Black Star Nairobi

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  They revved their dune buggies, spinning their wheels and raising so much sand and dust into the air that soon we couldn’t see more than two feet around us.

  O tapped the teacher’s shoulder and asked him if he knew what was going on.

  “Órale, take it easy. I took precautions—I am the only one who knew we were coming this way. We cannot outrun them. We see what they want, no?” Julio answered.

  “Bulletproof windows—we are safe in here,” the teacher said.

  We checked our weapons as we waited for the dust to settle. The militiamen beckoned Julio over. Instead, I rolled down the window a few inches.

  “Is there a problem?” I asked, trying to sound as friendly as I could.

  “You American?” one of them asked.

  “Yes—trying to head back home,” I answered, putting on my best innocent-tourist expression.

  “Taking the long route, ain’t you? What you doing around here, anyhow?” the same guy asked.

  “I could ask you the same, ain’t you a bit out of your way?” I said in turn.

  “We ain’t got no jurisdiction out here … Now, why don’t you step out of the vehicle so that we can see who we talking to? We can talk face to face … mano a mano,” the man said.

  It was a gamble but I asked Muddy to cover me. I slid my Glock into the small of my back, took off my shoulder holster, and gingerly opened the door as Muddy slid into place.

  “Come on down, we ain’t gonna bite you,” their leader said.

  I walked over to him—the four men were spaced out so that they were surrounding our car. I could see they had headsets on so they could hear each other, but they couldn’t all see each other. I knew O, Muddy, Julio, and the teacher had each picked their target. If it came to it and I couldn’t get to my gun before the man in front of me did, all I had to do was fall to the ground.

  “Like I was saying, we ain’t got no jurisdiction—just like when them Mexicans cross over and shit all over the jurisdiction on the other side. So the better question is, what you doing way out here? We don’t see many Afro-Americans around here,” he said, drawling out “Afro-Americans.”

  “Well, here we are, two Americans talking on this side of the border about jurisdiction. You came to us—what do you want?” I asked, trying to sound firm and polite at the same time.

  “What we want to know is whether you’re carrying some Mexicans—you could be one of them black coyotes. So, why don’t you ask your friends to step out the car, we get our Mexicans and the drugs, and you can be on your way?” the leader said, making it sound both reasonable and threatening.

  “Out here, you have no authority,” I said, motioning towards the U.S., a vague shape a few miles away. “What you are doing is interfering with my investigation,” I added, thinking how true that was.

  “Well, that may very well be true, but we sure could use some proof … you got a badge? Or perhaps a number I can call?” he asked, so sure that I was lying.

  I walked closer to him so he would either have to step back or push me backward to use his weapon.

  “You rent-a-cops are quite something. I’m undercover—why would I have my fucking badge with me? And the longer you keep me, the more questions they will ask,” I said angrily, having decided to play the part that I was playing in real life anyway. He hadn’t expected that tone and it gave him pause.

  His friends were getting impatient, as I presumed mine were as well, and now that they had heard me over their leader’s headset, they would be a little less sure of the course of action to take. They had been expecting, at the very least, a simple Stepin Fetchit routine.

  “Just walk away—hop away on your toys and pretend we never met. I can carry on and you can continue playing your games,” I said to him, knowing that there was no way this was going to end well.

  “You got one of yours in the White House, almost, but not out here in wetback country. You dig, my brother? So this is what you are gonna do. You are gonna call your little friends and ask them to step out the car one by one. Then we are going to search your vehicle. And then I will want to see some undercover identification,” he instructed, sounding like he was talking to a junior partner.

  “Dumb fuck—you think I have some Mormons in the car? I ask them to step out and they step out shooting,” I said.

  He pulled back, trying to raise his M-16. I edged closer in so that I was holding his gun down at an angle, pointing away from me. I still hadn’t gone for my Glock, hoping that, somehow, we would all come to our senses and have a good laugh, and then we would be on our way.

