Fatboy and the Dancing Ladies

by Michael Holman

  “Over the past four decades the continent has undergone a political and economic revolution, with the lives of its peoples changing more radically in the last forty years than in the previous four centuries. Colonial powers have withdrawn, white rule has ended, and apartheid has crumbled. One-party states have given way to multi-party politics, and state-controlled economics have succumbed to the market; as the Cold War ended, African presidents lost the patronage of Moscow and Washington, and donors demanded ‘good governance’ from mismanaged regimes they had previously tolerated or encouraged. From Cape Town to Cairo, the mood has altered dramatically as Africa enters a new era . . .”

  Furniver paused, and studied the words on the screen of his laptop.

  “New era . . .”

  He liked those words. They had a good ring to them, though he was far from clear as to what they meant.

  14

  Ferdinand Mlambo sat on the edge of his mattress, kept an eye trained on the State House kitchen garden in case anyone tried to sneak up, and tried to cheer himself up by singing a popular Kireba ditty.

  He had a fine voice, even by the standards of a country where a good singing voice was taken for granted.

  “Together, together again,

  United, united by pain . . .”

  It was a brave effort, but it didn’t work.

  For a few minutes he sat, snivelling. Then he decided. There was only one thing to do, one place to go.

  The boy pulled on his only pair of shorts, cleared his nostrils, blowing first one side then the other, and fastidiously cleaned his fingers on the grass. He then brushed his teeth with the bristles of a well-chewed twig, hawked and spat, wiped his face with the back of his hand, and set off along the overgrown path to Kireba via the old boathouse.

  He had made up his mind and there was no time to lose.

  He had betrayed President Nduka. He would not betray Charity Mupanga, never! But whatever he did, he needed to talk to Ntoto and Rutere.

  As he trotted on his way, sounds of Kuwisha swept over the urban landscape like a returning tide. From east of his lair came the murmur of traffic, a choir whose voices merged to form a single sound, from the rumbling bass of the huge lorries carrying steel containers through Kuwisha to its landlocked neighbours, to the endlessly honking matatus and the sharp noise of the buzzing motorbikes.

  All these sounds seemed to be subsumed by the hum of the many Range Rovers and Land Rovers, jeeps and Mitsubishis with which Kuwisha was blessed, travelling each day like animals to a watering hole, their bewildering range of acronyms emblazoned on their frames as they moved slowly through the morning traffic, hooting their frustration while signalling their importance.

  Within the air-conditioned interior of their vehicles, usually on the back seats, sat the men and women who did so much to help the frail economy of Kuwisha tick over.

  They were rich targets for the street vendors, who were making the most of the opportunity, as alert to a flicker of curiosity or interest as an auctioneer on a slow day at market; as assiduous and as persuasive in their patter as life-assurance salesmen, as they good-humouredly touted their wares.

  From the west, just half a mile from Mlambo’s den – if one of the sleek black crows that nested in the eucalyptus trees were to make the journey – came a different sound. Kireba produced an industrious buzz: a mix of hammer on anvil as old tins were turned into mugs and paraffin lamps; and the tinkling bells of the bicyclists hawking vegetables; and the rhythmic thump of hammer delivered by Philimon Ogata as he shaped the planks of wood that became coffins.

  On fire with resentment and burning with humiliation, Mlambo took the short cut from State House to Kireba, along the overgrown path which passed his den, and on to the State House boundary fence. He checked there was no-one in sight, before slipping through the hole he had made for the purpose.

  In the old days, the fence had run along the edge of a dam, which was fed by a small stream that flowed through the patch of land that came to be called Kireba. Some of the older residents recalled the time when the dam was home to the Sailing Club, and they had fished in its waters. But as is the way with old people, they had succumbed to false memory, and claimed that they had swum in the stream, bare-arsed with white boys. Anyone who believed that it had ever been possible to swim in the foul-smelling black rivulet of filth that ran through Kireba must be making it up; and as for swimming with young mzungu . . .

