One Day I Will Write About This Place

by Binyavanga Wainaina

  Crutch! God!

  God! Let me have sex first.

  His name is Julius. He leaves one day, asks to be taken to the bus station. He crawls properly now. We never see or hear from him again. I am sure he knew how much I wanted him gone.

  …

  It is third term. I have adapted to boarding school. I feel okay, as though I have been here forever. I don’t know what comes over me. I am sort of fooling around in the field one Saturday, a novel in hand, as usual, and I get an old urge.

  I stand, then walk, past the dorms, and the staff room, past the gate, in full school uniform, past the consequences, the cane, the suspension letter, the ruined record. I do not use one of the usual tricks to sneak out, the holes in the fence, the bribed security guards. I walk into Njoro town, eat chips and drink a cold Fanta, and take a matatu home, to Nakuru.

  There is nobody home. I climb into the house through the window and run a hot bath. Mum finds me asleep in my bed. She sits there, runs her hand across my forehead. I can hear her there, quiet, and I am not afraid; I just want her to keep her hand right there. She runs it through my hair. Her hand. I keep my eyes closed for the longest time and listen to her breathing.

  We have tea and cake. I gulp it all down.

  “I have to take you back to school, you know.”

  I nod.

  “Do you want to go back?”

  I nod.

  She takes my hand and turns it. I try to pull it back.

  “What happened to your thumb?”

  My thumbnail is mushy and bleeding, with pus. Over the past few months, I have been peeling my nails with a razor blade during night prep. Short, tight bursts of quiet peeling, nibbling, and scraping, only stopping to turn the page of my novel. Sometimes I stay up late at night and peel at my nails under the bedcovers. Always hungry. When all the unfeeling casing is gone, I can sleep well.

  I don’t know what she says to the headmaster. I am not punished.

  After a few weeks, Mum comes to visit me at school.

  “Pack your things,” she says. “You are going to a new school.”

  Chapter Ten

  We drove to Nairobi today, my father and I, to the city. I have five pimples. The capital city, for me, is the opportunity to spend time on soft teenage hydraulics­—­bookshops and burgers and Right On magazine and soft-­cheeked girls who say “That’s fantabulous!”

  We drove here, to Nairobi, my father and I, to get some complicated tractor or combine harvester machinery fixed. We do these things from time to time these days. My father throws the request casually—­my mother must have suggested it in forceful whispers: get him out of his room.

  They are both being nicer than usual and I am being spoiled. I put my book in my bag and head off to the car. My father is like warm bread: he smells good and radiates good biology, and my enzymes growl and glow around him. The car’s bonnet is open. So. I want to know about clanging metals and growling engines, and I stand there on the side, after you suck the oil out of a tube, in a manly way, and spit it on the ground and say, “They are not aligned.”

  Nods. We stand, all of us, looking at the car’s entrails, in meditation.

  “No. No.”

  “This car is injection.”

  And, feet apart, we shall consider this—­and jump into action, heaving and arranging and pulling and revving, and soon things will purr, and exhausted men will come home sweaty and eat hearty, and sleep the sleep of the dead. Jua kali, is the name we have for this enterprise. Hot sun. They live and work outside khaki Kenya; here they are free to make themselves what they want.

  Hot sun city. There is a large industrial park—­a slum—­surrounding us, a flat plain of corrugated iron sheeting.

  Take the sun—­give it ten thousand corrugated iron roofs—­ask it, just for the sake of asking, to give the roofs all it can give the roofs and the roofs start to blur; they snap and crackle in agitation.

  Corrugated iron roofs are cantankerous creatures: they groan and squeak the whole day; as they are lacerated by sunlight, their bodies swollen with heat and light, they threaten to shatter into shards of metal light. They fail, held back by the crucifixion of nails. Corrugated iron roof people do not go to the grassy leafy part of the city without a clear purpose. The police will get them. City council askaris will get them. The hotter it gets, the more it seems that some heat and light will burst out of this place.

  We are in a large patch of earth in the middle of this glorious and terrible light. There are mountains of twisted scrap metal and spare parts all around us, baked by the sun, red from rust, black from oil, and brown from dust, throwing crumbs of defeated iron to the ground: cars, parts of cars, the innards of air conditioners; dead exhaust pipes, no longer coughing or snoring or spitting illness.