  “Hey, that’s not all I have to say,” I said before he could respond. “I’m going to reach into my pocket slowly—I want to give you something—for you and your men.”

  “Very slowly,” came the inevitable warning.

  “Here is five thousand dollars—they see me giving it to you, I go back and tell them you took a bribe and we are all safe, and you can have a drink on the Bureau. Just take it and move on and I can put down in my report that the Minutemen have good judgment,” I said, trying to sound as convincing as Julio had been when he gave the teacher the choice of truth, lies, or death. He hesitated.

  “What I am telling you is that you were dead the moment you stopped us. And now I am giving you money to stay alive,” I said to them all, via the leader’s headset.

  He was starting to waver. Whatever he had against Mexicans was not principle. Way inside Mexico, confronting a black man with a car full of people whose intentions and capabilities he didn’t know, reason was telling him to take the money and run. As he put out his hand for the money, I reached for my Glock, closed in, and raised it to his chin.

  “I’m going to walk away now,” I said. “You make a move and you will be the first to die.”

  I could see the fear growing in his eyes—the tables had turned.

  “Hey, fellas, five thousand dollars for nothing? Let’s get outta here!” he yelled out to his men. I backtracked to the car and climbed in.

  “They were trying to get us out of the car—I think they know who we are,” I whispered urgently as the leader made a big show of putting the money in his pocket. They rode off and we continued on.

  “Think they are coming back?” the teacher asked.

  “Regardless of whether they know who we are, that was their reconnaissance—try and gauge our strength. Not bad at all,” Muddy said.

  “And now we also know who we’re dealing with,” I said.

  “They will be back. Stop the car—I’ll climb up on the roof,” O said to the teacher.

  “We are safer in the car,” Julio said, tapping the windows.

  “Inside we have only four guns—on the roof, I have an advantage and we have an extra gun—five on four,” O explained.

  It made sense: sitting in the middle, Muddy couldn’t very well shoot over O or me, and if they took out the tires, we couldn’t stay in an immobilized car indefinitely. We had to fight our way out.

  “When you see them, stop the car,” O said.

  Stopping the car was counter-intuitive—a moving target is harder to hit, so they would expect us to try to outrun them. Stopping would throw them off and we would be able to pick our shots.

  “It’s going to be bumpy,” the teacher said as he spun the wheels and churned up a sand storm to camouflage O’s move.

  We hadn’t gone very far before we saw the four-wheelers coming furiously toward us from both sides. The teacher stopped the car—as we had expected, they had been anticipating a chase, and so they stopped a few hundred feet away to think about their next move. Then they started up again—they sped toward us as they fired and we could feel their rounds tearing into the jeep like a hailstorm. I heard the disciplined roar from O’s AK, and the four-wheeler coming at the teacher spun in the air and came crashing down into the sand. The driver tried to find cover but it was too late. O cut him down.

  I waited, feeling the tapping of the M-16 fire getting more and more intense—and jus
t when I thought I couldn’t stand it, the driver of the ATV nearest to us hit a small dune and reached for the wheel with both hands. I waited one second more for the four-wheeler to steady, and just as he was reaching for his weapon again, I let out one shot—the man’s head jerked backwards and the four-wheeler crawled to a stop a few feet from our car. Julio and Muddy were still firing at the remaining vehicles. From the roof, O joined them—it was now three guns to two. One of them tried to turn back but it was too late, as both machines and the men inside came to a dead stop. In a matter of seconds, it was quiet again.

  We stepped outside to ID the men. I went to the leader first. In an inside pocket of his jacket, next to my wad of cash, was the man’s wallet. I opened it. There was a photograph of the man, his wife, and two young children in a park. I stared at it for a moment. The man stirred—he was barely alive.

  “Why didn’t you walk away? You should have walked away,” I said to him as he groped for the wallet. I gave it to him and he shakily looked at the photograph.

  “Why?” he asked.

