by Rob Spillman
They laughed because Ronan gave an exaggerated sigh as if he had done a lot of hard work.
“I thought you said it was the neighbours’ daughter,” said Yassir.
“Well this Amna character,” he said and Manaal laughed and nodded at the word “character,” “she is living with her in-laws, so it is really the in-laws’ house.”
Manaal got up to go and Ronan said, “I’ll tell you what. Just throw the keys up to us on the roof. We’ll wait for you in there. It will save time.”
The roof was dark and cool, its floor more uneven than that of the house had been. The ledge all around it was low, only knee-high. El-Ma’moura lay spread out before them, the half-built houses surrounded by scaffolding, the piles of sand and discarded bricks. Shadows of stray dogs made their way through the rubble. Domes of cardboard marked the places where the caretakers of the houses and their families lived. Their job was to guard the bags of cement, the toilets, the tiles that came for the new houses. Once the houses were built they would linger, drawing water from the pipes that splashed on the embryonic streets, until they were eventually sent away.
From the house next door came the sounds of children playing football, scuffling, names called out loud. A woman’s voice shrieked from indoors. Yassir and Ronan sat on the ledge. He offered Yassir a cigarette and Yassir accepted though he hadn’t smoked for several years. Ronan put his box of matches between them. It had a picture of a crocodile on it, mouth wide open, tail arched up in the air. Yassir had forgotten how good it felt to strike a match, flick grey ash away. It was one of the things he and Emma had done together—given up smoking.
“A long way from Aberdeen, or rather Aberdeen is a long way from here,” Ronan said.
“Have you been there before?”
“I know it well, my mother originally came from Elgin. They can be a bit parochial up there, don’t you think?”
At the back of Yassir’s mind questions formed themselves, rose out of a sense of habit, but dropped languidly as if there was no fuel to vocalise them. What was this man doing here, in a place where even the nights were hot and alcohol was forbidden? Where there was little comfort and little material gain? The painter sat on his roof and like the raised spots on the girl’s face did not arouse in Yassir derision, only passive wonder.
“If you look this way,” Ronan said, “you can see the airport where the red and blue lights are. Sometimes I see the aeroplanes circling and landing. They pass right over me when they take off. I see the fat bellies of planes full of people going away.
“Last August we had so much rain. This whole area was flooded—we couldn’t drive to the main road. The Nile rose and I could see it with my telescope—even though it is far from here.”
“How long have you been here?” Yassir asked.
“Fifteen years.”
“That’s a long time.”
Giant wisps of white brushed the sky as if the smoke from their cigarettes had risen high, expanded and stood still. Stars were pushing their way into view, gathering around them the darkest dregs of night. On the roof, speaking Emma’s language for the first time in two weeks, Yassir missed her, not with the light eagerness he had known on the rigs but with something else, something plain and unwanted: the grim awareness of distance. He knew why he had wanted her to come with him, not to “see,” but so that Africa would move her, startle her, touch her in some irreversible way.
Manaal threw up the keys, Ronan opened the locked room and put the light on. It was a single bulb which dangled from the ceiling, speckled with the still bodies of black insects. The room smelt of paint, a large fan stood in the corner. Conscious of his ignorance, Yassir was silent as Ronan, cigarette drooping from his mouth, showed him one painting after the other. “I like them,” he said and it was true. They were clear and uncluttered, the colours light, giving an impression of sunlight. Most were of village scenes, mud houses, one of children playing with a goat, one of a tree that had fallen into the river.
“Paper is my biggest problem,” said Ronan. “The brushes and paints last for quite some time. But if I know someone who is going abroad I always ask them for paper.”
“Is it special paper that you need?”
“Yes, thicker for water colours.”
“I like the one of the donkey in front of the mud house,” said Yassir.
“The Hilton don’t seem to want mud houses.”
“Did they tell you that?”
“No, I just got this feeling.”
“That means I could get them at a discount?”
“Maybe . . . How many were you thinking of taking?”