  One guy runs past me, waving some spare part and rattling loudly in Gikuyu, and another man runs after him. They are partners, dancing, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder, one laughing, the other growling.

  One is bent over, the other reaching for the end of his arms. His hands, which are holding the rattling part. Then, one laughing, the other not. And it is a game and a dance.

  Then it is a fight.

  A crowd gathers. Men cheering. My father frowns and his huddle of freelance consultants break away to witness and bay.

  And.

  The fight is over. They are separated.

  I invent a word. Hughagh: (a) a sound that is at once the belly under a fist’s assault and what issues from the mouth when the chest is banged; (b) a mid-­chorus reminder of one’s reservoir of strength: commonly used in jingles and sports shows, by army tug-­of-­war teams, and by female tennis players.

  Immortalized by Billy Ocean: Hugh agha ha! When the going gets tough, the tough get going, yeah! Hugh agha ha! Yeah yeah yeah.

  Hughagh rules football matches in City Stadium; the city comes to a standstill as Gor Mahia football club fans make their way back home. Hughagh is a policeman. Is a member of Parliament on a podium with his hidden little groups of paid thugs in the audience. Sometimes hughagh is a fist in your woman’s face; sometimes hughagcgh-­hic is lubricated by a tin or two of fine kumi-­kumi liquor, mellowed in rusty ten-­gallon drums that once stored diesel. Three tins and you will sleep on the open drain outside the drinking shack and wake up blind for life, or paralyzed.

  Hughagh can be fun, too: hagh hagh, you laugh at those who are poorer than you, laugh from the bottom of your belly at Kirinyaga people if you are from Kiambu, at Tugens if you are Nandi, at Punjabis if you are Gujarati, at the small tribes if you are from a big one.

  Somebody taps my shoulder, a thin Somali man, handsome, in giant white-­rimmed opaque sunglasses, a maroon shirt with little gleaming snowflakes all over it. The shirt is not tucked in, Somali style. He flashes his eyebrows up and down for me, our little conspiracy. And out of his hands a crackling magic mat unrolls.

  Sunglasses, wrapped in noisy plastic paper.

  “Ferrari,” he whispers, his voice carrying Yemeni monsoons and bolts of cloth. I consider, briefly, and decide not to risk it. Ferrari is a very cool thing. It roars forward, streamlined and low, lipstick red; it slinks and gleams and smells of fresh glossy magazines and cool. But if he is selling them, he is multiplied by ten thousand and so it must be that everybody in Nairobi has Ferrari.

  I shake my head. He thrusts them closer to me. Surely I have not seen them well. I move away and turn. He comes around to me with a new grin and thrusts a watch in front of me. A muscle in his jaw curls into sharp knuckles, stems of khat peeping out of the side of his mouth. His left cheek is swollen, his eyes red and bleary.

  Khat is salesjuice. Supercaffeine.

  “SayKo!” I point at my watch and shrug.

  His finger jabs agitatedly at his watch.

  SayKoSayKo! Let us get excited, my friend. Listen.

  The South Africans sing “SayKunjalo—­the time is now.” Sekunjalo. SayKo. He puts the watch to my ear, and I establish, beyond any doubt, that SayKo i
s ticking. Nownownow. And now I know—­that he will jab and poke at me until I am in a frenzy and will lash out or buy.

  SayKoSayKo! SayKoSayKo! SayKoSayKo!

  Because when it gets too hot, we melt. Or break. My pimples are glowing. I can feel them. I push his hand and move away, close to the huddle of Sokasoba men and my father, who will not appreciate being interrupted.

  “Heeeeey!”

  They shout. My father frowns.

  “Waria!” Derogatory term used in Kenya for Somalis.

  “Toroka!” Run. Leave. Depart from here.

  One of them shouts at him, “Waria!” And Waria grins and walks away, and I feel like shit. He makes his way to somebody else and somebody else, grabbing, gesticulating, jawing, jabbing. Tick. Tock. SayKo. SayKo. SayKo. And steam rises. Growl, Ferrari.

