There was one other piece of business to take care of: the teacher. We needed to know what he would do. We had saved his life, and he had proven himself. Now it was a question of whether he trusted us enough to let us continue with our work without him raising the alarm.
“I have nowhere to go except back to Mexico. To live here in America … is death to me. My former life is dead, what life will I be born to? I am police—that is all I know to do. Julio, help me get the bastard who sold me out … It is the only way I can go back in,” he said. “Once I’m back in, you and I, we know each other well now.”
He did have options: he could stay in the United States illegally, he could go to the DEA and offer his services and knowledge, he could go into the drug business himself—many police and military personnel had—but he was right. Each option was like death. He had only one choice, and that was to go reclaim his life. It all depended on just how badly Julio still wanted to ruin or kill him.
Julio was silent for a minute.
“I will help you, but remember your life is mine,” he said. The teacher, looking depressed, nodded in agreement.
This was our life, shifting alliances and allegiances, and we hoped with each shift that somehow the world, even as it remained the same crooked, crime-filled place it had always been, had changed for the better. With the teacher back in the force, a corrupt chief would be out. And the teacher had already been compromised by Julio. For him, the teacher, alive and back inside the police force, was worth more than dead and buried somewhere in a Mexican desert on their return trip.
Julio would get to turn him after all. With at least two things resolved, we inflated five of the seven air mattresses—it was true that Michael had just assumed there would be many of us and had prepared all the beds that he had.
While O was in the kitchen looking for omelette ingredients, I turned on Michael’s computer—he had the Kenyan Daily Nation as his homepage. Muddy leaned over my shoulder and we skimmed through the front page. The violence had intensified, but there were two positive developments. The idea that Obama should make a unity visit to Kenya was being floated—it’d be good for his campaign if he brought peace to a country while still just a candidate, and if anyone could, it was him. The United Nations was also sending in a former UN chief to broker peace and the Elders were planning to visit.
This was the first time I’d heard of the Elders. I looked it up on the Internet—it was an organization composed of the world’s most influential retirees—Mandela, Clinton, Bishop Tutu, Jimmy Carter, and others who still believed in doing some good, though I couldn’t help wondering cynically what they could do now that they couldn’t do when they’d held their powerful offices. Nevertheless, the idea that the world was a village and yet needed global leaders was interesting.
I guessed Obama’s visit wouldn’t happen at the height of the violence—too dangerous, physically and politically. And after the Norfolk bombing, with Sahara still on the loose, it would be foolhardy for the U.S. Embassy in Kenya to allow such a visit. We had to find Sahara—without him, everyone was holding on to only a small piece of the puzzle.
The United States had launched a drone missile attack into Somalia, killing some operatives from Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, or another organization. Of course, the real culprits were still at large, because they were going after the wrong guys. It was time to really question whether Paul was just a hapless diplomat who went along with the powers that be, or whether he was actively part of the disinformation detracting from the Sahara mission.
I had the feeling that the case was getting away from us, that we didn’t have the skills or the power to solve it, that we were being sucked into the eye of a hurricane.
Julio and the teacher were still sleeping, but they woke up as soon as O walked back into the sitting room with a big pan half-covered by a massive omelette. He had put in anything he could find in Michael’s fridge—beans, ugali, fish, beef, and even fries—but it was damn good.
Over breakfast, we discussed the best thing to do. We had to make it to the university and see what we could find out there. Muddy, O, and I would go to Berkeley while Julio and the teacher remained behind to buy car-washing supplies and Ninja Car Washers uniforms—to turn our shell of a cover into actual immigrant jobs.
Helen, our “African Hacker,” as I had taken to calling her, had decided from her profile that Sahara not only had a connection to the University of California, Berkeley, but that he had probably taught there—something to do with Africa. Muddy and I took a cab to the university and marched straight to the African Studies Department. We were going to present ourselves as a black couple, African and African-American, interested in the program.
“Can we learn more about what it is you do here?” we asked a beautiful white woman with thick blond dreadlocks and dressed in African clothing.
“My Kiswahili name is Amina,” she said as she shook our hands. “It means ‘feel safe.’ But you can also call me by my American name, Leslie,” she added with a self-conscious laugh when we said nothing.
“Pardon me, I was just admiring your dress,” Muddy said. She introduced us using our cover names.
“You must be Kikuyu … your name suggests so,” Amina said to me pleasantly.
“No, I’m actually from here … the United States, I mean. My parents gave me that name,” I said.
“Oh, I understand … black power,” she concluded, and then paused. “Oh my God, where is my hospitality? May I offer you some tea?”
“Thank you, Amina, tea would be lovely,” Muddy said. I was dying with laughter at this proper-sounding Muddy.
Amina made a call to the office and dashed off with a coffee pot. The assistant director, a tall, stocky white man with flaming red hair, came out and led us to his office. It reminded me of many of the offices of expatriates that I had visited in Kenya—there were the drums and clothes, and long shelves of books that displayed his knowledge.
