Black Star Nairobi

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  With the gate behind us, I now saw rows and rows of barely standing slum houses, made of corrugated iron and stitched together with rusty nails and rope to make odd-shaped boxes. Looking up the hill, I could see heat rising from the tops. If it weren’t for the skin color of the inhabitants and the bright graffiti decorating the shacks, I could have sworn I was in Kenya. I didn’t understand what we were doing in a Mexican slum, much less why the SUV had stopped.

  But what was going on soon became apparent, as four jeeps with heavily armed young men joined the Mercedes to make a convoy. Old women were smiling and waving at Julio while little children in ragged clothes ran alongside us. On the tin rooftops, I could see armed men perched, barely managing to hold on. No one was going to bring war to this slum unless they were ready to pay a high price. It was Julio’s slum. Relief set in.

  Julio didn’t think we were the SUV’s targets.

  “Only Jason and I know you are here. And in Mexico, everyone is a target,” he explained with a laugh. “And sometimes you do not know who wants you dead until you are dead already—and what good does that do you?”

  We drove up a muddy road full of potholes. Just when I was wondering how the Mercedes would make it all the way up the hill, we came to a tarmac road with lights running alongside it. Where it ended, there was a huge fortified gate that opened on to an extravagant lawn. The next thing I was expecting to see was a McMansion. Instead, I saw a number of identical-looking houses, lower-middle-class-type homes made out of brick—about ten of them.

  “You are living well,” Muddy said, pointing downhill to the slums, where the candles flickering through the windows resembled a night vigil.

  “Mamacita, you judge as fast as you are beautiful. We haven’t even broken bread,” Julio replied.

  “Our lives are in your hands … you can understand why we are a little bit concerned—the SUV,” I said to him, trying to sound casual.

  “What do you do?” O asked him. “We need to know.”

  “Let her ask. Questions about what a man does should come from the rose, not the thorns,” Julio said with a laugh.

  “I have asked,” Muddy said. I could tell from the tone in her voice that she was getting irritated. We came to a stop in front of one of the houses.

  “You know. You know what I do … This is Mexico. A secret is a dollar or two away. That is how the SUV found us. There are no secrets here but you, you are big detectives so you know that. You want to know, who is Jason? How I do know him? What is a CIA man doing working with an Afro-Mexican from the slums? That is what you are asking. So I want to ask—what is a black gringo doing in Mexico trying to tunnel his way into his own country? The Africans I can understand, but you, my friend, why? How do I know I will still be breathing and walking on my two legs after you are gone? We all have questions, my friends,” he said, and for a moment I thought he would show us the true colors of a drug dealer living literally on top of his people.

  But then his face softened. “Come inside. We put something in our bellies, and then we talk as much we want,” he said as he opened the car door. “Besides, and I am not trying to scare you, if you face the truth, what choice do you have? Like you say, your lives are in my hands. No?”

  “Ain’t that the truth. Amen to that, brother. You got a joint? Such a long journey to get to your part of the world calls for a celebration,” O said.

  “Do I have a joint? Is this African loco?” Julio asked, genuinely amused. “Do I have a joint?”

  And just like that, the tension that had been building since we spotted the SUV was gone.

  We walked into one of the brick houses. It was dark but as soon as Julio reached for a switch, the place was flooded with noise, lights, the sound of beers and whiskey bottles being opened—it was a surprise party. There was no time to ask questions; bottles of tequila were shoved into our hands and a few moments later Muddy and O each had a joint.

  Every person Julio greeted had flowers or a cheap gift—a beaded necklace or a belt—for him. One old man even had a chicken for Julio, and another a cigar—Cubano, señor, he said to much laughter—someone even gave him a Fanta. It reminded me of those stories you hear about doctors in rural areas being paid in kind.

  I walked over to Muddy and O—I didn’t want to, I didn’t like their high talk—but there was no one else to talk to.

