“Eh! She had ten thousand shillings and they went and stayed in a hotel in Narok for a week. Ole Kamaro had to bring in another woman to look after the children!”
“Hai! But she sits on him!”
Their talk meanders slowly, with no direction—just talk, just connecting, and I feel that tight wrap of time loosen, the anxiety of losing time fades, and I am a glorious vacuum for a while, just letting what strikes my mind, strike my mind, then sleep strikes my opening mind.
…
Ole Kamaro is slaughtering a sheep today.
We all settle on the patch of grass between the two compounds. Ole Kamaro makes quick work of the sheep and I am offered the fresh kidney to eat. It tastes surprisingly good: slippery warmth, an organic cleanliness.
Ole Kamaro introduces me to his sister-in-law Suzannah, and tells me proudly that she is in form four. Milka’s sister. I spotted her this morning staring at me from the tiny window in their manyatta. It was disconcerting at first, a typically Maasai stare, unembarrassed, not afraid to be vulnerable. Then she noticed that I had seen her, and her eyes narrowed and became sassy—street-sassy, like a girl from Eastlands in Nairobi.
Her breasts are sharp and bounce around under a T-shirt, quite indifferent to their effect.
So I am now confused how to approach her. Should my approach be one of exaggerated politeness, as is traditional, or casual cool, as her second demeanor requested? I would have opted for the latter, but her uncle is standing eagerly next to us.
She responds by lowering her head and looking away. I am painfully embarrassed. I ask her to show me where they tan their hides.
We escape with some relief.
“So where do you go to school?”
“Oh! At St. Teresa’s Girls in Nairobi.”
“Milka is your sister?”
“Yes.”
We are quiet for a while. English was a mistake. Where I am fluent, she is stilted. I switch to Swahili, and she pours herself into another person, talkative, aggressive. A person who must have a Tupac T-shirt stashed away somewhere.
“Arhh! It’s so boring here! Nobody to talk to! I hope Milka comes home early.”
I am still stunned. How bold and animated she is, speaking Sheng, a very hip street language that mixes Swahili and English and other languages. Here, so far from road and railway Kenya.
“Why didn’t you go with the women today?”
She laughs. “I am not married. Ho! I’m sure they had fun! They are drinking muratina somewhere, I am sure. I can’t wait to get married.”
“So, do you use Suzannah pomade?”
She blushes and laughs.
“Kwani? You don’t want to go to university and all that?”
“Maybe, but if I’m married to the right guy, life is good. Look at Milka. She is free, she does anything she wants. Old men are good. If you feed them, and give them a son, they leave you alone.”
“Won’t it be difficult to do this if you are not circumcised?”
“Kwani, who told you I’m not circumcised? I went last year.”
I am shocked, and it shows. She laughs.
“He! I nearly shat myself! But I didn’t cry!”
“Why? Si, you could have refused.”
“Ai! If I had refused, it would mean that my life here was finished. There is no place here for someone like that.”
“But…”
I cut myself short. I am sensing that this is her compromise—to live two lives fluently. As it generally is with people’s reasons for their faiths and choices, trying to disprove her is silly. As a Maasai, she would see my statement as ridiculous.
In Sheng, there is no way for me to bring it up that would be diplomatic; in Sheng she can only present this with a hard-edged bravado, because it is humiliating. I do not know of any way we can discuss this successfully in English. If there is a courtesy every Kenyan practices, it is that we don’t question each other’s contradictions; we all have them, and destroying someone’s face is sacrilege. If South Africans seek to fill the holes in their reality through building a strong political foundation, we spend a lot of time pretending our contradictions do not exist. To be a new thing in South Africa is normal. We know we sit on top of a rotting edifice; we are terrified of questioning anything deeply. There is nothing wrong with being what you are not in Kenya; just be it successfully. Almost all Kenyan jokes are about people who thought they had mastered a new persona and ended up ridiculous. Suzannah knows her faces well. We chat the whole lazy afternoon.