There were also the usual Maasai photographs: one of him surrounded by Africans, a scholarly face among a sea of smiling black faces, another in which he was wearing a beaded crown, next to him a slaughtered bull with its bright thick red blood streaking through sandy earth. He smiled when he saw me looking at the photograph.
“They made me an honorary chief … called me the red chief on account of my hair,” he said. “I used to be a vegetarian until that,” he added, pointing at the bull. “How could I live on grass like the animal, they asked? I had no answer.”
I gave him our Kikuyu names.
“Chief … my husband and I, we feel we need to know more about Africa. I am an African and he is from here, but we need to know more so we can …” Muddy started to say.
“Let me guess,” the white African Chief interrupted her. “You are from … wait, wait, don’t tell me, you’re from Rwanda,” he said, almost jumping up and down in his chair.
“Yes, my, how could you tell?” Muddy asked, sounding genuinely surprised except that from her tone I could tell she was putting on an act.
“I have an excellent ear for African accents. Were you there? Did you really see it? Sad times … Did you lose someone? Why do you have a Kikuyu name?” he asked her.
Muddy didn’t answer.
“Excuse me, I get carried away when I meet people like you—survivors—it takes courage and strength. You are the reason I am what I am. I should not have asked. What can I do for you?” he said apologetically.
We explained that we had met a professor from the department, probably retired, but we had lost his contact information. He had had a profound effect on us, he had told us about the program, and we had promised to look him up when we came to campus. He went by the name of Sahara—his African name. At which point the Chief said that it happened all the time, friends of Africa took African names.
We described Sahara, but the Chief said that we could be describing most old white college professors. He entered a few keys into his computer, waved us over to his side, and scrolled do
wn a list of current and retired professors associated with the program.
“Any of these names seem familiar?” he asked. None of them did.
He gave us his card and some brochures and suggested we spend some time online learning about the program—we could come back next week if we had questions before applying.
As we left the office, we saw that Amina was pouring water from the coffee pot onto some Ketepa tea bags. So, to be polite, the four of us sat around her receptionist desk, sipping lukewarm Kenyan tea.
“Hey, what are you guys doing later in the afternoon? It’s African Festival Week. I promise it’s going to be a blast—come, I’ll show you around,” she offered, and gave us a flyer. We were just about to turn her down, when she said, “Hey, you can’t say no—everyone who has ever done anything in Africa, they will all be there. You can leave Africa, but Africa will never leave you.”
“Your professor might even be there,” the Chief said.
The conversation spiraled down to cuisine and culture. When we left, the Chief and Amina were laughing about their last encounter at an Ethiopian restaurant: the hot pepper had been watered down—the food wasn’t really African.
“I have an idea. I once asked Jason why he joined the Foreign Service, and he said it was because he went on a study abroad program. We need to look at their study abroad programs—love for the Foreign Service begins with Peace Corps–type programs, a visit to a foreign country …” I said excitedly.
“Where are you going with this?” Muddy asked me.
“Sahara’s men, there was something about them … Someone somewhere must have recruited and trained them, and a campus is as good a place as any. Shit, the army, the CIA, corporations, everyone recruits from the colleges. Why not Sahara? Think of Amina … she would be attracted to a company promising to do some good,” I talked it through to Muddy.
“Well, let’s find out,” she said.
A colorfully dressed maternal woman who had a busy mouth ran the study abroad office. Muddy told her we were journalists working on a piece for Kenya’s Daily Nation about Berkeley’s programs. What we wanted to do was go through a list of their students spanning two or three generations. Specifically, we wanted to write about students who had been to Africa.
“You’re in luck, honey, everything is computerized,” she said to us as she turned on a computer monitor. “What years?”
“When was the Peace Corps founded?” I asked her. “Sixty-two, wasn’t it, by Kennedy?”
“I see you’ve done your research, dear. It was 1961. Let’s see, 1961 to the present … if we narrow the search to Africa,” she said as she typed, “… not many hits in the early 1960s. You know, Africa was not that popular back then …”
“Why is that?” Muddy asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine, honey. All I can tell you is that you’ll find very few alumni for the early days,” she replied.
That was good for us, since our search dates would range from the 1970s to the early ’90s, assuming that Sahara’s men were, give or take a few years, in their late thirties.
“Do you have a flash drive?” she asked. “It’s okay, I know those damn things can be expensive.” She rummaged through her drawer, found several, and picked one. “The students, they forget them here and never come back for them,” she said, looking with pity at the poor African journalists.
She gave us the downloaded data and we thanked her, promising that we would send her the piece as soon as it was published.
Next, we went to the university library and used a computer there to go through the flash drive. A few minutes into it, Muddy pointed to the screen and I tensed. We had something. In 1985, five students, four of them white and one of them black, had traveled to South Africa. These were the days before the U.S. declared sanctions against the racist government there.
There were a few photos of them marching with black students against apartheid. But it was the last photo, in which they were looking into the camera somberly, their eyes without the luster, smiles, and laughter of the earlier photographs, that suggested something profound had happened to them. My guess was that they had seen more violence than the university newspaper would dare publish—dying and dead schoolchildren still in their uniforms, shot by the security forces. These were our guys.
