One Day I Will Write About This Place

by Binyavanga Wainaina

“Hmmm,” I say, still squinting bionically, hands televisioning like itain’tworthmytime, that won’t even cover my costs. He nods in agreement and his offer starts to climb up like black empowerment; soon it is paragliding in the sky, wheeee, and my stomach is billaboinging in fear.

  I nod and step outside, worried I will throw up in excitement. I light a cigarette and think to myself that, truth be told, George Majola has always been a sweet guy, not a malicious bone in him at all, and he must have some idea of my situation, if only from my wild scribbled hair and greedy fingers, and he is offering me this with grace.

  Like how Sylvia Nkanyuza offered to let me stay rent free in her house; like Sylvia’s father, a physics professor who left South Africa in the fifties unable to get a job in Verwoerd South Africa and who was adopted in Nigeria where they lived for many years, and he taught a generation of Nigerian physicists at Ibadan. He often turns up at Sylvia’s house when she is traveling, to chat, see that I am okay. He always brings beer, refuses to let me buy any. Like Victory’s endless free beers and small loans; like how DoomDoom let me sleep in his small room for two months and showed me how to use a computer; like how Chuma Koyana took me home to their lovely place in East London one long holi­day; like how Chuma’s mother took care of me as if I were her own son; like Kaya’s uncle asking me, a Kenyan he did not know, but an African they trusted, to tell Kaya his mother had died; like how Mrs. Baguma asks no questions; like how my uncles brought us here and watched over us. This is how to become an African. This town—­full of doctors and teachers and professors and nurses and civil servants from all over the continent, and from all over this country—­has taken good care of me, and given me more than I have given back.

  George and Alice come and stand with me, and we chat about this and that, and watch the meat grilling. The door to her house is open, and music is playing.

  …

  I call up Chuma. He has a new Golf GTI, which he always needs money to service. Chuma is like family to me. He too is presently jobless. But he is better subsidized than I am, by an inheritance from his late father, a lawyer who died in the 1970s.

  We draw up a thing of beauty. It has charts, projections, colors, and trenchant analyses cut and pasted from the Internet. George loves it. He gives us a fat deposit for expenses. And several giant boxes of his posters.

  We spend the next few weeks driving all over the Eastern Cape, talking to “contacts,” the media and other important people. Chuma knows everybody, so the work is easy. Mostly we attend parties. We call up George to report, and he tells us he has something to tell us. Can we drive to Durban?

  Sure.

  We drive to Durban—­six hours from East London. He hosts us in his firm’s corporate flat. He says he has decided to cancel the tour. Work. Priorities and… he looks uncomfortable. We are nervous. I look at him and keep my lifted eyebrow bi-­ronic.

  But—­but… of course he will pay us in full. Do we mind staying in that flat, and partaking of its black Johnnie Walker whiskeys and minty black powerments, and being driven around Durban for a few days as his corporate guests while he organizes the money? There is a big Empowering launch tonight at the beach. You are invited. Many celebs and free drinks floating on the swimming pool and bikinis and DJs.

  Hmm, my eyebrow sighs, like timeismoney.

  I look down and notice a hole in my shoe. “Oh,” he says, “and here is a small something for now.” The envelope has crisp notes.

  After three days George brings the money. Himself. Lovely man. We get the money. I walk into a secondhand-­book shop: three floors of heaven. I buy more than a hundred books that day.

  I decide to pack immediately when I get back to Umtata, and move to Cape Town.

  Chapter Twenty-­Four

  Hayibo. What is up with Brenda Fassie? Why can’t she stay dead?

  We have pounded her right into toothless history. We laugh and gossip-­column her. Three years ago her lesbian lover, Poppie Sihlahla, died, an overdose of crack cocaine. In Hillbrow! Once Struggle Central, now Hillbrow is the drug-­dealing capital of Africa, where the broken are robbed by the new and hungry. We can see now, how broken she is. Her son, Bongani, says he tries to hide drugs from his mother.

  How could we ever have followed her?

  She storms out of rehab, after only one day there, and speaks to journalists, saying, “I went there, and they made me wear a uniform and said I should say, ‘Hi, my name is Brenda and I am a junkie.’ Me! Me! Brenda Fassie! No way.”