  I looked at him, trying to understand what he was asking. Why had we fought back? Why didn’t he walk away? Why was he dying? Why were we in Mexico? Why had I betrayed our country? He was gone before I could ask him what he meant.

  I was about to put his wallet back in his jacket but remembered it had my prints—as did the M-16. I tore off one of his sleeves, dipped it into the tank of his four-wheeler, and put his wallet and weapon on top of it. Then I asked O for a lighter and set it on fire.

  There was nothing useful on any of them. Did they really know who we were? It seemed more than likely. If so, it meant that Sahara knew we were coming, and that was bad news. The good news was that the U.S. government didn’t know—otherwise it would not have been four militiamen.

  We drove off. A few hundred feet behind us, the four-wheeler exploded into flames. The man’s question kept playing in my mind. That question, asked into the vacuum of death, when there was nothing else left to lose or gain, that question as a dying man’s confession or curse—that question—I knew that question would fuck me over, someday soon.

  An hour later, we came to a stop. Julio took out three shovels from the back of the car and led us to the bottom of a sand dune. He gave the teacher, O, and me a shovel each and pointed to where we were to start digging. We dug for about ten minutes until we hit what looked like a trapdoor. Julio pulled it open and we all went down a ladder to the beginning of a tunnel. He fumbled around and found some flashlights.

  “Whoever is last, close the door—the wind will cover it with sand,” he said nonchalantly. “Sorry about the accommodations, this is not the kind of tunnel that has electricity and air-conditioning. This is a poor man’s drug tunnel.”

  We crawled for about an hour before the tunnel suddenly opened up into a basement. Julio knocked on a door in the wall once, paused, then twice more.

  “You know what that says?” he asked me.

  “No,” I answered, curious.

  “My knock say ‘Ju-li-o.’ Get it? I spell my name,” he said, laughing. We were too exhausted to laugh with him.

  The trapdoor opened and on other side was a well-dressed old woman who reminded me of O’s mother, aged and wrinkled but not bent.

  “What are you doing here, Julio? Aren’t you the big jefe over there now?” she asked him in English.

  “I had to deliver them across myself,” he replied as he pointed at us.

  “They must be very special packages,” she said, beckoning us in.

  “Welcome to the United States of America. You are now officially illegal immigrants,” he said to us.

  “Come … let us get you something to eat and then you can bathe,” the old woman said to us, as if we were children, not fiercely armed and dirty strangers. She led us to her sitting room, which was immaculately clean, and I noticed that we were tracking dirt all over the place.

  “Don’t worry, labor is cheap over here—someone will clean up after you,” she said, laughing. She handed us towels and blue overalls to wear, leaving us to decide who was going to shower first.

  After we cleaned up, Julio called us together for what appeared to be a drug meeting. He went to another room and came back with three phones and a bunch of SIM cards.

  “Change them every other day! Don’t use only cash—that will make some people suspicious. Here are some prepaid credit cards. Buy new ones in poor neighborhoods—use fake names. Your weapons are like Samson’s hair, your strength and weakness—if you are arrested with them, you are fucked. You could go in Gandhi-like. But to find clean unmarked guns is hard work, so take what you have,” he said.

  “Operate like this is the 1960s—that is the only way to defeat your more sophisticated enemy. They have the satellites, you will have only what you can see; they will have their sophisticated weapons, you will have only what you can point and shoot; they will have their computer networks, their international connections, the Internet will be at their beck and call, you will have word of mouth. In other words, my friends, stay as you are, operate as if you are still in Africa,” Julio drilled us, and then laughed. I laughed along, too: it was the best damn speech anyone could give three fish out of water.

  It was time to leave for Oakland. We stepped outside the house into a hot, glaring sun and climbed into a blue van with NINJA CAR CLEANERS on it—the logo was a picture of Mr. Clean dressed like a ninja. We were off.