The write-up concluded with the information that their meeting with the university president led to the University of California becoming the first university to fully divest from apartheid South Africa—to the tune of three billion dollars.
That kindness they had about them that felt so out of place—it made sense. It was hard to believe that these kids would, a few years later, plant a bomb in Kenya, kill one of their own and die in a small apartment in Nairobi after shooting an unarmed woman in the head.
The write-up didn’t mention where they were from—but we had their names. Neil Jackson, Harrison Bush, Ronald William, and John Rhodes. And our dead man—Amos Apara. There was no Sahara, but now I knew if we looked hard enough, we would find him. We could work with this.
I stepped outside the library and called Helen. She was still working on getting past the security on Sahara’s laptop. In the meantime, she would hack into the school database and get us the listed addresses for where the men had lived.
I went back inside and we continued going through the flash drive, sure we wouldn’t find Sahara. But if we followed the dead black man—Amos Apara—I had to get used to the fact that we now had a name—he would eventually lead us to Sahara. We left the library feeling much lighter.
The African Festival Week was unlike anything I had ever seen. It was half celebration and half mourning; Kenya, up in flames, was still fresh in my mind. But slowly I relaxed and forgot that we were here to look for Sahara or anything that might help us with the case.
At the festival, Muddy and I could eat, drink, and hold hands and just be an engaged couple in love. We could dance to the Malian musician on stage, playing his ngoni, which made beautiful muted thin and stringy sounds that were well complemented by a blues guitarist’s lazy electrified notes, the congas, and the drums. I had seen Muddy happy, but I had never seen her carefree—without a worry in the world, so in the moment that every now and then she’d even skip about when pointing something out.
I was dressed in a flowing blue African shirt and blue jeans, while O was wearing a white shirt over black corduroys. Muddy had set her dreadlocks free and she was wearing a long hippie-looking African dress. You could say we were disguised as ourselves. The outfits had another advantage: they concealed our weapons and bulletproof vests.
Julio and the teacher were wearing modern Mexican out-fits; at least that’s what they told us, as Julio made us repeat the names of everything—guayabera shirts, which looked African to me, and sombreros, jeans, and sandals. It was Muddy’s idea to play up the ethnic dress.
We divided up, O taking the teacher and Muddy taking Julio, and went in search of Sahara. After two hours of walking around, peering into every face, we converged at a makeshift bar that was selling Tusker beer. In true Kenyan form, we ordered two each and some beef kebabs and found a place under the tent to sit down, watching people walk by. This had been a long shot, but there was no harm in hanging around in case Sahara came to the festival later.
“Mr. Mwangi, you are not asking,” O said to me, reverting to our cover names.
“What question?” I asked him.
“I thought by now you would have asked what I thought of America, your country,” O said.
“Well?” I said.
“I knew we were many but I did not know there was a place where we could be … all together, black people from all over. And walking together with Asians and Europeans—you know what I mean? I like that. Makes me think of what’s happening back home,” he answered pensively.
Amina walked by, dressed every bit the part, looking more African even than Muddy, who had forsaken a head-wrap so that, as she had explained, her dreads could soak in the Ame
rican sun. I caught up with her and we walked back to the tent together. She had a quick beer with us—she was meeting friends—but she was having a party later and she invited us along.
At Amina’s, Muddy and O were smoking up a storm while I was getting deeper and deeper into the blues. The teacher and Julio had left with the rest of Amina’s guests, a motley crew of graduate students interested in one or another aspect of Africa.
“Hey, Mwangi!” O called out, high and very drunk. “Do you know what it’s like to wake up one morning, kiss the woman you love goodbye, go to a hospital to see your sick mother, and come back to find your wife dead? Do you know anything about that kind of … of … suddeneity?” he asked me as he got up to dance, or rather sway back and forth.
“Suddeneity is not a fucking word,” Muddy corrected him, and she took a deeper hit from her joint.
“No, I can’t say I do,” I answered, already hating where the conversation was going.
“Heeeeey, Bwana,” Amina said, raising her hands up in the air. “My father … my father died in a car accident in fucking Kampala, one day we were talking over the phone, the next day he was dead and we were trying to get him back home. Some people hit giraffes, and some die in war. We’re here, aren’t we?” she said as she blew smoke into the air and coughed.
“Don’t stand in my way,” O said to me, ignoring Amina’s comment but reaching for her hand.
“Hey, fuck off,” Amina said, and slapped his hand away.
“I’m sorry—that came out the wrong way. Okay?” he said to Amina before continuing. “What I mean is that the closest you can get to knowing yourself is when you’re looking for the motherfucker that tried to kill you—that’s it. And you wanna know why?” he asked drunkenly.
“Why?” we chorused back, some of us lagging behind like we were preschoolers.
“Because you have to ask yourself—why does that motherfucker want to kill me? And why did he miss me and kill my wife?” he said, pointing at an imaginary enemy.
“And then you have to ask—how the fuck do I kill him?” O said. “Do you know that you have to get to know his soul? I mean you have to know his soul. That is how we get Sahara.” He slapped his hand on his knee emphatically.
Black Star Nairobi Page 17