Yassir chose three, one of them the children with the goat because he thought Samia might like that. He paid after some haggling. Downstairs the birds were asleep in their cage, there was no longer any ice in the jug of kerkadeh. Manaal was waiting for him by the gate. She had a handful of dates from next door which she offered to Ronan and Yassir. The dates were dry and cracked uncomfortably under Yassir’s teeth before softening into sweetness. It was now time to leave. He shook hands with Ronan; the visit was a success; he had achieved what he came for.
Manaal slept in the car on the way home. Yassir drove through streets busier than the ones he had found in the afternoon. This was his last day in Khartoum. Tomorrow night a plane would take him to Paris, another plane to Glasgow, then the train to Aberdeen. Perhaps Ronan K. would be on his roof tomorrow night, watching Air France rise up over the new houses of El-Ma’moura.
The city was acknowledging his departure, recognising his need for a farewell. Headlamps of cars jerked in the badly lit streets, thin people in white floated like clouds. Voices, rumbling lorries, trucks leaning to one side snorting fumes. On a junction with a busier road, a small bus went past carrying a wedding party. It was lit inside, an orange light that caught the singing faces, the clapping hands. Ululations, the sound of a drum, lines from a song. Yassir drove on and gathered around him what he would take back with him, the things he could not deliver. Not the beads, not the paintings, but other things. Things devoid of the sense of their own worth. Manaal’s silhouette against the rig’s flare, against a sky dyed with kerkadeh. The scent of soap and shampoo in his car, a man picking his toenails, a page from a newspaper spread out as a mat. A voice that said, I see the planes circling at night, I see their lights . . . all the people going away. Manaal saying, you could have made it easier for her, you could have been more kind.
• East Africa •
BINYAVANGA WAINAINA
• Kenya •
from DISCOVERING HOME
I AM VISITING home, from South Africa. I take the dawn Nissan matatu from Nairobi to Nakuru, a two hour drive. It is 1995 and it has been three years since I saw my parents, my brother Jim, and my sister Chiqy. I have been working as a journalist in South Africa for the last three years.
The Kikuyu-grass by the side of the road is crying silver tears the colour of remembered light; Nairobi is a smoggy haze in the distance. Soon, the innocence that dresses itself in mist will be shoved aside by a confident sun, and the chase for money will reach its crescendo.
A man wearing a Yale University sweatshirt and tattered trousers staggers behind his enormous mkokoteni, stacked high with bags of potatoes moving so slowly it seems he will never get to his destination. He is transporting. No vehicle gives him room to move. The barrow is so full that it seems that some bags will fall off onto the road. Already, he is sweating. He smiles and waves at a friend on the side of the road, they chat briefly, laughing as if they had no care in the world. Then the mkokoteni man proceeds to move the impossible.
Why, when all odds are against our thriving, do we move with so much resolution? Kenya’s economy is on the brink of collapse, but we march on like safari ants, waving our pincers as if we will win.
Years ago, a guy, outside a theatre in Nairobi, told me he found Kenya strange. He was from the Caribbean.
“It is as if it is a country that has not thought itself int
o being.”
Maybe motion is necessary even when it produces nothing.
I sit next to the driver, who wears a Stetson hat, and has been playing an upcountry matatu classic on the cassette player: Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler. There are two women behind me talking. I can’t hear what they are saying, but it seems very animated. I catch snatches, when exclamations send their voices higher than they would like.
“Eh! Apana! I don’t believe!”
“Haki!”
“I swear!”
“Me I heard ati . . .”
Aha. Members of the Me-I-Heard-Ati society.
I construct their conversation in my mind:
“Eee-heeee! Even me I’ve heard that one! Ati you know, they are mining oil in Lake Victoria, together with Biwott.”
“Really!”
“Yah!”
“And they are exporting the ka-plant to Australia. They use it to feed sheep.”
“Nooo! Really? What plant?”
“You knooow, that plant—Water-hyak haycy . . . haia. Argh! That ka-plant that is covering the lake!”
“Hyacinth?”
“Yah! That hya-thing was planted by Moi and Biwott and them in Lake Victoria. They want to finish the Luos!”
