One Day I Will Write About This Place

by Binyavanga Wainaina

  Her son Kenneth, named after her father, Binyavanga, is a strange one. She defends him, more than she should. He lives inside his dreams, and is always stumbling. He never accepted God, and sometimes it looks as if he can disappear inside chaos. He has a sweetness that disarms her; in a way they are friends. He never made it difficult; even when he was lost in his world, he would never say so. He shrugs and smiles and tries to please, following people.

  He cannot say no. He has her dreaminess, her absent­minded­ness. Her stubbornness. He does not have her will, her spine, or her refusal to accept uncertainties, to transcend them. He stands and falls into the tangle of his doubts. Always stands and falls and dreams. She too wanted to make beautiful things and maybe that is why she let him go, when sometimes she could have been sterner with him.

  She is not there, when her son’s Cape Town phone rings. It is Uncle Henry, who has not spoken to her son in years. Uncle Henry, now a professor of business management at the University of the Witwatersrand, says, “Hello, Kenneth.”

  “Yes,” says Kenneth.

  “Are you… how are you? Kenneth… are you sitting down? I am sorry to tell you, your mother, Rosemary… she passed away today, in Kenyatta Hospital.”

  Rosemary Kankindi is the third daughter of Cosma Binyavanga. She married Job Muigai Wainaina, of Kenya, and they have four children:

  James Muigai Wainaina

  Binyavanga Wainaina

  June Wanjiru Wainaina

  Melissa Kamanzi Wainaina

  She has two grandchildren.

  From both her daughters. Paul Muigai, and William Wainaina.

  Chapter Twenty-­Six

  Nairobi in 2001 is one big bar.

  It’s been a year since Mum died. I came for the funeral and found I could not leave. To leave means changing my name, getting a new passport. It means not being sure I will get a visa. It means witnessing change in a place that will never let me be part of it. South Africans are infatuated with their own new trajectory. Like Americans, they see the whole world in their country, and seem perpetually surprised that other people are in their country. I will always be a foreigner. Even after ten years. I am tired of moving around. I want to be home. Just to be home. I don’t want people being born, people dying with me away. My baby sister is all grown up and I do not know her.

  I live in a small room in a private student hostel called Beverly Hills, in Eastlands, next to one of Nairobi’s largest slums.

  Hostels like these are popular with college students and the newly employed. They are cheap and secure. Water is rationed. That first night I left the dry taps open, and I woke up to see my laptop floating in four inches of water. The screen died. I bought a cheap second­hand PC screen in the city, and now it is working.

  I spend my day indoors, writing, and leave my room when I smell the first onions and Royco Mchuzi Mix frying for people’s supper. I walk into Mlango Kubwa to buy something cheap to eat. To meet and chat with people.

  Congo rumba music squeals out of a rusty corrugated-­iron shack; it seesaws up and down my stomach, wrapped around beer-­fueled laughter, the squeals of barmaids. Early-evening light makes beasts of faces. Eyes and teeth gleam; gums and tongues rejoice, as paraffin light laps at the cooling air, and the tentative scuttle out of their holes to feed. A group of three Somali women walk, like mice, huddled together, heading for the mosque in Eastleigh. I follow.

  Two Congolese men are standing outside the bar, their pants hiked up to their chests, short and stocky in designer fur coats, skin bleached a flat and dead yellow, lips black and smoky. There is a Kenyan joke about the Congo man whose trousers are so high that he can access his wallet only by reaching over his shoulder. The men are laughing and talking to each other in Lingala, in a closed world of two, a sound that jangles like the music in my head.

  I am writing a lot, and getting commissions here and there. I have started writing fiction, which I love the most. My only regular source of income is the one hundred dollars a week that Rod Amis, the editor of an online magazine, g21.net, pays me for contributions. I have abandoned my bad speculative fiction novel. I am trying to build skill by writing short stories.

  The elections are in a year, and we are all wondering whether we will survive that long. Many people have filled the streets many times to campaign for political change. Finally the constitution is amended, so an elected official can only serve two terms. This is Moi’s second term. He has promised to retire. We don’t really believe it.