  She is finished.

  Finished. We are listening to bling music, which thumps and talks about hip and hop, gold and going places. There is no past, everything is sampled. Kwaito.

  She is finished. Bubblegum.

  But… she isn’t.

  It is 1998. I have been in Cape Town for a year, and things are moving. I started a small catering business with a friend, making African food—­all those years of free meals taught me a thing or two about peanut butter chicken and Nigerian ogbono soup. We are failing mostly, but things are moving, a few deals here and there.

  It is a chilly day, lunchtime, and the wind is blowing like mad. I haven’t slept, but I need to find a cheap phone to call Mum. I have news.

  I board a black taxi in Sea Point, in Cape Town, and two white women keep asking the taxi driver to play some song. He puts it on, and the taxi falls silent.

  It is Brenda’s new song. In Xhosa.

  It is strange. There hasn’t been any real crossover music in South Africa, except Mango Groove. Artificial Tropicana juice has been drunk by generations of Day-­Glo bright, banana-­leaf-­wearing natives of a rainbow nation, who dance and sing daylight come and me wan’ go home. That is the general idea behind Mango Groove—­a white woman with a group of anonymous blacks in faux tropical clothes cheerleading her.

  Cape Town whites listen to rock music and the ethnic music of all places not in South Africa. The word edgy appears a lot in music magazines, music that takes people outside themselves to some cliff, so one can bungee jump off and get the “energy,” drum and bass and techno and a thing called ambient. Urban black South Africans love R&B, and Kwaito, reggae, and gospel.

  One day, a couple of months ago, I was living in a backpack hostel, and the common phone booth was ringing early in the morning. Somebody picked up and called me to the phone. “It’s your father,” he said.

  I pick up the phone. “Hello.”

  Baba was in Johannesburg. He had been in Australia on some work thing and had changed his ticket to try to come to South Africa for a day or two to see if he could find me. Somebody had told him I was in Johannesburg. Then Ciru called a friend, and they gave him this number.

  “I…”

  “Don’t say anything. Just listen. You have to stop worrying about us, and what we think, or what we want. Do what you need to do…”

  I am quiet.

  “But—­call your mother. She… you know she worries.”

  I panic. There is something in his voice. They are hiding something. “Is she okay? I can… come home?”

  “Oh no, no. We are fine. Kenya is bad but we are fine. Don’t risk losing your papers…”

  He doesn’t ask what I am doing. Then he drops the bombshell. Ciru also had a baby two weeks ago. His name is William. “Oh,” I say. I am surprised. He is quiet on the phone. “She is old enough,” I say. “She can support herself.” He sounds tired. I wonder if I will ever manage to survive having children.

  Mum and I speak a few times. I tell her about the writing. She sounds happy, wary, and encouraging. She doesn’t ask what I am writing about. Baba told me that the diabetes is back. I ask her about it, and she says she is fine. She sounds frail. She talks about the grandkids a lot. Paul is talkative and William is the quiet one. Everybody calls Paul Bobo. “He looks like you when you were a baby,” she says. Jimmy got married, to his girlfriend Carol, and I missed the wedding. I am not going home until I make something of myself.

  Baba has retired now, and they have
moved to a new place they are renting while they build the new house. Sometimes she has to go to Baba’s new office to receive a call while they wait for a landline. She can’t drive herself. Politics is terrible, more clashes, and the 1997 election was rigged. Moi is back and the opposition is broken.

  I am working around the clock, writing, cooking, looking for catering contracts, not getting them. Charlie Sweet and I still share work. I am still trying to make my dreadful novel work. Last night, Charlie and I were e-mailing back and forth. I started to write to him about my trip to Uganda. A long, long e-mail. He is quiet for a few hours, and it is nearly dawn.

  He doesn’t e-mail. Then the phone rings. It is Charlie.

  “This is beautiful,” he says.

  I can hear my jaw creaking open, its rusty hinges groaning.

  “Your mother… she… wow… man, you really should publish this somewhere big.”

  I work through the morning. Cut and shape it. I spend some time looking around the Internet for newspapers and magazines. I want to send it somewhere before I sleep and get all accordion and kimay.