And the Illuminati, the Free Masons—where Biwott, a short man who is said to run everything, is supposed to be the hooded Masonic overlord, higher there even, we hear, than the president.
The Nissan drones on, we are in a narrow tunnel made of star-stitched black felt, all fifteen of us lost in our own thoughts. Outside, in the valley below, all I can see is thousands of sepia paraffin lamps, flickering dots, each carrying wriggling dreams—hidden behind stoic faces, and sturdy mud and wood homes, muffled behind the shrieking silence of night.
I know in these red fertile hills, where my own ancestors come from, and where pyrethrum and potatoes are grown, strange cults thrive, hundreds of charismatic churches, tens of apocalyptic churches, and in the dark, tongues flutter and throb, eyes roll; and in the morning, faces are stoic.
At seven, the taxi goes somber as the music is turned off, and the news comes on, and we discover that today President Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi lifted an eyebrow, shut one eye, examined a pimple, drank tea.
There are funeral announcements on the radio, then a song comes on that takes me straight back to a childhood memory. Charonye ni Wasi.
It must have been a Sunday, and I was standing outside KukuDen restaurant in Nakuru, as my mother chatted away with an old friend. It was quite hot, and my Sunday clothes itched, the clean lines of colonial Nakuru met the raw and seemingly inarticulate noise of something else.
Then this song came on . . . Congo music, with voices as thick as hot honey, and wayward in a way Christian school tunes and English nursery melodies hadn’t prepared me for. The music was familiar enough, there is no way to avoid rhumba in Kenya, but I heard the music for the first time today. Guitar and trumpet, parched like before the rains, dived into the honey and out again. The voices pleaded in a strange language, men sending their voices higher than men should, and letting go of control, letting their voices flow, slow and phlegmy, like the honey. There was a lorry outside, and the men unloading the maize were singing to the music, pleading with the honey. The song burst out with the odd Swahili phrase, then forgot itself and started on its gibberish again. Maroon Commandos.
It disturbed me, demanding too much of my attention, derailing my daydreams. I lean back, and close my eyes. Those were good days.
I am maybe seven.
A flamingo woman, her stick-like legs in cloggy high heels, handbag in her beak. Flying away. We are sitting on a patch of some tough nylony grass next to the verandah. I used to love that flamingo book, it came with a carton of books my mum got from some American missionary neighbours who were going back home. Sun is hot. I close my eyes and let the sun shine on my eyelids. Red tongues and beasts flutter, aureoles of red and burning blue. The colours of dizzy.
Mum is shelling peas and humming; Ciru is running around, with a yo-yo, from the same American carton of goodies. When Ciru laughs, everybody laughs, and when she is running and laughing, everybody is warm and smiling.
Yellow dahlias hang their heads, like they are sad. Jimmy is making a kite. Take a newspaper. Baba will beat you if you use the Sunday paper. Cut one page off its twin. Use a knife to split a stick of old bamboo from the fence. Tape sticks, diagonally, with cellotape. Three holes in a triangle, in the right place. Make a long long newspaper tail. Run. Run. Run.
There are two old kites stuck on the electricity wire.
I don’t laugh a lot, my laugh is far away inside, like the morning car not starting when the key turns. It is Ciru number one in school, blue and red and yellow stars on every page. When I laugh it is when Ciru laughs and I find myself inside her laugh, and we fall down holding each other. She is seventeen months younger than me. It is Ciru in a white dress giving flowers to Mr. Ben Methu in school. If I am in the bath alone, I will sink inside and see the thick colours of things outside from inside the water, until my eyes are numb. If I am washing with Ciru, we are splashing and laughing and fighting and soon we are in a fever of tears or giggles.
From here we can see my whole home town, stretched springs of smoke, the silos, one a clump of four tall, glued together concrete cylinders, UNGA (Flour) LTD., and two separate metallic blue tubes where Baba works, at Pyrethrum Board of Kenya. PieBoard. Behind, Menengai Crater; to the left, Lena Moi Primary School, sitting under Nakuru Golf Club. Everywhere, there are purple, puffed up cabbages of jacaranda. Past the silos, green maize and paler wheat stretch out. All around, in the distance, are mountains, we are at the bottom of the Rift Valley.