  I make my way through the zigzag paths of Mlango Kubwa’s main ave­nue, Biashara Street. The soapy, gagging smell of an open drain rises up and catches me by surprise. I walk, in a hurry, breathing with my mouth, a childhood habit designed to bewilder ambitious microbes. The gaudy hand-­painted colors of small-­scale marketing wriggle; they splash to woozy life in the muddy puddles that line the path.

  Tens of thousands of people—­on foot and bicycles, unloading from thumping matatus—­are swarming past us down Mlango Kubwa, through Eastleigh, the frontier of formal Nairobi, on paths made spongy from years of fresh produce and litter, to Mathare, in a thick downhill flow.

  Dark is thick now, and I walk more lightly. I take this route most days, to catch the flickering streams of people. There is something beautiful about the moments when people are removed from themselves by the imminent: the rush to do small forgotten things; the unpacking of mobile shops; children shrieking, cut loose from routine; the flood of black China-­made bicycles, hurling warning bells and threats at children; the sharp clicks of roofs contracting in the cooling air. I come out every evening at this time to buy some supper; to buy some dope, sometimes to buy a beer.

  I spent the past few weeks polishing a short story for the Caine Prize for African Writing. It is about a young girl (Girl Child, Gender!) who is questioning the world, and her mother’s values (Empowerment).

  I mine every sexy African theme I can think of. The Caine Prize, based in England, is worth fifteen thousand dollars, and you get an agent and fame and lots of commissioned work.

  Whenever I walk here, I always look out for Joga’s murals.

  I stumbled on his work a few weeks after moving here; after my eyes adjusted to the flow of things, I could set aside the hundreds of small dramas unfolding before me, and I was able to focus on the particular. Joga’s older works were smoky, sometimes difficult to see clearly. In one bar, I found a large mural painted on chipboard, mounted on the wall. The bar was full of old Gikuyu men and women: waistcoats and plastic eyeglasses and headscarves, the odd walking stick. Sluggish traditional accordion music from the Kenyatta-­era 1970s scratched its way out of old speakers. There were murals everywhere. Friesian fields; over­large udders; lush countrywomen trampolining on soft kikuyu grass; gnarled old trees gathered in a semicircle of wisdom.

  Escape here, says the hand-­painted ad; sample a little bit of rural home. Two drunk men try to carry a cow into a matatu, their legs waggling like earthworms. In the distance, coffee plantations gleam, like gold.

  After a few months, this mural disappeared. The bar owner was bored with it and threw it away. He bought a pool table and a VCD player.

  Every few weeks I go to Nakuru and spend some time with Baba. We have a beer at Njoro Golf Club, eat there even, and talk. He is the chairman of the club, and spends a lot of time there restoring things and making them work again. It’s strange to us—­we are all used to seeing each other through my mother’s gentle public relations. It is hard to believe this Baba who makes mistakes, who can be unsure of himself, who is not up and out of the house at 8:00 a.m. every day. The new people at Pyrethrum Board have been mismanaging things, and it is hard for him to stand aside and watch what he has worked for be destroyed by incompetence. The new managing director is from Moi’s tribe. A diplomat, with no experience working with farmers. I get angry and flap my hand about when Baba tells me this, and he remains measured and sensible, writes reports, and goes to Nairobi often and discreetly to meet ministry people and sug
gest ways to keep Pyrethrum Board alive.

  I stop at a tin and clapboard and recycled tin barbershop, which is asymmetrical and coiled around a get-­together of wiggling paths, made slick by large advertorial murals—­painted, again, by Joga.

  Mash and Ndizi stand outside, as they do every day, eyebrows offering suggestions whenever eye contact is made with a potential customer. Kalamashaka, the original rappers in Sheng, growl out of a music system that sits outside: “I’m so thirsty Sprite cannot quench my thirst / I’m so tired trying to maintain an image…”

  Kalamashaka live up the road, in Dandora. Only here, in the slums of Nairobi, has some sort of three-­in-­one language developed, Sheng, and slowly hip-­hop musicians are bringing Sheng to life all over the country: angry burning songs about the struggle of life in a falling city, on new FM radio stations that have opened the previously restricted airwaves.