  The Sunday Times is South Africa’s biggest and richest newspaper. I read the weekend magazine travel section. Yes, I could try for that. There is an e-mail address at the bottom of the page. I attach the story. It is just after 9:00 a.m., and I am about to shut down the computer when a reply arrives. “How much money do you want for your story?” asks a gentleman called Andrew Unsworth, who is the sub­editor. “It’s quite long,” he says, “but I think we can make room for it. Love it. Love it. It runs on Sunday.”

  So, I am sitting in this taxi, floating. The two white women are saying, “Oh, oh. It’s so so beautiful, this new Brenda Fassie song.” Not a word in English in this first real crossover song in a new South Africa.

  It’s the way the song begins—­a church organ, playing on a scratchy old record, a childhood memory of a sound, for the briefest moment, then come her first few words, slurred like she is drunk and far away, lost inside an old short­wave radio. The first word is vulindlela—clear the path—delivered in a soft, childlike candor, and for the next few sounds, we are left alone with her voice, pleading to us softly, vulindlela, let me in.

  The country has all its defenses up. Everybody is screaming and jostling for space. Young hip-­hoppers with trousers showing the crack in their buttocks have announced the end of innocence, the death of the village, the end of the struggle; young white kids shrilling, “Emigrate, we are emigrating to Australia because of affirmative action, which is racism in reverse.” At the supermarket last week, the cashier, a colored woman, shut her till when she saw me and told me to join a new queue.

  “But… but…,” I said.

  She laughed. “What will you do?” she asked. “Go report me to Mandela?”

  All that disappears for a moment, as the first ten seconds of the song turn us all into mush.

  The song starts to thump, and Brenda continues to twist the gut, sounding like she is sixteen again, and our shoulders are popping in this taxi. Everybody in this car is in exactly the same place. I hide my tears.

  South Africa is starting to make something new. In Brenda’s new video, she is pouting, a crown on her head, her fake teeth flashing, her lips lopsided, a mischievous child, a brassy woman, a tomboy, a cartoon, refusing to fall, carried forward by song only. I am sure Wambui—­powerful and unbeatable Wambui—is still in Kenya, still somebody’s maid. Wambuis do not become Brenda Fassies in Kenya.

  I am a writer. I am now a published writer. I am going to call Mum, call Baba, and tell them that my story, about us in Uganda, will be online for them to read.

  Later, Brenda will say, of this new album, Memeza (Shout), “I’d been shouting and shouting and no one wanted to hear me. When I sing this song, vulindlela, I want to cry.”

  Chapter Twenty-­Five

  It is 1960, Mum is sixteen, and she is at home. Standing on Grandpa’s balcony, looking down the big hill at the train of cars and trucks and vans crawling in circles up the steep old road, driving toward them, coming from Congo, where my grandmother, Modesta, was born. The cars are piled high with luggage and mattresses and furniture, and boxes and trunks and bags.

  It is all over the radio. Congo is shaking. Rebellion is spreading like fire.

  Independence is a fever, and it is all over the continent.

  Last night a family came to their house, dressed in torn clothes, some in sleeping clothes, pajamas and nighties. They were tired and weak, and Mum found it heartbreaking. She helped feed them and fetched water for them to drink and wash. They parked their cars outside, to rest. In every direction, eighty thousand of them flee as Congo erupts. Some refugees are staying in the cathedral a few hundred meters away. In the 1930s, when my grandfather was baptized, he gave land to the church for the cathedral.

  Mum is about to sit her O-levels. She will do well. She is waiting to go and study at Makerere University, in Kampala. Ever the mouse nibbling in people’s cupboards for books, I once found, stole, and read her school autograph book. One of her friends said, “Rosa, I hope you meet your handsome sailor.”

  From where Mum sits, this road leads deep into Congo, to Kigali, Rwanda, and the same road will take the refugees who are able to go to Kampala, then Nairobi, then Mombasa—­and to South Africa, Rhodesia, and Belgium. Cars run out of fuel along the way and are abandoned. The famous Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek buys a Rolls-Royce for next to nothing in Kisumu. In the 1960s, V. S. Naipaul wanders down this road and says it will all go back to bush.