  Whatever the truth of these claims, these days the dam was barely a dam. Rather it was a weed-encrusted eyesore, gradually silting up, and anyone who was careless could sink knee deep into the surrounding mud. Perhaps the security officers had decided that in this way Nature had protected State House from intruders, and the fence did not need to be reinforced. More likely, the contractor responsible for fencing the perimeter of the grounds had claimed for work that was never done.

  Mlambo secured the section of the fence behind him, paused in the bushes for perhaps a minute, and again checked that the coast was clear. The rocks he had put down to serve as stepping stones across stretches that were especially muddy had sunk out of sight, but Mlambo had no difficulty finding them, having taken the precaution of marking them with sticks, that made the route easy for him to follow.

  Within a few minutes he was passing by Ogata’s place, and he made a point of keeping his distance. One could never be too careful.

  Mlambo was not entirely sure why he had always gravitated to Harrods. Once when he was senior kitchen toto, he had braved the night, climbed a tree near his State House lair, and looked out into the huge dark saucer that was Kireba, pin-pricked by cooking fires.

  He had tried to pick out Harrods.

  It had been easier than one might imagine, because Harrods had electricity, thanks to the cable that ran from the clinic. And at night, its lights gleamed like a beacon of hope.

  And once or twice, during the day, he had arrived early for football practice, and had lurked behind a nearby makeshift toilet. From there he could hear Charity’s slightly husky voice, encouraging, rebuking, and cajoling. But above all – though Mlambo himself would not have put it like this – underlying her every call and tone was a constant sense of concern.

  Charity cared passionately about the future of her street children, whose lives seemed destined to end in their teens, struck down by the plague that was visited on the world, and, it seemed, on Africa in particular.

  Her nightmare in which rats, with the faces of young humans, ate the seed corn from Kuwisha’s granary, continued to afflict her; and showing the little rats that she cared about them was the only response she could devise.

  And as Mlambo listened to her rebukes, head cocked, he was reminded of his childhood, the years he was looked after by his grandmother.

  “Where is the grater, Rutere? If I find you using it . . .”

  That Rutere boy, he was often in trouble, but he always had a good excuse, thought Mlambo.

  “If you don’t wash your hands and scrape the carrots, young Cyrus Rutere, you will lose breakfast rights.”

  “Ntoto, where is the clean water?”

  Sometimes the boys answered back, sometimes they were downright cheeky, and Charity’s patience ran out. The sound of rapid Swahili, followed by the smack of hand on flesh, and wails from the boys carried to the toilet from where he watched, and Mlambo winced in sympathy.

  But he noted that the wails were howls of outrage at the indignity of being smacked by a woman, and not cries of real pain.

  Willard Luthuli, Sportsman cigarette dangling from his lip, chipped away and created his long-necked elegant giraffes for which tourists had an insatiable appetite. Mlambo took care to avoid him, for he was a notorious gossip, not to be trusted.

  Concealed behind a shack, he listened to the tuneless whistling that came from the Klean Blood Klinic, where proprietor Clarence “Results” Mudenge, Registered Doctor, sat on a three-legged stool.

  For a moment Mlambo thought of seeking his help.

/>   Surely amongst his many mutis was one that could assist him?

  It would be unfair to suggest that Mr Mudenge was a conman, if only because it was a term that did not do justice to his many skills – part psychologist, part traditional herbalist. His friends agreed: Mudenge was a man who could sell desert sand to a Kalahari bushman.

  He was especially persuasive when potential customers asked why he, Mudenge, whose head was as bald as an egg, had not taken advantage of his own product, the best-selling all natural hair restoring lotion he prepared on the spot.

  It was a question which every would-be client asked, and a lesser man might have grown so tired of it that his patent hair restorer would have been abandoned. At the very least, Mudenge would have been pardoned had he responded to the question with a degree of asperity, or if, just every now and then, a note of irritation came through.

  Far from it.

  Mudenge treated each questioner with fresh respect, praising their acute observation, their profound insight.