  They say, in my new school, that electrogalvanizing deposits the layer of zinc from an aqueous electrolyte by electroplating, forming a thinner and much stronger bond. These multiple layers are responsible for the amazing property of the metal to withstand corrosion-­inducing circumstances, such as saltwater or moisture. Besides being inexpensive and effective, galvanized metal is popular because it can be recycled and reused multiple times. We call it mabati. Or corrugated iron.

  Take: ten thousand hammers, ten thousand languages all shouting, ten thousand specialists of ten thousand metals arranged into ten thousand loud permutations to fix cars, tractors, plows, pots, pans, woks, mills, chairs.

  Sell: sunglasses, pirated cassette tapes, Swiss knives, spanners, boiled eggs in blue bowls, sausages in sweaty glass-­and-­wood cases strapped to a thin torso, key chains, plastic ducks or bunnies wound and yapping frenziedly in MadeinTaiwanish.

  It is hot and yellow and dry in 1984. Many of these people have certificates. Marketing. Carpentry. Power mechanics. Electrical technology. This is the dump site for certificates that did not send you anywhere.

  I am standing and nodding, and huddled men confer around my father.

  “Sokasoba?”

  “Nooo. The shock absorbers are okay.”

  “These old pinjots are very good. Three-oh-five. Ni injection?”

  I nod.

  I know nothing about old Peugeots. There are things men are supposed to know, and I do not want to know those things, but I want to belong and the members need to know about crankshafts and points and frogs and holy manly grails and puppy dog tails. Secular things to hang on to.

  At the edge of the field of fixers, there is an old gentleman with a fresh old school haircut, complete with a trimmed line above his left temple, what white people call a part, an appropriately biblical word for African hair engineered with great will to separate in this way. He is wearing a tweed jacket, a hat and feather, and his old leather shoes are gleaming with all the dust. He is selling old tins and cans and drums and all other manner of containers.

  One guy is cutting tubes from tires and selling the strips: those strips, called blada—­for children’s catapults; to tie your goods to your bicycle or on the roof of a matatu; to make a hosepipe fit a tap and not leak at the point of contact. For intricate toy wire-­cars, for the boot of your car in case of any one of thirty thousand things that can go wrong that a blada can sort out. Who does not have a use for blada?

  There are piles and piles of corrugated iron sheets. Mabati. For re­cycled roofing, for millions of one-­room Nairobi people. I rub my hand along my jacket’s shoulder pads, thrilled at its padded promises in this clanging world. I am different. I am different.

  I am bored with Baba’s mechanics and walk around. It is lunchtime, and women are gathered around huge pots cut out of old oil drums; beans and maize are boiling, men queuing for a two-­shilling lunch. Screaming, shouting, ladles clashing hard onto enamel plates. Now it is the smell of boiling suds of beans.

  The grass has been beaten down to nothing by feet over many years in this large patch of ground of banging. Somewhere, not far from here, an open-­air church service is taking place: loudspeaker and shouts and screams.

  You would not believe that not five hundred meters from here are roads and shops, and skyscrapers and cool restaurants that are playing the music of noiseless elevators, and serving the food of quiet electric mixers and plastic fridge containers. Burgers and Coke. Pizza.

  I love the music of noiseless elevators: the whoosh of hydraulics, a promise of soft landings. I love easy pop, Michael Jackson, and the Gap Band. People are standing next to big, cheap speakers from Taiwan, which I am sure are bouncing up and down on the cheap wood mounts, making their own drumming sound to add to their cheap crackle.

  Thin men, with corrugated brown teeth from miraa, and muscular jaw muscles, and glazed, wild eyes, focused on one repetitive task. And from them, from their speakers comes the sound of Congo—­and this sound is exactly the sound of all the clang, the rang-­tang-­tang, tinny clamor of agitated building, selling, and the multilingual clash of mouth cymbals, lifting up and down, jaws working, eating, trading, laughing. And people singing are the sound of melting metal. In that urban Congolese music that sounds like it clangs: Lingala, that jangling language of Kinshasa. But around them, electric guitars twang hard, things bang.

  Why don’t we listen to crooning and soft drums and strumming pools of water and acoustic guitar meadows? Why not listen to plaintive old folk songs, leather string and goatskin box? The wooden sounds of long ago?