Brown is near. Green far. Blue farthest.
From here you can see Nairobi road, and often there are long long lines of tanks and trucks and tanks and trucks and lorries going to the Lanet barracks.
President Kenyatta is going to beat Idi Amin.
President Kenyatta is a bull.
I look at pink and blue Lake Nakuru below me, watch the flamingoes rise up like leaves in the wind, our dog Juma grinning, mouth open and panting, and I have this feeling.
It is a pink and blue feeling, as sharp as clear sky; a slight breeze, and the edges of Lake Nakuru would rise like the ruffle at the edge of a skirt; and I am pockmarked with whole-body pinpricks of potentiality. A stretch of my body would surely stretch as far as the sky. The whole universe poised, and I am the agent of any movement.
These are the maps; you dig your hand deep into the bag and extract them for use later, when your body is sluggish and awkward, and it seems you are wading through thick mud in the dark.
Nakuru. I am at home. The past eight hours are already receding into the forgotten; I was in Cape Town yesterday morning, I am in Nakuru, Kenya, now.
Blink.
Mum looks tired and her eyes are sleepier than usual. She has never seemed frail, but does so now. I decide that it is I who am growing, changing, and my attempts at maturity make her seem more human.
We sit, in the dining room, and talk from breakfast to lunch, congealing eggs around us. Every so often she will grab my hand and check my nails; a hand will reach into her mouth to lick a spot off my forehead.
We wander and chat, and things gather to some invisible assessment inside her, and she turns, sharp and certain, and says, “You smoke.”
I nod, eyes tap-dancing awkwardly, waiting for it to come: the full blow of power. It does not come: there is restraint.
They are worried about me, and for the first time in my life, worried enough not to bring it up.
I make my way around the house. My mother’s voice, talking to my dad, echoes in the corridor. None of us has her voice: if crystal was water solidified, her voice would be the last splash of water before it sets.
Light from the kitchen brings the Nandi woman to life. A painting.
I was terrified of her when I was a kid. Her eyes seemed so alive and the red bits growled at me. H
er broad face announced an immobility that really scared me; I was stuck there, fenced into a tribal reserve by her features: rings on her ankles and bells on her nose, she will make music wherever she goes.
Two sorts of people: those on one side of the line will wear third-hand clothing till it rots. They will eat dirt, but school fees will be paid.
On the other side of the line live people some see in coffee-table books, we see in weekend trips to the village to visit family, on market days in small towns, and on television, translated back to us by a foreign man with a deep voice that has come to represent timeless days and bygone ways and an Africa ten metres away from us in the living room, and a million light-years from any reality we can process: this Africa is the same as Disney World, and Woody Woodpecker and Groovy Ghoulies and the Boomtown Rats. We are maybe less ironical about it because it comes from too far away from us for us to see into its motives, we can only try to seem familiar with a television language that is the Way the World Works.
So, in Nature Televisionese, these people are like an old and lush jungle that continues to flourish its leaves and unfurl extravagant blooms, refusing to realise that somebody cut off the water.
Often, somebody from the other side of the line.
We, the modern ones, are fascinated by the completeness of the old ones. To us, it seems that everything is mapped out and defined for them, and everybody is fluent in those definitions. In televisionspeak, they are a different species: they are spoken of in hushed reverential tones, like when the naturalist is showing us the birthing albino dragonfly. We are interested only in their general bygones.
The old ones are not much impressed with our society, or manners—what catches their attention is our tools: the cars and medicines and telephones and wind-up dolls and guns and anthropologists and Funding and International Indigenous Peoples’ networks.
In my teens, set alight by the poems of Senghor and Okot p’Bitek, the Nandi woman became my Tigritude. I pronounced her beautiful, marvelled at her cheekbones and mourned the lost wisdom in her eyes, but I still would have preferred to sleep with Pam Ewing or Iman.