little blood-letting,’ you Kenyans call it? There is no such thing as a little bloodletting,” she said, managing not to sound bitter.

  O started to say something but Muddy raised her arms to interrupt him.

  “Wait, wait … Each drop of blood is a flood,” she yelled, clapping her hands together in delight and jotting the line down.

  O was now cutting a tomato, the garlic left half-chopped.

  “What is missing from my motherfucking omelette?” he asked.

  I pointed to the mushrooms and the green and red peppers—all from Muddy’s garden—that he had yet to chop up. His phone rang.

  It was the pathologist on the line. He had something for us. We weren’t expecting anything useful. In the U.S., we used to say, “no body, no conviction,” but in Kenya finding a body in Ngong Forest meant that you had just another piece of evidence that was as important as the powerful wanted it to be.

  “To be continued … We gotta go,” O said to Muddy. When high he liked to sound cool, like a rapper. It no longer irritated me. After all, pop black America was everywhere in Kenya, from the hip-hop Kiswahili rappers to teenagers in the streets of Nairobi looking like poor gangsters straight from Camden, New Jersey.

  I kissed Muddy goodbye and followed O out.

  Peter Kamau reminded me a lot of Bill Quella, the Madison Police Department’s coroner back home. BQ was Southern, from the eye of the South, he liked to say, and he loved Southern expressions—he had once described a victim as being as full of blood as a tick. Peter Kamau used a lot of proverbs and riddles and wise sayings that invariably made sense only in his workplace. “Better dead than never” was his favorite.

  Kamau and BQ were both tall and thin, and they smoked noisily, smacking their lips as they moved cigarettes from one end of their mouths to the other. It was my guess that this line of work called for certain personality traits, one of them being a love for expressions. Kamau, though, unlike BQ, was a hardcore Christian who prayed for each body that found its way to his table.

  When
O and I walked in, Kamau was sitting in a corner on a bar stool, as if he were watching a performance. The lights were off, except for the one that shone on the remains of the dead man. Kamau hopped off the stool and turned on the lights, but he might as well have done us a favor and left them off. I thought BQ’s lab was bad. In Kamau’s lab, bags of ice were laid on top of the bodies to preserve them, and so the floors were covered in this murky mixture of lukewarm water and human fluids.

  He called us into his office, which looked like a supervisor’s at a manufacturing plant: on the same floor, the only thing that separated it from the lab was a few hurriedly assembled low white-painted pieces of wood with windows stuck into them. At least it was dry ground. He raised his hands up in the air like a priest about to bless both of us.

  “The moment I saw that body, I knew it. I knew he was trying to tell me something. Speak and I will listen, I said to the man,” he said. “But you, ask and you will receive,” he added, pointing at O.

  “What do you have?” O asked.

  “Your man is black,” he announced.

  “Shit, Kamau, of course he’s black,” I said.

  “Hold it, open your ears and you will hear—I did not say he is Kenyan or African. I said he was black.” He was barely able to contain his excitement, but he waited until O asked him to explain.

  “Height, six-two. His clothing, at least what is left of it, appears to be American. But all that is like saying water is wet. I found this in his mouth.” He placed two small capsule halves on the desk and brought out a magnifying glass from his back pocket. We peered over his shoulder as he pointed out indentations on the capsule, using a toothpick.

  “Some lettering is gone,” he explained. “But this eventually spells hydroxyurea.”

  “Okay, what’s that?” I asked.

  Kamau straightened up.

  “Hydroxyurea,” he said, as if addressing a class of primary school students, “is a drug used to treat sickle cell disease. Sickle cell can be a trait or a disease—mostly, black people have it. This type of cell is good for malaria prevention—think of it as nature’s immunization. But let’s say you were kidnapped from the hottest malaria-infested interior of Africa and exported to non-malaria zones. It becomes a disease—not lethal, but in some cases painful enough to require a doctor’s attention—I mean real pain—like you’ve been nailed to a cross.”

  “Sickle cell—never heard of it,” O said.

  “Why would you? If you think you are well, the disease doesn’t matter,” Kamau said.

  I didn’t know anything about hydroxyurea, but I knew about sickle cell. My ex-wife and I were tested for it before we got married. She wouldn’t bring a child into this world with sickle cell, she had said. Had someone told me that the next time I’d hear about sickle cell, it would be from a crazy pathologist, as a clue in a Kenyan murder case, I would have had them tested, for drugs. But here I was, happily thinking that at least my ex-wife had taught me something useful.

  “Sickle cell, one in ten black people are carriers. A carrier marries a carrier—they get a baby with the trait, chances are. Only problem with your theory, Kamau—our guy could be from anywhere two black people marry. He could be British—shit, man, we weren’t all sold in America. Spain? Brazil? Cuba? How do you know he isn’t Kenyan?” I asked, unable to mask my irritation.

  “Come on, Ishmael, how many Kenyans do you know that take any kind of medication? And don’t you think Haitians, Jamaicans, and what have you have enough on their plates without worrying about sickle cell?” Kamau responded.

  He was right. Of all the diseases killing people in Kenya, sickle cell would be like a migraine: take a Panadol pill and go to bed.

  “And you know what that means if I’m right?” Kamau said, pointing to O and me. “It means his death was a …” he lowered his voice, “a surprise. Who stops to take medication when they know their life is in danger?”

  “I think Kamau is on to something. Two clean shots—this is not murder Kenyan-style. Now that I think about it, the last clean political murder was in 1969—a trade unionist,” O reasoned.