  In Nairobi, a young man, all of twenty, with a wide smile and big eyes, has a job as a tea broker for Brooke Bond. In a few days, he will buy his first car from one of the refugees. He likes fast cars. He broke his leg on a motorcycle. He loves the English language.

  His name is Job Wainaina. His big sister, Rebecca, is already a famous playwright. Rosemary, standing on the hill, does not know that soon she will head down the same road as these refugees, to Nairobi and Kianda College, to do a secretarial course.

  She will not go to university.

  Sometime in the early 1950s, many years ago, Modesta, my grandmother, and her sister are at home cleaning and cooking and a neighbor comes to the door all fearful and excited and says that a strange white man is on their property.

  My grandmother is a shy woman, a stern woman. She is around thirty years old. They find the man walking around, digging at the ground, as if he is looking for something. He is Belgian. Grandmum takes a stick and starts to beat him. She hits him as hard as she can. He is on the ground begging, and she hits him. Those who know her have never seen her so fierce.

  Grandad finds out that there is a black stone on their land, that this black stone is very valuable. This stone sends their eldest son, Damian, to university; it sends Rosalie to Switzerland to study, and Christine to France. Christine sends Mum her first pair of shoes from France. Mum is thirteen and has never worn her own shoes. Mum works hard in school and excels in her exams. She is called to Uganda’s top high school, in Buganda, Mt. St. Mary’s Namagunga, where she wears her new shoes. One day she sees the king of Buganda, King Freddie, who shakes her hand. He is handsome in his military royal clothes, hand in pocket like an Englishman. She never stops talking about it.

  All the Binyavanga children do very well in school. Many of them go to the top schools, in Buganda. Kamanzi and Henry are always at the top of their class at St. Mary’s Kisubi. Eventually they move to South Africa. They teach at universities there.

  Modesta is very close to her daughter Rosemary, who, at sixteen, is already dangerously beautiful. Rosemary is quiet and dreamy and can be stern, like Modesta. Among the children, it is Rosemary who helps enforce Modesta’s rules. She does all her work, on time. She helps take care of the babies—­Bernadine and Gerald and Innocent. She is almost another mother to them.

  Like her mother, she can be strict and gets into no mischief. She is not confused like her son will be. She is very stubborn; when she believes somethi
ng, nobody can sway her. When she was young, she used to have fits; when she cried she would faint sometimes.

  If you ask her now, she will say that she will marry somebody in Kampala, after university. They will build a home near her parents. She is the good daughter who stays behind and helps her parents. Standing here on the hill and watching Belgian Congo fall, and Lumumba’s Congo rise, she does not know that Uganda too will fall and break, long after she has left.

  The black stone’s value on the world market has fallen. There is not enough money to send Mum to university. She agrees to wait for a couple of years. She goes to Nairobi, to do a secretarial course at Kianda College, which is famous all over East Africa. She lives with her cousin Barnabas, who is a friend of the deposed king of Rwanda. The king, who is very tall, is always flirting with Rosemary. Rosemary is not interested. There is another friend of Barnabas. His name is Job. He has a wide smile. A car. She is not her father’s favorite child. It is her sister Rosalie who is close to her father. But she loves her father terribly. She will speak of him all the time to her childen. Job, like her father, is warm around people, makes them laugh. Takes her quietness out of her. Sometimes Job drives past Kianda College in his car and finds her at the bus stop. He looks surprised to see her. Oh! It’s you? Do you want a lift?

  They marry, in the district commissioner’s office. She wears a simple suit. His family is very Protestant. Her family is very Catholic. She is the first of the sisters to marry. Her sister Christine will say, “I was so worried. Rosemary was so in love with Job, we were worried about her. I had never seen her like that.”

  Standing here, on the hill, she does not know that she and her husband will take in her own younger sister and three brothers, support some through school, college, and university when Uganda is bleeding. She will start a hair salon to help to raise money for family. She will be known for her willingness to put her own dreams behind and serve her family. She will drive a tractor one day, pregnant with baby Chiqy, to deliver diesel to the farm. She will grow wheat and barley with her husband for extra money when Kenya starts to stumble.