  Wood rots. Wood will not bend in heat. Wood burns and crumbles. Early this century. The searing heat of Belgium’s lust in the Congo insists on new metallic people. We, in Kenya, don’t understand the lyrics—­we don’t speak Lingala—­but this music, this style, this metallic sound has become the sound of our times.

  Work your metal to the frenzy of your plan and let the heat around grow and grow and soon something gives, your future—­on the softer side of town, in the soft melt and grass of your new square stone house in the village. After a day beating metal, you go home and sleep under your galvanized metal roof, and it rains, and no sleep in the world is better than the sleep under the roar of rain on a naked mabati roof. Something gives: of the body and its limits, and you’re in a zone, a stream of molten creative metal. Your labor can beat, bend, melt, harden, shape, aggregate, galvanize. Labor that can defeat tiredness, because dance and song is labor that leaves you exhilarated. This is rumba. Mabati music. Metal music.

  Baba is done. “Let’s go,” he says.

  “Baba…”

  “Hmm…”

  “Can we go to Wimpy?”

  “Sure.” He smiles.

  Chapter Eleven

  Forty Kenya shillings at Ndirangu’s.

  Opposite Matatu Stage, Thika (near Josphat Bar and Butchery). Al­ways in stock: Mills and Boon, Silhouette Romance, Robert Ludlum, Robert Ruark, Frederick Forsyth, Danielle Steel, Wilbur Smith, and James Hadley Chase.

  All form four and six textbooks available.

  Ask for Malkiat Singh notes and form four marking schemes.

  Ndirangu provides an endless supply of books to middle-­class Thika girls, working secretaries, bank clerks, schoolgirls on holiday, and housewives every day. I sneak out of my new school to trade with him. Each new book I read has to be more, bigger, more melodramatic to keep me interested. I gobble them like candy. I read two or three of them a day. I can write one, I am sure, a big saga and make lots of money, and eat pizza every day.

  Will he kiss her? The Argentinean polo player has melting eyes and thick eyelashes. One moment they are glowering like a demonic Inquisition chimney, the next they are looking at her and saying caara, cara mia. Or the Argentinean version—­something caramia-­rish, and then because of her beauty they heat up blacker and shinier, blacker and velvetier, blacker and blacker, until they can’t heat up any more and black Latin tenderness drips from his eyeballs like hot oil, it purses itself up like a kiss, and grabs her and… and…

  …

  Mangu, originally Kabaa High School, is the second-oldest school for Africans in the country. Be
cause it is in Gikuyuland, in Central Province, it was easier to get me a place here. Mang’u was founded by the Holy Ghost brothers in 1939. In the 1960s they decided to offer aviation as a subject for Mang'u students. They bought a glider, were given land by President Kenyatta in this dry, snake-­ridden bush, and, together with the government, started to build a new school.

  But the money ran out, and only the first phase of the school was completed. When it rains we are overwhelmed with mud. Our toilets block and spill over every week. The showers have collapsed. There are strange animals breeding in unfinished dorms. Many classrooms have no windows.

  All those shining alumni, like Vice President Kibaki, do not come back here. Their money supports schools like St. Mary’s, private Nairobi schools where their children now go to do British GCEs and international baccalaureate. Mangu is a national school, and it attracts the brightest students from all corners of the country. Some rich, some very poor. Some come having never seen a faucet.

  There is a guy in my class from one of the villages in Taveta, where the Kenyatta family owns land as big as a whole district. Many of the Taveta people there are casual workers for the Kenyatta plantation. He works as a casual laborer on farms during the holidays to earn money for fees. He walks from Thika town and arrives with his uniform torn and faded. He is all giant forearms and huge digging calves, and he sits through the night, every night, with his books.

  He rarely talks, is always in a good mood, always dazed from books.

  Mangu High School, every year, supplies a third of the students to Kenya’s medical school. We top every science subject in the country. We hover near the top of everything else.

  We are believers. More than any other school in this country, we believe in raw and bloody hard work, in impossible academic standards. No teacher sets the bar—­the old culture of our school does.

  Food is boiled. Boiled maize and beans with thick chunks of soupy cabbage. Boiled in giant steel steamers. Our school caterer tells us a growing boy needs one piece of meat the size of a matchbox a week for good health. Boiled beans are good. She says. Sometimes fights break out over potatoes.