  Joga’s work on this barbershop has a metallic aspect. Master P’s golden face leers, filling a whole wall, gold glinting on his teeth, on his fingers, around his neck.

  There is a small portrait of Osama bin Laden on the door, and the rest of the walls and the stand-­alone sign on the ground are taken up by paintings of soft slick African American haircuts. On quiet nights I have turned a corner and a giant Joga face—ruby-­colored lips parted to whisper green-­card lottery dreams in an air hostess voice—slaps me to attention.

  Mash has a face like a Cadbury drinking chocolate advert, shiny yellow cheeks and dimples. A James Hadley Chase novel, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, peeks out of the side pocket of his denim jacket. We met a few weeks ago, at an open-­air book exchange near the KBS depot. Ndizi, his business partner, has remained elusive, sliding away smoothly whenever I try to pin him down, always friendly, always aloof.

  K-­Shaka rap: “Are you thinking of bringing a ridiculous cast to my funeral / Please hide the machete before thoughts start roaming.”

  We chat, and my eyes wander. Paths zigzag, crash into shops, and swerve off, so at ground level you can’t see any farther than a few meters, an instinctive maze fulfilled by a naked citizenry, a protection from surprises: Police. Authorities.

  When Mungiki militias took over in this area, they started to build straight roads and demolish shacks. They said that straight roads make it hard for thieves to hide. Most of us think Mungiki are the lowest of the low. Fanatics. Mafiosos. Mash is a Mungiki supporter; he says crime has stopped and young men have something to believe in, something to do.

  All the systems that function here are built on small relationships. You—­your branded individuality and its costumes, and your manner, and the trade or activity this costume represents—­are the institution that matters. You negotiate your power in every conversation.

  Joga comes out of the barbershop to say hi. He often hangs out here. He has changed. The awkward nineteen-year-old I met a year ago, wearing the shyness of the village, is gone. He is now a celebrity. Eastleigh, only a few hundred meters away, has “discovered” his work, and he has new commissions nearly every day. He has his first contracts with the formal city, and the respect that this brings.

  He no longer wears paint-­splattered jeans; he has on a trendy fleece jacket, baggy pants, and Nikes. He has acquired that loose-­walking way that is referred to as cool. He will stop and lean against a wall, slouching slightly. He will not stare at anybody, like he used to, with eyes that declared his shyness; he will let his glance sit lightly on whoever addresses him. The glance will acknowledge that person’s contribution, and the shutters will close.

  He nods his head to one side, one eyebrow lifting in greeting. I nod back.

  “Nimemaliza,” he says to the group, and we follow him inside, to see a huge two-meter by two-meter portrait of Jay-­Z.

  “Ni kaa photo.” It’s like a photo, says Ndizi. I look at it, and there are little cartoon emphases: gleams exaggerated on his teeth, cartoon bursts of diamond bling! Jay-­Z’s features are exaggerated, for effect. Joga does not see a difference between his pungent cartoon images and photographs.

  I grew up with people whose lives dived down from television satellites, and shot past us. Going Somewhere People. We followed: all of us scrumming to enter the bottleneck beyond which international-­level incomes are offered. We are threatened, every minute, by failure, if we question the stepping-­stones of certainty presented to us, if we fail to be fluent in the fashions of MTV and London and New York.

  Joga does not know what an art gallery is; he does not seem to believe me when I tell him about the Nairobi art scene at Kuona and the French cultural center. Even here, he has never apprenticed under anybody. He taught himself; his whole evolution as an artist has been mediated only by his translation of what he sees and hears.

  Which face do you pick to meet chaos? The one built from the ground up, baring all your past, all your scars? Or the adopted one, wired to a certain manner that you have discovered will open doors to the scholarshipped, resuméd, backed-up, buffered world out there and the piece of stamped paper that promises that you will inherit the earth?

  Me, I am like a squirrel, looking for opportunity all over the Inter­net. My story “Hell Is in Bed with Mrs. Peprah” is accepted by a small American magazine, and I celebrate.

  But I find out that it won’t be published in time for the Caine Prize deadline. The magazine, in Nebraska, can only pay in contributor copies.