  “Murder Kenyan-style? Remember what they did to Ouko? Tortured, burnt, and shot? My friends, this man is as American as apple pie,” Kamau said with a silly laugh, poking me in the ribs.

  “Okay. I can grant that he isn’t Kenyan. Could even be African-American. But let’s look at this the other way round. How does a black American end up dead in the middle of Ngong Forest?” I asked, not expecting an answer.

  “How did you come up with this hydroxyurea stuff anyway?” O asked Kamau, genuinely intrigued.

  “My second bible,” he said, pointing at a thick yellowing book on his desk. “That and Google. My friends, I know this is thin, but sickle cell, an execution in Ngong, the clothes—but hey, you are the detectives—you have a hypothesis, go forth and produce.”

  We turned to leave.

  “One last thing,” he said, laughing hard. “Remember, the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”

  “What else you got, Kamau?” O asked him.

  “I found this in his stomach.” Kamau took a shiny silver ball bearing from his pocket.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “This was his secret—this is what he wanted found. It’s a riddle I can’t unravel,” he said. “But I can tell you this, there is someone out there with a plan, and he won’t be too happy if you mess it up.”

  He could not have timed it better. Right at that moment, we heard a loud explosion. The floor beneath us shook. Then, a deep silence.

  “And that, my friends, that is the sound of the plan,” Kamau said into the silence. We rushed outside to see a huge fireball rise up in the air.

  A bomb had exploded somewhere in Nairobi.

  I was certain about one thing—our guy had something to do with the explosion. For someone to want our guy this dead, it had to be for an important reason, and my gut told me we had just heard it.

  All the people we needed to see would be at the bomb site; we might as well go see what kind of clues we could pick up. That, and curiosity, had us driving toward the city center without saying goodbye to Kamau.

  O called Hassan’s cell. After several tries, he reached him. The Norfolk Hotel had just been bombed and he was on his way there.

  I hadn’t felt American for a long time. In fact, I hadn’t wanted to. A black man from the U.S., I liked getting lost in the sea of blackness in Kenya, rather than standing out in a sea of whiteness in Madison, Wisconsin. But the idea that a fellow American, a black man like me, could be shot and his body left in the middle of Ngong Forest to be devoured by hyenas stirred up an anger in me that I knew was dangerous. In the U.S., we died in all sorts of ways, but never like this.

  My phone rang as we drove toward the explosion. It was Muddy; someone had texted her to tell her that Nairobi was under attack. I told her what I knew—it was just the Norfolk, not the whole city.

  O’s phone rang—Mary had felt the explosion at the apartment and she wanted to make sure he was okay. It was the first time I had ever known her to call O to check on him and that gave me a bad feeling.

  My mind went back to when we had first seen our guy, with his half-smile magnified by the dulled sunlight and the loud silence of the forest. The body in Ngong—it reminded me of English 101, Antigone—the king leaves a rebel’s body to be devoured by wild beasts … it didn’t end well for everyone involved. I just knew there was no coming back from this one—whatever it was.

  CHAPTER 2

  ANCHORING HOPE

  Chaos. Barely two hours after the Norfolk Hotel bombing that had so far left ten Americans, five Europeans, and fifty-one Kenyans dead, the Kenyan Special Branch, CIA, and U.S. Embassy folk—ringed by onlookers and TV reporters with their bright lights—were milling about the bomb site. Car horns were going off randomly, and small fires puttered along until a gust of wind made them flare up, only to be put out by a solitary fire engine that, in true Kenyan fashion,
had more men operating it than necessary. There was danger still.

  The power company had shut the electricity off—there had been power cuts that morning anyway, though they never touched tourist locations. But a generator trapped somewhere in the rubble kept surging, powering still-attached air conditioners, hairdryers and—this I could not help thinking in spite of the seriousness of the situation—all sorts of sex toys.

  The chaos was why we were there. There had to be a connection between the bombing and our man. And maybe we could talk to Hassan and the people from the U.S. Embassy while we were at it. We decided to take advantage of the situation and canvass the site for ourselves. No one had stopped us, anyway, not even to ask us for ID. I guess we looked like we belonged.

  The wounded were being rushed to the hospital and the dead to the city mortuary. There were pieces of flesh and bones here and there, some recognizably human, others so torn apart that they looked like something you would see at the back of a slaughterhouse. The scents of blood, oil, water, and dust mixed with the whispery tangy smell of whatever explosive had been used to make the bomb, a smell that stung the back of your throat. Seeing the destruction in the late morning light drove the cruelty of the terror home. There were aged police dogs, given to the Kenyans by the Americans after the last bombing, sniffing in the rubble, looking for survivors. There would be occasional yells of hope from the policemen guiding them, followed by the overmanned fire truck finally pouring water on the area. And then deflated sighs as it turned out to be nothing.

  There were questions of jurisdiction, arguments back and forth. Americans had died, so the U.S. government had a right to conduct its investigations, but it had happened on Kenyan soil and the majority of the dead were Kenyans. Eventually it boiled down to the fact that the Kenyans didn’t have the technology to deal with this kind of thing.

  The final shots were going to be called by those controlling the purse strings. Back in Wisconsin, when I worked on the force, the Chief would bury some cases. Pursuing justice for one case would mean that there would be no funding to buy bulletproof vests, or our union would suddenly find itself in the red. It was the same all over.