One woman is sprawled on the grass, elbow crossed over her eyes, sleeping, her whole body receiving the sun. The smell of fish, dry fish, cooking fish, and boiling, bitter green vegetables is everywhere. It smells like a foreign country—a hot and languid place. Dried fish from Lake Victoria. Many railway employees come from all over East Africa. The railway was once the East African Railways, but Idi Amin became the Ugandan president, and Mwalimu Julius Nyerere is a communist, so the East African community collapsed. To re-create Kampala and Kisumu heat in these highlands, these women keep food boiling on stoves, and sit inside steaming courtyards and small rooms.
Two women’s heads are held at the knee by their hairdressers, legs wide open. There is a pile of discarded pea pods, sukuma-wiki stems, and potato peels next to the tap, covered with a large web of slime. Brackish, soapy water glides into an open drain where ducklings swim. Ducks with mossy, muddy bellies wander about. One of the women, in a blue and white kikomi outfit, starts to talk to Wambui in Dholuo.
“Who is Engine?” asks Wambui.
“Ai? You speak Luo?” Ciru asks Wambui.
“I used to speak it well, but I forgot much of it.”
Ciru and I look at each other. When Wambui speaks Luo, her body language changes. Her face becomes more animated, does more moving than her arms; her mouth pouts, her arms rest akimbo. Wambui is awkward in English, crude and ungrammatical in Kiswahili.
“He! Engine ni mwingine,” says the woman in Kiswahili. Engine is something else.
“Kwani?” Wambui asks.
“I have never seen someone like that one. Chu chu chuuu all the time. He—huyo, he has no brakes when he is with a woman.”
A child runs past roaring like a rally car as he steers his wire Datsun 160J. We laugh.
“He is an engineer—his mother was a Goan, from India. His father was a rich Maasai. He has women all over the railway line.”
All the women start laughing. The sleeping woman wakes up suddenly and stands slowly, her lesso falling off. She reties it, and I see twin strings of beads running around her waist. Wambui told me beads are for making men happy in bed. I am not sure how. Wambui is winking at Ciru. Those two have secrets, and I don’t like it. I miss Cleophas.
The woman stands. She is not young. In her sixties maybe. Straight and lean with sharp buttocks outlined against her lesso, and very short gray hair, cut like a boy’s.
Time stops for a moment as she walks toward the communal kitchen. Her head is a pot gently placed on a long, straight neck, where it rocks gently from side to side; giant metal loop earrings dance with the sway; hips and buttocks are a pendulum of tight flesh. Her back is perfectly straight.
Wambui turns to Ciru and whispers sharply, “You see, I told you. The best way is to practice by carrying pots on your head.”
To practice what? I have no idea, but I nod hard at them both to pretend I understand. Wambui catches my eye, mid-nod, and winks. I blush. I cannot wink well. I have practiced a cool wink many times in front of the mirror but can’t get one eye to shut confidently on its own.
I have learned to lift one eyebrow really high, and keep my lips straight, which I like to do in school if somebody says something I think is too stupid for words. I call it my supercilious manner. I have tried to cultivate a sneer, but it is not very good. Wambui has an epic sneer.
There is a guy in my school, called Moses, who can keep one eye low and cool, like Steve Austin in The Six Million Dollar Man. Moses’s father owns a nightclub. Girls like him. My nose sweats a lot these days, and my armpits smell, and I wake up at a lot at night all wriggly and hot, like Congo rumba music. I send Wambui my most supercilious eyebrow. She does not even see it—she is huddled with Ciru, and they are giggling at something.
…
It is dark. Mum and Baba are out. They have gone to State House for a Madaraka Day dance. Baba hates going. Mum likes it, because she can dress up. People from school went for choir at the stadium this morning. They will show the Massed Choir on TV tonight on Yaliotokea.
Sometimes Wambui talks about going to Amigos Disco. Amigos is famous in Nakuru, and I have a picture of it in my head, gray and silver, full of orange and green polyester shirts and orange bell-bottoms, bouncing Afros and sweat. Boogie down. Wambui rubs soap on her legs every day after washing us. She tells us stories about about the village, cows, digging with a hoe, maize and beans, hard hands, hunting for pigeons with the barefoot boys, and Mau Mau days. Her grandmother was in the Mau Mau. She knows how to play soccer; she can make and shoot a catapult.
