One Day I Will Write About This Place

by Binyavanga Wainaina

  She was taken aback. The queue behind me was impatient.

  Backtracking, she said, “Oh. No. Ai! You mean it is wrong to ask? Kwani I can’t just ask you? I am just asking? Your last name is Gikuyu… where is the other name from?”

  She still did not let me move. Finally I lost it and said, “Are you saying I can’t check in until I answer your question?” She pouted and let me pass, and for a second I saw her small sneer.

  After the incident with the air hostess, three years into Kibaki’s reign in Kenya, my name has begun mysteriously to twist tongues. Binyawho? Manyabanga? Sometimes people laugh at it. All the people who find their tongues unable to pronounce my name are Gikuyus. My own tribe. Some members of my family. Friends even. One person stops me on a street to tell me how happy he was to see me in the newspaper—­but that name of yours, my friends are asking, you are half what?

  Now that we have a Gikuyu president, for the first time in my life, to be Gikuyu is a public event. You are tagged and measured, and then people let you in; there is a national conversation taking place, and this conversation is happening in Gikuyu, for Gikuyu, and of Gikuyu.

  The rest of Kenya has become the Tribes. There is a text message being sent to Gikuyus calling Luos and people from western Kenya “beasts from the west.” This sort of thing is being peddled even among the middle classes. The direct targets of this are the Luo, personified by Raila Odinga, who is becoming the devil in hundreds of text messages and Web sites. For decades the public face of Kenya’s struggle for identity has been symbolized by the battles of towering Gikuyu politicians fighting towering Luo politicians. In our vague unthinking way, we Gikuyus have come to see Luo meaning the coming of communism and emotionalism, and the collapse of order.

  To be Gikuyu, it is said, now every day, in nearly every forum in which Gikuyus gather, is to be reasonable. We are the invisible middle-­class objectivity of Kenya. For others to belong among us, they have to behave like us. We do not need to examine ourselves.

  We need to tame the tribes.

  Years ago, I sat with an old man I respect, and he told me that Kenya would work wonderfully if we had an overt policy to develop people according to their tribal abilities. Positive tribalism, he called it. The Luhya are strong, and they make good laborers. They also speak English very well, he conceded. The Luo are very artistic and creative. They are good tailors. The Kamba make good soldiers because they are loyal. The man went around the pizza called Kenya, naming every slice and according it grace. It completely escaped him that every skill coincided nearly perfectly with the first acts of labor division introduced by the British, that he was, in fact, affirming exactly how we were defined and given roles to play in colonial Kenya. These identities were, in his mind, our permanent tribal personality. I asked him, so what will the Gikuyu do in this utopian Kenya? He was surprised, and frowned. It had not occurred to him. The Gikuyu just were, and everybody else was ethnic.

  Something slipped into his generation’s view of a possible Kenya. Those early Gikuyu technocrats under Kenyatta inherited, nearly exactly, the British idea about who does what. Who runs things. Who can. Who can’t, and why not. The tribes were primeval and could not escape their fate. This impartial and objective view is always presented as the conclusion of a long and thorough analysis, which, by complete co­incidence, comes up with the finding that if you look at it all, all of Kenya, analytically, especially now that our president, Kibaki, is Gikuyu, any reasonable person will come to the conclusion that we Gikuyus are the best people to allow the tribes to develop.

  I am home from teaching in America. Paul and William, my nephews, are eight and seven. Jimmy is doing well. He has two daughters. His house is full of kids running around. I laugh at him and say how he used to tell us he would live alone like a hermit. He tells me the economy is doing well. He is a legend now, in Nairobi retail banking circles.

  He finished a triathlon and was on the company billboard.

  Mary Rose, his eldest, is named after Mum. She looks just like Jim. She has the same high energy. Emma, the baby, is a flirt.

  In the past two years, during political campaigns, text messages called on the members of the House of Mumbi (the mother of the Gikuyu Nation) to let things “stay at home.” Ka mucii was whispered from cab driver to passenger, from politician to market trader. Text messages flew everywhere. John Githongo, Kenya’s anti­corruption czar, who broke ranks with a corrupt Gikuyu elite, was branded a traitor.

  Wink wink. Nod nod. It is our season. Kibaki season.

  Over the past two years, people complain that nice middle-class Gikuyus are now speaking in their language in office corridors. It is a strangely schizophrenic place to be. Many Kenyans assume I am not Gikuyu and share their concerns with me. Meanwhile, an equal and opposite paranoia about the Gikuyu is starting to spread around Kenya. Many Gikuyus freely share with me their newly discovered contempt for everybody else. The mood is triumphant. We are back. Kenyatta’s face is on our currency.

  For it has come to be, now, in this fever, that part of what it means to be a Gikuyu is to be not a Luo. To be Gikuyu is to be not a tribe. And to be a Kenyan is to be not Gikuyu. We are saying we are the template of Kenya, and you other people had better fit yourselves in. If you behave, we will be nice to you.

  I say my hellos. I say my good-byes. I can’t wait to leave.

  Chapter Thirty

  She took her own certainty along by stooping under everything: stooping under her own history of the heart, stooping under the stares in Mamprobi, and stooping under her own lowering world.

  —from Search Sweet Country, by Kojo Laing

  I arrived in Accra, Ghana, yesterday. This is my first time in West Africa, on writing assignment for a World Cup anthology. Years are flying by now, as my writing career starts to take shape. It is 2006.