  I was in the U.S.—that much I knew objectively. I was a U.S. citizen and this was my country, but I didn’t feel like I was home. At the same time, with the election coming up, I couldn’t have picked a more exciting time to come home, in spite of the ugliness we had left behind in Kenya and in a Mexican desert.

  CHAPTER 12

  BACK IN THE U.S. OF A.

  I was home, but home was largely unrecognizable—San Francisco wasn’t Madison, by far. For one, late November in Madison was bitter cold and snow-covered. In San Francisco, the night was cool, all right, but it felt more like a nice Wisconsin spring.

  Yet, at the same time, it was home. American English! I had never thought of language as anything other than words, but to be surrounded by it after so long, to wallow in it, to understand everything around me—it was as if a long-dulled sense had awoken. Even when I couldn’t make out a whole conversation or even a single sentence in the noise of people and machinery, there was a sense of familiarity, of being home.

  And this din was American. The hum of noise was mine—the Caterpillars and jackhammers working through a darkness lit by large floodlights, loud people walking down the street, all the smells of different cuisines from cheap and expensive restaurants, the smell of perfume coming from well-dressed men and women going to the bars and clubs. Yes, this wasn’t Madison, but it smelled and sounded like home.

  When I worked undercover as a cop, there were times I felt desolate and lonely—it was like living parallel lives, trapped in one body. But even then I always knew that a single phone call could change all that—I had a whole police force behind me, which meant that, at the bottom of it all, I had a government behind me. This felt different—I didn’t have a single lifeline. Yes, I could ask for favors from people I trusted like Mo, my journalist friend in Madison, but even they could only do so much for me.

  Now I felt like my cover was too complete—a single arrest and I would be tried as an enemy combatant. I was a man without a country at home. On the other hand, it wasn’t so bad: I had O and Muddy here with me and we were all working this case together.

  From the door of his house in Oakland, Michael sleepily beckoned us in. Where O was tall and lean, Michael, though just as tall, seemed to fill the doorway. Shaved bald and wearing a big smile and a thick blue bathrobe that barely covered his belly, he looked every bit the consummate Kenyan middle manager. He let us in, mumbling something about having to be at work in the morning—he worked at a nursing home. He pointed to the fridge, two couches, and a bunch of sleeping bags in the sitting room, and
went back to sleep.

  “How did he know that we would be five and not three?” I asked O. O hadn’t told him we were coming with Julio and the teacher.

  “He didn’t, he just assumed we would be many,” O answered.

  “I find that to be very curious. Why?” Julio asked, joining me in my suspicions.

  “It’s an African thing,” Muddy said.

  “You motherfuckers better chill out and enjoy your African hospitality,” O explained lightly. I didn’t need convincing and I went to the fridge. It was full of barely cold food—fish, nyama choma, collard greens, and ugali. The long road had made us ravenously hungry and I didn’t bother looking for plates or spoons, I just laid out the food on the low coffee table in its big aluminum trays. There were some Tuskers in the fridge too. I passed them around and as we ate, we discussed our next move.

  “Are you in any hurry to get back?” Muddy asked Julio and the teacher. “I mean, surely your thriving business can survive a few days without you? Then we can enjoy the sights.”

  “What are you asking?” Julio said.

  “We could use your help—your Ninja Cleaners gives us a good cover. Two of us have never been to the U.S. before, two of us are cops used to doing things with the law on their side, the simple way. Look, Julio, we need you, we need you to help us stay underground,” Muddy said.

  “If you stay, I stay. Then we go back together,” the teacher said to Julio.

  “Let me make a call,” Julio said and stepped outside. We waited, sipping tiredly on our beers until he returned.

  “Jason, he like that I stay and watch over you,” he said with a smile on his face.

  “What did you really say to him?” I asked him.

  “Let us say that you, my friends, are good for business. You were right, my dear rose,” he said, turning to Muddy. “From here I can run my business.”

  Sometimes I doubted whether without Muddy we would ever get anything done. She was right—we needed Julio around.