She likes to talk about the corrugated iron township, Boney M., Sister Sledge, Tabu Ley, and Maroon Commandos. When she speaks English, her r’s and l’s get tangled up, like my hair if I comb it dry. All her d’s become merged with n’s. All her b’s merge with m’s. Maloon Commados. M’boney M. She makes us laugh. Idepedence Nday.
It is dark. Chiqy, my baby sister, is asleep. Wambui is plaiting Ciru’s hair in Mum’s chair in the sitting room. I am not happy. I am used to moving from Ciru’s bold girlness to a boyishness that stands behind Jimmy. I don’t have anybody to follow.
I move to the back of the sofas by the windows, which are cool from the night outside. The curtains of the television room are green on white: thick, stately, teeming with life, an ecosystem of snarling flower heads, ecstatic stems and leaves bent forward, like italics.
Now they are putting on Mum’s lipstick and makeup. Mmmm-pah. They keep smacking in front of a small mirror. Mmmm-pah. Sometimes they try on Mum’s shoes and clothes.
The news is over, and now there is a full hour of Independence Day ceremonies on television. Wambui likes Yaliotokea.
Mp-ah. M*h. They still kiss the mirror, and now they are putting on face powder.
Trumpets are blaring on television and groups start to march. Mp and mpr words. You have to inhale and push enough air down your mouth to make sure that you make a promising mpr. Permanent bonds. On headstrong things. Boys. Paper. Stubborn girls. Citizens. Two solid things meet, and one is, or both are, left changed forever.
Imprint. Impress.
Trains and trains of people swarm the screen. Schoolchildren; Salvation Army bands, the navy, the army, teachers’ choirs, traditional singers from all over Kenya, religious groups all marching to the stadium in Nakuru, to sing for the president. It is Madaraka Day, when we got uhuru, so every year we sing for the president.
The camera swings, and we see a massive group of people sitting on the soccer pitch in the stadium, waiting for the president. All around are piles of celebrating accessories. Some gleam in the hot sun, like iron roofs: trumpets and drums and shiny uniforms and belt buckles. Different tribes in different nationalizing uniforms that we call traditional. The military people are crisp and beautiful—there are no straighter lines in Kenya, no whiter whites.
There are also feathered ankle rattles, women in dyed-grass skirts, groups of men wandering around aimlessly drinking sodas, ankle bells rattling and clanking, enormous drums.
There are many whistles. Troops of Scouts called to order by whistles. I am in Kingfisher Patrol. Every year we go and march past Baden-Powell’s grave in Nyeri. He founded the Boy Scouts and could skin a rabbit with his fingernails. He was buried in Kenya. Mprr. Traditional bandleaders with feather and skin hats, and fly whisks sing mprrrrr every few minutes to push the song forward. Army and police bands are called to order. Impound. Stamp. Impede. Sta-mpede.
All around, choirs are practicing. The groups are spread on the grass, arranged in three or four lines, according to height—the tallest at the back, their eyes open in complete earnestness, their eyebrows jostling up and down, men’s chins forced down into their throats to sound bass. “Fuata Nyayo, fuata Nyayo. Tawala, Moi, tawala.”
Rule, Moi, rule.
The women are dressed in kitenge print dresses that reach their ankles, with freshly plaited or hot-combed hair. All the choirs sing with a cartoonish expression, and Wambui mimics them, her newly lip
sticked mouth adding some exaggeration to the effect: eyebrows up, cheeks sucked in, mouth open as round as the letter O. Mr. Dondo, our choirmaster, tells us that the eyebrows create a feeling of happiness, when the mouth is making an O. When the mouth is released, the choirs bare their teeth, polite hotel slices of breakfast pawpaw, to look extremely happy. Proud. Pretty. Prim. Promising. Eyebrows subside.
My lips close down firmly on each other. Imp. Imprison. Implode. Implant. Impede. After each mp, there is a little explosion of air outward because your lips purse as if prepared to rein in the words after each p. Improve. Impress.
My groin is hot with friction. I can hear the night outside; crickets are the sound of a vacuum. I am careful to make sure every slit in the curtains is sealed. The man is dancing with the woman in his arms, like white people, or square dancers, but this is a Gikuyu traditional dance. It also looks like a Scottish dance. One man has a feather in his hat. Another man plays an accordion. The old dances were banned by the missionaries, and now many dances happen in rows and columns. Impede. Imperil. Improve.