…
I spend whole days watching the combine harvester roll, acres and acres of dry wheat sucked in, crutch, and shat out as grain. Weetabix is unbeatabix. I read books out in the sun, now at the top of the familiar escarpment, looking down on Nakuru’s flamingos, Amigos Disco, dreams, and distant chatter. I help bag the grain and sew it, following the lead of the workers.
I am starting to scribble my thoughts, to write these moments. It is when this is all done that I do what I do best. I look up, confused and fearful, all accordion with kimay; then soak in the safe patterns of other people, and live my life borrowing from them; then retreat—for reasons I don’t know—to look down, inside the safety of novels; and then I lift my eyes again to people, and make them my own sort of confused pattern.
I am no sharp arrow cutting through the career ladder. It’s time to try to make some sort of sense of things on the written page. At least there, they can be shaped. I doubt myself the moment I think this.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It is time. Christmas 1995 is arriving. In January a new term starts. I have decided to go back to South Africa and try to finish my degree. If I manage to focus enough, for just one year, I can cover all of my missing courses. I can’t start again. I have been fine the past few months, so much so that it is hard to explain to myself why I have been so… unable. I am nervous. I do not know what I will do if I start to fail again. First, we are on our way, by road, to Uganda, for my grandparents’ wedding anniversary. The drive through the Mau Hills, past the Rift Valley and onward to Kisumu, bores me. I haven’t been this way for ten years, but my aim is to be in Uganda. We arrive in Kampala at ten in the evening. We have been on the road for more than eight hours.
Mum asked me if I thought I was ready to go back to school. I said yes. “Are you sure?” She was looking straight at me. I did not flinch. “I am ready, Mum,” I said. She smiled.
This is my first visit to Uganda, a land of mystery for me. I grew up with her myths and legends and horrors, narrated with the intensity that only exiles can muster. This is the first time that my grandparents will have all their children and most of their grandchildren at home together; more than a hundred people are expected.
My mother—and the many relatives and friends who came to visit—has filled my imagination with incredible tales of Uganda. I heard how you had to wriggle on your stomach to see the kabaka; how the Tutsi king in Rwanda (who was seven feet tall) was once given a bicycle as a present, and, because he couldn’t touch the ground (being a king and all), he was carried everywhere, on his bicycle, by his bearers.
Apparently, in the old kingdom in Rwanda, Tutsi women were not supposed to exert themselves or mar their beauty in any way. Some women had to be spoon-fed by their Hutu servants and wouldn’t leave their huts for fear of sunburn.
I was told about a trip my grandfather took when he was young, with an uncle, when he was mistaken for a Hutu servant and taken away to sleep with the goats. A few days later his uncle asked about him, and his hosts were embarrassed to confess that they didn’t know he was “one of us.”
It has been a year of mixed blessings for Africa. This is the year that I sat in a bar in Cape Town during the Rugby World Cup in the Cape and watched South Africans reach out to each other before giving New Zealand a hiding. Mandela, wearing the number 6 rugby jersey, managed to melt away, for one night, all the hostility that had gripped the country since he was released from jail. Black people,
traditionally supporters of the All Blacks, embraced the Springboks with enthusiasm. For just one night, most South Africans felt a common nationhood.
It is the year that I returned to my home, Kenya, to find people so far beyond cynicism that they looked back on their cynical days with fondness.
Uganda is different. This is a country that has not only reached the bottom of the hole countries sometimes fall into, it has scratched through that bottom and free-fallen again and again, and now it has rebuilt itself and swept away the hate. This country gives me hope that this continent is not, finally, incontinent.
This is the country I used to associate with banana trees, old and elegant kingdoms, Idi Amin, decay and hopelessness. It was an association I had made as a child, when the walls of our house would ooze and leak whispers of horror whenever a relative or friends of the family came home, fleeing from Amin’s literal and metaphoric crocodiles.