  In a panic, the day before the submission deadline, I ask Rod Amis to publish my girlchild story for me on g21.net.

  He says he can’t publish fiction. I send him a quickly re­edited version of the Uganda story I published in South Africa.

  We decide to call it “Discovering Home.”

  Rod submits it, and gets a snooty e-mail from the Caine Prize people in England, saying they only accept stories published in print.

  I am furious. I write back, telling them only one anthology has been published in Africa in the past year. Where do they find published stories? I ask.

  They don’t respond. Fuck them, says Rod. Bloody colonizers. Yes. Yes, I say.

  Joga is stuck in the same place I am. Can only see his pictures as photographs because, like me, he receives ideas from some far-­off capital. Nobody here will pass up a chance at gold and bling and puppy dog jeans. Does he have any idea how fresh his work looks, after the elaborate mimicries of the other Nairobi? I hand over some money to Mash, and Ndizi passes me the rolls of bhangi. His dreadlocks splash spaghetti shadows on my shirt.

  “Why do they call you Ndizi?”

  His laugh sounds like paper rustling on a radio microphone.

  “Ndizi kaa Sundaymorning.”

  An answer and no answer. A Jamaican accent smudges the seams of his Sheng. His voice has the rich musical undertones of a Luo. I turn and head back slowly for home. I laugh to myself. Joga is better off than I am. Rod can’t afford to pay me a hundred dollars a week anymore, so I can’t even afford to live in this slum.

  I last three months.

  I go home and ask Baba if I can stay with them in the new house. Ciru has a job, with an Internet start-­up. Chiqy works for a mobile phone company in Nairobi. Her son, Bobo, lives with us while she sets herself up. I babysit my nephews and write and cook. I do small features for local magazines in Kenya. I meet online and make friends with a young Nigerian woman, Chimamanda Adichie, who is also trying to get published. We critique each other’s work. Soon, we are e-mailing every day.

  I meet Muthoni Garland online and other Kenyan writers—­a community starts to connect and talk. Soon we are talking about publishing, about starting a magazine.

  I am online all day and all night. Baba complains about the bills. An uncle is sent to speak to me. He has this new machine. It can take cheap alcohol and seal it in small sachets. “You talk well,” he tells me. “You can do sales and marketing and make some money.”

  I am about to say yes when the e-mail from the bloody colonizers comes.

  Dear Caine Prize Shortlisted Guy, called Binya
… vanga. Do you want to come to England, and have dinner in the House of Lords, and do readings, and go to the Bodleian Library for a dinner of many courses, with wine, and all of London’s literati? At this dinner, you will find out if Baroness Somebody Important will give you fifteen thousand dollars in cash, and even if she doesn’t, you should come because being shortlisted and having dinner at the House of Lords and such is like a big deal, a really big deal. Will you come?

  Oh yes. I go.

  I win the Caine Prize, and cry, bad snotty tears, and come back with some money. A group of writers and I start a magazine, called Kwani?—­which means so what?

  Chapter Twenty-­Seven

  I am traveling a lot now, sometimes on magazine assignments. I always look for reasons to travel in Africa.

  One day a very nice Dutch man calls me up. “Are you Binya-­wanga? The writer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, I heard about your work. I work for the European Union Humanitarian Something. I want to produce a book about Sudan, about sleeping sickness in Sudan.”

  “I don’t really do development writing,” I say.

  “Oh, no no. We want a proper… African writer to write a book about what he sees. You know, literature. We will publish it and pay for everything. You will go with a photographer. It will be something different. Powerful. Literature and photographs.”

  “You mean you will pay, and I can write whatever I see?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you can say that in the contract?”

  “Yes.”

  So I go to Sudan, and come back shell-­shocked. I start to write. I fictionalize parts of it. I met a South Sudanese doctor who worked for the SPLA. He would work the whole morning and get violently drunk in the afternoon. Sometimes his superiors would send him to Nairobi to get in shape, then return him to the front to patch broken bodies together and throw them back to the war. He refused to leave his work and get a decent job somewhere. I decide to make him a poet. It is the first poetry I have written.