  “A drug-dealing Robin Hood?” Muddy was saying while laughing.

  “No, Muddy, Julio is a drug-dealing revolutionary … like the Cuban, Che …” O said.

  “Che? What the fuck, O? What the fuck are you smoking, O?” Muddy asked as they broke into conspiratorial giggles.

  “Muddy, that is your problem—the example doesn’t matter. You fixate on the example and not the principle of the statement,” said O.

  “But your example is proof, you know, like in a science experiment, if your experiment is wrong, you cannot say the …” She paused, looking for a word. “You cannot say the …”

  “Hypothesis,” I interjected and let out a groan.

  “You cannot say your hypothesis is correct,” she finished.

  “Don’t you guys care about what’s going on? Here we are in Mexico, we just almost got shot, we’re with a drug-dealing slumlord following a case that for all we know should have been solved back in Kenya,” I said. Muddy leaned into me and brought a bottle of tequila to my lips.

  “Fake husband … That SUV could have been our death carriage. It could also have belonged to Julio. There is nothing to know yet. Drink up,” she instructed.

  It’s not like I needed much persuasion. Julio was right—for the moment he was all we had. In this compound, we were his guests. If we didn’t want to be here, then we might as well have taken our chances in Kenya.

  Our host was being celebrated. The music kicked in hard—guitars and drums and wailing but happy singers tried to outdo each other. We joined the party. Muddy and O smoked up and I held on to the bottle, drinking the madness of the last few days away.

  The night continued until it faded into morning. Breakfast, or brewskyfast as Jason would have called it, was served and the music, drinking, and smoking went on.

  At about 7:30 a.m., Julio stumbled over to us.

  “My friends, it’s time to go open it,” he said.

  “Open what?” I asked.

  “You wanted to know what I do. Allow me to start with why,” he replied mysteriously.

  We followed him as he led a long procession of drunken men and women, with guitarists dispersed among us playing different tunes and people singing different songs—chaos. We went through the slum picking up more and more people, until at the bottom of the hill we came to an oasis—a massive new school. I hadn’t seen grass or trees as we walked down, yet here pavements cut across green lawns leading to four new stone buildings with red-tiled roofs.

  The whole procession walked around the school, meandering in and out of the new classrooms, the teachers’ lounge, the lab, the students’ dining room, and the newly built pit latrines.

  The students, all dressed in green shirts, shorts, and dresses, were assembled in the square that the buildings ringed. The teachers were sitting up on a platform. And the principal, a short, rotund black Mexican—I still couldn’t get over the black Mexican part—looked regal in an armchair. A bell rang and the principal stood up to speak to all of us, as people in the procession drunkenly shushed each other. Julio walked over and said something to one of the teachers, who then went and joined the principal.

  “Distinguished guests, parents, and fellow teachers, this is a great day,” the principal began, as the teacher translated his words into English for us.

  “Our children will no longer be illiterate—we shall no longer dream of sending them to schools that we cannot afford. In this school, which we have decided to call the School of Free Dreams, any child who wants to learn will be educated …” and he went on for quite a bit about the virtues of education before finishing to drunken happy cheers.

 
; Julio walked up and shook hands with the principal and with each of the teachers as the students clapped.

  “Sweat and blood. Let us never forget that. Now I declare the school open—let the learning begin,” he said. Some parents were crying while others laughed, and the students walked quietly to their classrooms. The procession made its way back up the hill.

  “This is great, Julio, but what happens to the school if something happens to you?” I asked him.

  “I have done what you gringos call investment … no, endowment. The money is there to run the school … in a U.S. bank, of course … they are too big to fail, they say, so my money is always safe …” he began, but then he was engulfed by a crowd of people coming to thank or congratulate him.

  When we got back to the compound, he called to the three of us and told us to follow him. “Now I will show you what I do,” he declared.