I am rather annoyed that the famous seven hills of Kampala are not as clearly defined as I had imagined they would be. I have always had a childish vision of a stately city filled with royal paraphernalia. I had expected to see elegant people dressed in flowing robes, carrying baskets on their heads and walking arrogantly down streets filled with the smell of roasting bananas, and intellectuals from a 1960s dream, shaking the streets with their Afrocentric rhetoric.
Images formed in childhood can be more than a little bit stubborn.
Reality is a better aesthetic. Kampala seems disorganized, full of potholes, bad management, and haphazardness. It is the kind of African city that so horrifies the West in all of us. The truth is that it is a city overwhelmed by enterprise. I see smiles, the shine of healthy skin and teeth; no layabouts lounging and plotting at every street corner. People do not walk about with walls around themselves as they do in Nairobbery.
All over, there is a frenzy of building. A blanket of paint is slowly spreading over the city, so it looks like one of those Smirnoff adverts where inanimate things get breathed into Technicolor by the sacred burp of 40 percent or so of clear alcohol.
It is humid, and hot, and the banana trees flirt with you, swaying gently like fans offering coolness that never materializes.
Everything smells musky, as if a thick, soft steam has risen like broth. The plants are enormous. Mum once told me that, traveling in Uganda in the 1940s and 1950s, if you were hungry you could simply enter a banana plantation and eat as much as you wished. You didn’t have to ask anybody. But you were not allowed to carry so much as a single deformed banana out of the plantation.
…
We are booked in at the Catholic guesthouse in Kampala. As soon as I have dumped my stuff on the bed, I call an old school friend, who promises to pick me up.
Musoke comes at six and we go to find food. We drive past the famous Mulago Hospital and into town. He picks up a couple of friends and we go to a bar called Yakubu’s.
We order beers and lots of roast pork brochettes, and we sit in the car. The brochettes are delicious. I like them so much, I order more. Nile beer is okay, but nowhere near Kenya’s Tusker.
The sun is drowned suddenly, and it is dark.
We get onto the highway to Entebbe. On both sides of the road, people have built flimsy houses. Bars, shops, and cafés line the road the whole way. Many people are out, especially teenagers, hormones flouncing about, puffs of fog surrounding their huddled faces. It is still hot outside; paraffin lamps light the fronts of all these premises.
I turn to Musoke and ask, “Can we stop at one of those pubs and have a beer?”
“Ah! Wait till we get to where we are going. It’s much nicer than this dump!”
“I’m sure it is, but you know, I might never get a chance to drink in a real Entebbe pub, not those bourgeois places. Come on, I’ll buy a round.”
Magic words.
The place is charming. Ugandans seem to me to have a knack for making things elegant and comfortable, regardless of income. The ethical universe of the past is strong here in this country that is more Catholic, Anglican, and Muslim than Kenya. At the same time, here the old kingships and their institutions are still alive.
It’s strange how things turn around. Uganda was my childhood bogeyman, and now Kenya teeters, and Ugandans everywhere are asking me what is wrong with us.
…
I sleep on the drive from Kampala to Kisoro.
From Kisoro, we begin the drive to St. Paul’s Mission, Kigezi. Ciru is sitting next to me. She flew from South Africa and met us in Entebbe. Chiqy has been to Uganda before and is taking full advantage of her vast experience to play the adult tour guide. At her age, cool is god.
I have the odd feeling we are puppets in some Christmas story. It is as if a basket weaver were writing this story in a language of weave, tightening the tension on the papyrus strings every few minutes, and superstitiously refusing to reveal the ending—even to herself—until she has tied the very last knot.
We are now in the mountains. The winding road and the dense papyrus in the valleys seem to entwine me, ever tighter, into my fictional weaver’s basket. Every so often, she jerks her weave to tighten it.
I look up to see the last half hour of road winding along the mountain above us. We are in the Bufumbira range now, driving through Kigaland on our way to Kisoro, the nearest town to my mother’s home.
There is an alien quality to this place. It does not conform to any African topography that I am familiar with. The mountains are steep and resemble inverted ice cream cones. The hoe has tamed every inch of them.
It is incredibly green.
In Kenya, green is the ultimate accolade a person can give land: green is scarce, green is wealth, green is fertility.