  It had been his own experience of hair loss, he would explain, that had driven his research into this distressing condition called “baldness”. Alas, he had made mistakes when he treated his own hair loss with the lotions and potions he had assembled. These experiments had taken their toll. But the fewer the hairs on his head, the more he was determined to find a solution, and the greater his resolve.

  While he was talking, Clarence Mudenge would take the questioner by the arm and guide them into the privacy of his “office”.

  There, when the visitors’ eyes got accustomed to the gloom of his plastic and tin-sheet shack, they could see hundreds of boxes, from floor to ceiling, marked with strange words that Mudenge offered to translate.

  Every now and then Mudenge would pull out a box, and shake it with a frown on his face, or hold it to his ear, and listen intently.

  He would invite his patient to listen for himself, and express astonishment if the patient could hear nothing. If the customer had not been convinced, Mudenge would use his ventriloquist’s gift, and engage in rapid conversation with one of the boxes.

  Then, with lowered voice, Clarence Mudenge dealt with the caller’s concerns, using words and phrases that came from a medical dictionary an Mboya Boy had stolen from a visiting doctor from England some years earlier.

  But the medical terms alone would have been of little use had it not been for the fact that Mudenge had a shrewd, intuitive insight into how people functioned, what made them happy or unhappy, and how their moods were at the heart of many of the problems for which they sought his help.

  Even Charity was impressed.

  Sometimes she would pause in her duties at Harrods and watch “Results” at work.

  “You are a spiderman,” she once accused him.

  “You invite these people inside, Mudenge, and then you are a spider and they are flies, or like fish, slowly, slowly pulled in.”

  It was the first and only time Charity had seen Mudenge get cross.

  “I do no harm,” he said, thumping the old school desk at which he sat. “Everything I use is clean. The changa, even, I brew myself, and use only a few drops.”

  It was true. If the potions and powders he provided did no good, there was no evidence they did any harm.

  And many was the patient who felt better after taking a dose of the Klean Blood Klinic’s best-selling tonic. A few drops, taken three times a day, of Mudenge’s secret concoction: a squeeze of lemon, a fragment of vanilla, a teaspoon of clove oil, well shaken.

  “Take for three weeks – DO NOT OVERDOSE” ordered the instructions on every bottle.

  And there was his guarantee: “Results,” said Mudenge, “or your money back.”

  Had Ogata not spotted Mlambo, and called out, beckoning, “Come, Mlambo, come!” the boy might well have sought Mudenge’s help, for it was well known that he made powerful muti.

  Instead he moved on. When Philimon Ogata called, it was best to respond without delay. A man so closely associated with death should never be crossed.

  If Mudenge was one of nature’s mediators, Ogata was a natural businessman, with an eye for opportunity, head cocked to one side as he assessed the potential of a project.

  Both men dressed with care – Ogata wearing an all-black concoction he considered appropriate to his job, while Mudenge, squat and tubby, looked like a favourite uncle.

  15

  Business was booming at the Pass Port to Heaven Coffin Parlour. But for reasons which no-one could understand, not even the parlour’s owner, Philimon Buchema Ogata, there were fewer demands on his time between eight o’clock and ten o’clock in the morning. And the busiest part of the day was between four o’clock and five o’clock. That day was no exception, and Ogata was using the morning lull to study the obituaries page in the Kuwisha Times.

  As Mlambo drew closer to Ogata’s place, he could hear a strange sound – a roll-call of the recently departed, recited by Ogata himself, while he marked with a pencil stub the best lines from the funeral announcements.

  Every now and then, Ogata, a tall and thin man in his mid-forties, with an extraordinary bass voice, read an extract in a way that made the hairs on the back of Mlambo’s neck bristle.

  “Edward Tambo: Now your journey is ended, heaven awaits. Oliver Mukuzi: No more tears, no more fear, Only trumpets, loud and clear.”

  He repeated the sentiments with relish: “No more tears, no more fear, Only trumpets, loud and clear. Faith Gumede . . . Free at last, in the Almighty’s hands . . . Baby Grace, Called to Jesus . . . You see, Mlambo,” Ogata broke off, startling the boy, “all the departed are either living in America, or have relatives in America . . .”