  He took us to one of the small buildings. Inside, we found his employees: naked men and women packing cocaine into bricks. He took us to another house, and it was weed. Each of the houses was a processing zone for weed or cocaine brought in by armored trucks that were just rolling in as we left with the last house. The houses weren’t divided into rooms—they were just empty halls with chairs and long tables and weird-smelling chemicals.

  “This is how I built the school,” he said when we were done. “With American noses … the gringo nose is very good for business. They sell us the guns, we sell them the dope. No blanket of lies between us.” He laughed, but we were too stunned to join him.

  One of his men came and called him. We followed him to the gate—there were about twenty men in ragged clothes waiting for him.

  “They are looking for work. This …” he pointed at the houses, “is the only work that pays.”

  He said something to the men and they pointed at one man. Julio reached into his pocket and gave him a wad of pesos to share, I gathered. He then pointed them to the trucks that had just arrived and they rushed to unload them.

  “My friends … life here is very hard. Go get some rest and then tell me what you are doing in my beautiful country. I know what Jason told me, but Julio likes to hear for himself,” he said. He called over one of his men, who guided us to rooms in the only two houses that weren’t part of the factory.

  Both Muddy and I stank, from travel, from weed, from tequila, and from not having washed or brushed our teeth or changed our clothes since we’d left Kenya—but we were happy to be alone together, just the two of us, and finally naked. Despite our lack of sleep and our stinky breath and armpits, we kissed, caressed, and made love before collapsing in the mid-morning heat.

  O, Muddy, Julio, and I were sitting in a bar called, simply, Cantina. It could have been a bar in the slums of Kenya; it was so devoid of comforts that even the walls seemed out of place. Yet it was lively, with men and women talking loudly over cigarettes and tequila. There were some musicians on a makeshift stage picking at their guitars, riffing off each other, and they seemed to be enjoying playing with each other even more than entertaining the bar. Every now and then, a drunken patron would join them and sing along for few minutes before getting thirsty and going back to the bottle.

  Soon Muddy was on stage—performing a poem with a man wearing a cheap guitar loosely across his shoulders, like it was an AK-47, his fingers moving rapidly to produce a slow deliberate sound, like a train chugging up and down hills, straining when going up, and braking when going down to maintain speed.

  Muddy was speaking just above the guitar, sometimes missing a step, at other times catching up—a Tower of Babel speaking to each person in their own special language, to individual needs, fears, and hopes. The English teacher who had translated for the principal at the school was standing next to Muddy, rendering her words into Spanish, gesturing animatedly, performing alongside her.

  “Water … is like blood—it flows—water dies. But water lives if it’s in an ocean, if in its bed there are many, many like us, many like bones—odd-shaped, a jigsaw puzzle of the dead African bones that hold the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean, and the Pacific. In the Sahara, the Sahel, in the Mojave, in the Chihuahua Desert—these barren lands strewn with odd-shaped bones, each oasis draws life from blood like us. Blood is like water, it flows and it dries, but not if it’s a memory.”

  “Look, who is that?” she asked, pointing at a faded painting with thin cigarette soot and cobwebs running down it. The teacher repeated the question to the bar.

  “Yanga,” a few disjointed voices yelled back.

  “Gaspar Yanga, or to call him by another name, Dedan Kimathi Waciuri,” she said. “But today, let’s just call him Love.” She got down from the makeshift stage and joined us at our table as a complimentary cheap bottle of tequila was brought over.

  “Muddy, you are hermosa. It would take at least ten English words to describe what hermosa means in Spanish … Beautiful, complete, unparalleled, handsome … do you want me to go on?” Julio said, laughing. The whole bar was quiet, listening to the teacher’s translation.

  “Of course, go on, Julio—some girls love diamonds, I love words. I would love to hear the rest of them … that was only four,” Muddy replied. I felt a twinge of jealousy.

  “Start the count, then: without end, deep … órale, perhaps I lied a little lie. It is six English words for one word of Spanish. All I am saying is you are beautiful in a deep Mexican way,” Julio said, raising up his hands in surrender.