Bufumbira green is not a tropical green, no warm musk, like in Buganda; nor is it the harsh green of the Kenyan savanna, that two-month-long green that compresses all the elements of life—millions of wildebeests and zebras, great carnivores feasting during the rains, frenzied plowing and planting, and dry riverbeds overwhelmed by soil and bloodstained water. Nairobi underwater.
It is not the green of grand waste and grand bounty that my country knows. It is not the Protestant nation of taming and saving that Kenya is trying to become. This is a Catholic nation—ritual and form matter more.
This is a mountain green, cool and enduring. Rivers and lakes occupy the cleavage of the many mountains that surround us.
Mum looks almost foreign now. Her Kinyarwanda accent is more pronounced, and her face is not as reserved as usual. Her beauty, so exotic and head-turning in Kenya, seems at home here. She does not stand out anymore; she belongs. The rest of us seem like tourists.
As the drive continues, a sense of where we are starts to seep into me. We are no longer in the history of Buganda, of Idi Amin, of the kabakas, or civil war, Museveni.
We are now on the outskirts of the theater where the Hutus and the Tutsis have been performing for the world’s media. My mother has always described herself as a Mufumbira, one who speaks Kinyarwanda. She has always said that too much is made of the differences between Tutsi and Hutu, that they are really more alike than not. She insists that she is Bufumbira, speaks Kinyarwanda.
“Forget the rest,” she says.
I have only one memory of my father’s father, Guka. We are sitting outside his black wooden house, and he sits on a chair in a black jacket, tall, thin, and dark, with charcoal smudges around his large slanting eyes, like Jimmy. His knuckles stand out from his long fingers and he has the long forehead of all the Wainainas, all the many cousins, all his twelve children. His hairline is shaped like a W, which everybody, except me, has.
I sit on a sharp knee and he tells me he will come to Nakuru to visit us.
The same year, on Jimmy’s birthday, we are gathered to open presents in Baba and Mum’s room in the morning. Presents are always in the boot of Baba’s car. The phone rings. Guka is dead. Baba’s mother, my grandmother, died in 1963, and talking about her always makes Baba sad. I never met her.
…
I ask my mother where the border with Rwanda is. From this high hill, we can see Congo, and Rwanda. Mum points out the border, where Mount Muhavura, a giant inverted ice cream cone, stands above all the other mountains, like something out of a sci-fi novel. The countries are both closer than I thought. Maybe this is what makes this coming together so urgent. Life has urgency when it stands around death. There is no grass as beautiful as the blades that stick out after the first rain.
In the 1960s, when Mum’s father, my grandfather, retired, he wrote the family genealogy. He knew his ancestors dating back nine generations: Sserubabaza, son of Mbayiki, son of Bidudu, son of Mutiamwa, son of Ruhetsi, son of Biraro, son of Masunzu, son of Rubunga, son of Nzogoma.
As we move into the forested area, I am softened by the smell and by the canopy of mountain vegetation. I join the conversation in the car. I have become self-conscious about displaying my dreaminess and absentmindedness these days.
I used to spend hours gazing out of car windows, creating grand battles between battalions of clouds. There is a conspiracy to get me back to earth, to get me to be more practical. My parents are pursuing this cause with little subtlety, aware that my time with them is limited. Baba wanted to know if I have a problem with drugs. It is necessary for me to believe that I am putting myself on a gritty road to personal success when I leave home. Cloud travel is well and good when you have mastered the landings. I never have. I must live, not dream about living.
We sat down a few days ago, Baba and I, in the dining room, with the college manual to talk about my school. We made a deal. I need only three courses to graduate if I change my major from finance to business management. The plan is simple. I will go and finish, and hold my breath until it is done. I will keep things simple. I believe I can do it only because I can’t look at them and say I can’t. I have been fine for months. It is hard to imagine being lost again. I don’t say anything about the stories that I am writing. Baba is retiring this year. I can’t fail.
One Day I Will Write About This Place Page 16