Baba is Gikuyu, but I can only understand one or two words. Ciru is laughing and squealing, and the world is so big. Wambui will laugh and laugh like Dracula. Accordionland stretches like a giant trampoline forever. I will be unbearably butterflying, turning in circles like the dancers, dizzy without respite. The choirs are back singing, and Wambui is singing with them, some Moi praise song.
I lie back and watch the ceiling. Juma sleeps on my thigh, and I let my mouth shape a perfect O. I start to mouth the song, mimicking Wambui’s accent silently in my head and letting silver pictures flow, of my Amigos Disco, Afraha Stadium, uhuru world.
Wambui has a lot of stories about lost women, about Ugandan women who steal Kenyan men, about women poisoned and cursed, about women who give birth to beasts because their neighbors cursed them. Wambui once told us about a Ugandan woman with big buttocks who lives in Ronda and sells red mercury, which is more expensive than gold, because it is nuclear, and America is buying it. It comes from Congo. And it makes women give birth to rotting vegetables. The women are very beautiful and like to trap men.
Wambui told me that in the old days, before the arrival of colonial missionary mprrs, young Gikuyu couples would take off all their clothes and dance the whole night. Women would have their private parts tied up so they would not misbehave. Otherwise, they would dance and dance and play with each other’s bodies, would forget themselves, she said.
Baba has a book called The Mind Possessed, which has wonderful pictures: in a voodoo possession ceremony, a group of people roll on the floor, having jumped out of their rows and columns, the whites of their eyes disappeared; a white woman is having an orgasm, as buttocks thrust into her.
Imperil. Baden-Powell, who invented Scouts, made King Prempreh of the Ashanti kneel before his quickly assembled throne, made of boxes of biscuits. Gikuyus are complaining that Kalenjins are sitting on them.
The downfall of King Prempreh of Ghana, from
Diary of Life with the Native Levy in Ashanti
by Major R. S. S. Baden-Powell
The president’s convoy arrives, and large rusted gates swing open on the television screen as the commentator starts to boom. The mass of people queue up behind the convoy to enter and circle the athletic track. They all go around the track, gleaming and shining. President Moi and his cabinet mount the VIP section. People stand in lines in the field and listen to the national anthem, mouthing loyally, the president’s ivory and gold stick lifted for all to see.
There is a group of ministers’ wives expressionless from makeup. There are the lines of soldiers spread all over the rusty stadium—their shoes and instruments and garters and buttons and trumpets fine and sharp and true. In front of the president, a line of long-distance runners in blazers wait for awards.
Wambui says, “Ah, this is boring.” She turns down the volume, and we watch the parade in silence. She puts on the giant Sanyo radio behind the sofas. It stands on four legs, and it is covered in brown vinyl. Wambui’s favorite radio show is on. DJ Fred Obachi Machoka is the Blackest Man in Black Africa.
Salaams come from Francis Kadenge Omwana wa Leah, with greetings from Zambia. Zachariah Demfo of Lake Babati. Robbie Reuben-Robbie from Kitale Salaams Club, who says, “Keep on keeping on.”
Boney M.’s “Rivers of Babylon” is playing. Jimmy said the song is taken from Psalms in the Bible. I don’t believe him. It is too cool. Wambui starts to dance, arms flying.
“Oh, I rove Boney M.!” she says. She starts to sing. The letter r climbs into her Gikuyu tongue intact, slaps against the roof of her mouth, and is broken into a thousand letter l’s. Only one of them can survive. It runs down her tongue, an accent jet plane, and leaps forward into the air, “By the livers of mBabylon…”
Ciru and I look at each other and start to laugh.
The president stands on the now silent TV screen, behind him a row of provincial commissioners in khaki and pith helmets; in front of him are rows and columns of human order: tribal dancers, soldiers, Scouts. Two lean Kalenjin long-distance runners climb up to the podium to receive medals from the president, who is from their tribe.
I close my eyes. Gikuyu letter m breaks free of his place in the stadium and runs around manically, looking for the Gikuyu b. They stand together and hug, bonded by fear into a new single letter, a tribe. Mbi. Sometimes you try, but your tongue can’t wrap right around the rules. A, mbi, ci.
Policemen circle them; the president pauses. N starts to agitate, standing there in straight colonial stadium lines. In National Stadium lines. D shakes like an accordion and wriggles across to n; they start to do a waltz. Kanu Khartoon Khaki wants them to behave, be what you are supposed to be, stay still and do what Kenya Khaki says. KANU, our one party, is father and mother, says President, and Khaki people salute. A. mBi. Ci. nDi, E, F, nGi.