  “Obviously Julio does not share your gift,” O said to Muddy. When the teacher was done translating, the little cantina trembled and threatened to crumble as laughter and conversation broke out and drinks were ordered.

  I had come to treasure such moments, when the case, the poverty and violence, the drugs, the politics, foreignness, what we had left back in Kenya and what I was going to find at home didn’t matter. Only this moment, untainted by any of those things except for a feeling of being here, mattered—the cantina could have been down in hell, or in heaven, and only all of us laughing would have mattered. What makes such a moment happen? Five minutes earlier or later, that moment wouldn’t have been possible.

  At last, Julio, sounding serious, said, “Okay, let’s get down to business. Let’s go back to the house. We can come back here after we’re done talking.”

  CHAPTER 10

  THE PROPOSAL

  “We leave tomorrow morning,” Julio said, after we had settled down for the promised serious business talk. “In normal times, it would take us two hours—if we are crossing the border legally—but there are no more normal times in Mexico. And you, my friends, want to go in quietly—so it could take a day or two.”

  He was trying to spread out a small pocket map on a table sticky with beer, and when he succeeded, he indicated two crossing points.

  “I have made arrangements for your travel from San Diego to San Francisco. Once I deliver you to your man, you are on your own … when you are ready to come back, you call me and I pick you up in my limousine,” he instructed, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

  “Jason, how do you know him?” O asked.

  “Jason, me and him have been friends for a long time. Jason—one day he comes to me and he says, I will give you guns and intelligence. In return, you keep your ear to the ground—listen for Arabic. He says, after 9/11 his foreign policy is, yes to drugs and no to terrorists. He laughs, high as hell. We shake hands and we have been good friends since,” Julio explained and waited for the information to sink in. “Simple as that.”

  “I know we are capable of many things, Julio—but you are asking me to believe that the CIA is working with drug cartels to fight terrorism?” I said.

  “Ishmael, simple economics—what I am telling you is this—we do not want terrorists coming in through Mexico. The gringo noses turn against us. Business, you know? If one of us gets greedy and wants some oil money, the United States government cannot stop him from smuggling in terrorists through a tunnel. But we can, bec
ause we know each other’s business—it is my business to know what is happening in other compounds because my life and livelihood depends on knowing,” he explained.

  “Julio, we are on the terrorist list—anyone who knows who we are will think you are breaking your fucked-up agreement …” Muddy said.

  Someone called Julio. He looked at his phone.

  “Then know that Jason and I risk a lot here. But you also know that Jason is who he is, just like I am who I am,” he said and wandered off.

  I felt I could trust Julio more than I could Jason. It was the same way I had always felt I could trust Jamal, even after he betrayed us to Sahara—they both were criminals, but they were always in their element. Perhaps I thought I could trust Julio because I knew that, fundamentally, I couldn’t trust him. His mandate in life was to sell drugs and protect the school he had built, and everyone was useful to the extent that they served or detracted from his mission.

  Jason, on the other hand, was a political instrument, even though he thought he was acting independently. In the end he was around for as long as politicians in Washington found him useful. He had taken us this far but it didn’t mean that he would not sell us out if it would serve a higher purpose—as defined by him.

  The difference was that Jason wanted us to trust him and Julio didn’t care. I guess we were all predictable in our own ways. O was going to do whatever it took to kill the men behind his wife’s murder. Muddy was here because in spite of her attempts to leave a life of violence behind, a part of her was addicted to the smell of gunpowder. I had never known her to turn down a fight. She could have decided to stay home and look after Janet and Mary’s mother, but she was here. And I followed a case to the bitter end because that was how I defined myself—it was all I knew, it was all I could stand on.

  O hadn’t said anything. I looked at him, trying to catch his eye, and he nodded back.

  “I will work with the Devil if I have to,” he said.

  “But will you play by his rules?” I asked him.