  Could he break into the US market, Ogata wondered, and if so, should he take on an extra worker?

  On the one hand, the personal service that Ogata provided was at the heart of his success, and anything that reduced this might well drive customers away. To be measured for an Ogata coffin, Furniver had observed, was as important an experience as getting the tailor at Turnbull and Asser, in London’s Jermyn Street, to run up half a dozen of their hand-made Sea Island cotton shirts. In both cases, the clients expected personal attention.

  On the other hand, although business was especially good, profit margins were narrow in what was a very competitive business. Ogata had scandalised some people when he first put his slogan into effect: “Try at home – before going Home”. The invitation to people to choose their coffin, and sleep in it for a night before making a final decision on purchase, not only got his business talked about; it had become a great success.

  Mlambo shuffled closer, listening and watching, fascinated as Ogata continued with his litany. Every now and then the coffin-maker expressed respect for the dead, and condolences for the living.

  And as Philimon Ogata made clear to his customers, in Kuwisha people did not die. Dogs died, yes; but people were not dogs. At worst they passed on. And as far as Ogata was concerned, very, very few of his customers did something so simple, as mundane as to “pass on”.

  His customers deserved far better an introduction to the Life that was to come. So never did they die. Instead they were “Promoted to Glory”, or “Risen to the Lord”. That was only right and proper for these hard-working people who had been such devout servants of the Maker.

  Ogata beckoned Mlambo to move closer, to cross the black stream of effluent that divided them.

  “Lost a bit of weight, I see. Lose a bit more – it will be good for you. Score more goals.”

  He wiped the sweat off his brow, and added: “But not too much! I don’t want you to become a customer yet.”

  Ogata laughed.

  The joke, such as it was, may have been in bad taste, but Mlambo was grateful for the humanity of the exchange. He had little doubt that news of his humiliation would have reached Kireba, and he appreciated the fact that Ogata had not called him Fatboy.

  He came closer.

  “Sit, boy, sit!” Ogata patted a bench alongside h
im.

  Mlambo sat down, and then realising it was an upturned coffin, leapt up as if he had lowered his bottom onto the embers of a fire.

  Kireba’s leading coffin-maker continued to read from the obituary pages: “And the dead were living, and the living were as dead, save those who had honoured the Lord; and so it will be on Judgment Day, when tears will cease, and joy will conquer pain. Revelation 9(vii).”

  Ogata marked the passage in his battered Bible, marked “Gift of the Gideons”.

  “Joy will conquer pain . . . now that,” he said appreciatively, “is good. I like that. Very much.”

  Mlambo crossed himself. Just in case.

  “There is good business in the USA,” Ogata returned to his theme.

  “Every notice,” he explained, his pencil tapping the paper, repeatedly making his point, “has family in USA. Sons, brothers, sisters.”

  He looked at Mlambo, who was now peering over Ogata’s shoulder. Should he confide in the boy? Why not?

  “One day, I will make coffins for Kenyans in the USA. Plenty needed. Good business.”

  Like most residents of Kireba, Ogata was an ambitious man.

  He coughed, spat, and lit a cigarette.

  “Mlambo, if you want to learn this business, you become my apprentice . . .”

  Mlambo must have looked doubtful.

  “And you get a free coffin,” promised Ogata.

  “Guarantee?”

  “Guarantee. Ask your gran,” replied Ogata.

  Mlambo nodded.

  She had been buried in an Ogata coffin. He had little doubt that had his gran had any complaints about the service provided, she would have let him know.

  Just then a thin and wasted woman who looked 50 but was probably half that age appeared, and Ogata got up to greet her.

  Mlambo joined in the greetings, and then left Ogata to his potential customer. He reflected, as he often did, on the wisdom of his old grandmother.

  “Power and success do strange things to people,” she would say to anyone who would listen. And since she looked after Mlambo until he was nearly six, at which age he was judged ready to herd the family goats, he heard her say it more often than most.