Wambui dances across the carpet, mouth open, singing her M’Boney M. song, mangled in her Subukia accent.
“M’by the livers of m’bambyl-oon, where we sat n’down, yeeah we wept, when we lemeber Zion. Kitanda Whisking, blabbin’ us away captivtee, inquire-ling for us a song, but how can we play the Rord’s song in a stlaaange rand…”
We roll on the floor, laughing at Wambui. She glares at us. Face hot, lips red. I will mpah you, she seems to say, lips pouting and eyes feral. But she stops singing. “Send your salaams,” screams Fred Obachi Machokaaa. Roby Reuben Rrrrrrrrbobie is asking for Habel Kifoto and the Marrr-oon Commandos.
Wambui squeals and jumps, her breasts bouncing, “Ohhhh. Haiya. Chalonye ni Wasi? I rove this song.”
I lie back on the carpet. I close my eyes, my back prickling, and let her limbs climb into my mind’s living room—where the turgid disco ball throws a thousand nipples of light on me and skirts twirl and glitter with silver. Her full fiction world comes surging like current, and happiness bursts out of me like a trumpet.
Mprrrrr…
Wambui, my Wambui is a trumpet, a Gikuyu Scottish strumpet, a woman in long skirts from a Barbara Cartland book cover, from Mum’s secret cupboard, We Danced All Night. Wambui is broken English, slangy Kiswahili, Gikuyu inflections. She is Millie Jackson. A Malloon Commaddo. She is a market woman. A (L)Rift Varrey girl. Third generation. Her aunt is half Nandi, her grandmother a Ngong Maasai. Wambui is Gikuyu by fear, or Kenyatta-issued title deed, or school registration or because her maternal Gikuyu uncle paid her father’s fees, or because they chose a Gikuyu name to get into a cooperative scheme in the seventies. Maybe her grandmother, born in a Maasai home, married in the mixed-up Rift Valley, was a feared Gikuyu general during the Mau Mau. It could have been different. Blink.
My fiction Wambui will upend the fate of her mother; she has no fear of starting new, in a new place. All of her clothes glint with sequins and disco, in black and white, on television. They all became Gikuyu after Independence, for the president was Gikuyu, and so the river of independence gold spoke Gikuyu and wore pith helmets
on podiums. Wambui is hoisting up a naked leg like the Solid Gold Dancers with Andy Gibb and Dionne Warwick. Her brown tooth gleams wickedly. Pubaf!
But she is mproud. And those with more than her can impede.
Twin military trumpets tear the track open. Charonye ni Wasi. Maroon Commandos is a jazz rumba band originally from the army. Kenyan Olympic distance runners, in blue Kenya blazers, flowing out into bell-bottom trousers, like mermen, waiting for the Independence Day medal ceremony. If they stand upside down next to the president, the trousers sink to their ankles. Tall, lean, shiny legs and polished thighs, thin where they meet the mpresident’s fattening cheeks. President leans back, and blows hard, para raraa rara rara rara raa ra, his cheeks swollen with national fat. They swell, his cheeks, rising Kalenjin balloons, now floating above Kenya, a new tribe, lifted over frail Kenya like helium. Their tall, burly president rules, and rows and columns of pressed khaki protect him. He is no longer awkward.
If there is a Nandi Wambui, a Kalenjin hidden inside Wambui’s bloodstream, it is not strong enough to break away, pure and clean, and jump on the podium. She could have become a Luo, if they stayed there long enough, and she married there; she is dark skinned enough to get away with it.
Below the heroes of Kenya are rows and columns of citizens, in clear straight lines, in crisp uniforms, Boy Scouts and policemen, the navy, the army, and ten thousand schoolchildren in new uniforms. Then there are the tribes—each one in a costume, here to tell the president we sing and dance for you.
Strumpet Wambui stands to attention and lifts her leg Hollywood high, then puts it down. The disco ball turns. Little droplets of disco light are spinning gently around Wambui as she turns. Her buttocks wiggle. The song gentles. Enter the chorus of men’s voices singing, “People of Taita eeeeh, people of Taita we greet you. How are you? We are here, we are fine, we don’t know about you back home…”
These short lyrics are a call home that I don’t know, that Ciru does not know. We do not know how to be from two nations: home home (home squared, we call it, your clan, your home, the nation of your origin), and the home away from home—the home of the future, a notyet place called Kenya. We are Milimani kids, speaking English and Kiswahili.
One Day I Will Write About This Place Page 5