  I spend much of the first night in a cybercafé in Osu, trying to find out as much as I can about Togo. The café is full for most of the night, full of young men, mostly, all well dressed, and, from my sideways glances, all looking for scholarships or at dating Web sites.

  I am going to Togo tomorrow, to sniff around for a World Cup–related book project. Togo is suddenly in the headlines because its team, against all predictions, has qualified for the World Cup.

  What a happy, happy city. People are laughing and greeting and laughing and greeting. Working, selling, building.

  Many Google trails yield much information.

  The French, since the days of de Gaulle especially, love fatherly African dictators who love French luxury goods, and French military bases. It makes them money, makes them feel they have their own commonwealth that gives them a feeling of international drama; it makes for good dinner-party talk and much student agitation. Omar Bongo, of Gabon, imported a French chateau; Emperor Bokassa had a Louis XIV–style inauguration and died in Bangui; Léopold Sédar Senghor died in France; and Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast built the biggest Catholic basilica in the world in his home village.

  Gnassingbé Eyadéma, who died recently, was cut from the same market fabric. He managed to remain in power for thirty-eight years with no small help from the French, who ignored most of the abuses of his government and gave him much military aid for decades. Chirac called him a friend of France.

  Nations that have cut themselves off from any way of measuring themselves against the normal transactions of their population become comical, in a crocodile-grinning, Idi Amining way. The constituency of these leaders was France, their cold war partners, their clan insiders, and the executives of the main extractors of their main overseas export. A Togo Web site reports that a former Mitterrand aide was arrested in Lomé for selling arms.

  …

  I meet Alex at breakfast in Accra. He is a carver of wooden curios who has a small shop at the hotel. His uncle owns the hotel. He spends his days at the gym, playing soccer, and making wooden sculptures of voluptuous Ghanaian women. For tourists. He shines with beauty and health and fresh-ironed
ness. He seems ready, fit and ready. I am not sure what for. We chat. He doesn’t speak very much. I ask him if he can help get me somebody. He plays finger football on his mobile phone and finds me somebody to take me to Lomé.

  Later, in the evening, we get in his uncle’s Peugeot, and he drives me to meet my guide. I am struck, again, by the fluidity of his body language, and even more by his solemn maturity. There does not seem to be anything he cannot handle.

  But his attitude toward me is overly respectful. He plays boy to my man. Does not contradict anything I say. It is disturbing. Before we get to the suburb where his friends are hanging out, he turns to me and asks, his face awed, and suddenly boyish, “Have you been to America?”

  …

  We find them, Alex and I, at dusk, a group of young men sitting by the road, in tracksuits and shorts and muscle tops. They are all fat-free and pectoraled and look boneless, postcoital, and gray after a vigorous exercise session at the beach, and a swim and a shower. One of them has a bandage on his knee and is limping. They are all fashionably dressed.

  I ask around. They all come from middle-class families. They are all jobless, in their twenties, not hungry, cushioned in very small ways by their families, and small deals here and there.

  Hubert is a talented soccer player. Twenty-one years old, he is the star of a first-division team in Accra. In two weeks he will go to South Africa to try out for a major soccer team. His coach has high hopes for him.

  “I am a striker.”

  He looks surprisingly small for a West African football player. Ghanaians are often built like American football players. I conclude that he must be exceptionally good if he can play here.

  “Aren’t you afraid of those giant Ghanaian players?” I ask, nodding my head at his hulking friends.

  He just smiles. He is the one with the international offers.

  Hubert agrees to take me to Togo for a couple of days. He is mortified by my suggestion that I stay in a hotel. We will sleep in his mother’s house in Lomé. His father died recently. Hubert is in Accra because there are more opportunities in Ghana than in Togo.

  “Ghana has no politics.”

  …

  I offer Alex a drink. To say thanks. We end up at a bar by the side of a road. A hundred or so people have spilled onto the road, dancing and talking rowdily and staggering. Alex looks a little more animated. They are playing hiplife—Ghana’s version of hip-hop, merged with highlife. It is a weekday, and the bar is packed with large, good-looking men, all in their twenties, it seems. There are very few women. We sit by the road and chat, watching people dance in the street. This could never happen in Nairobi—this level of boisterousness would be assumed to lead to chaos and anarchy, and it would be clipped quickly. Three young men stagger and chase each other on the road, beers in hand, laughing loudly. Alex knows a lot of the guys here, and he joins in a little, in his solemn way.

  I notice there are no broken bottles, no visible bouncer. No clues that this level of happiness ever leads to meaningful violence.

  After a while, we find a table on the pavement. I head off to the bar to get a round of drinks. Some of Alex’s friends have joined us. “You don’t drink Guinness?” they ask, shocked. Guinness is MANPOWER.

  When I get back, I find that a couple has joined the table: a tall man with large lips and a round, smooth baby’s face, and a heavily made-up young woman with sharp breasts and a shiny short dress.

  The rest of the table is muted. They do not meet the woman’s eye, although she is their age. The man is in his thirties. He shouts for a waiter, who materializes. His eyes sweep around, a string of cursive question marks. People nod assent shyly. He has a French African accent.

  Alex introduces us. He is Yves, from Ivory Coast. He is staying at the same hotel that I am.

  Yves laughs, his eyes teasing. “Your uncle’s hotel. Eh.”

  Alex looks down. Nobody talks to me now. It is assumed Yves is my peer, and they must submit. They start to talk among themselves, and I turn to Yves.

  “So. You are here on business? Do you live in Côte d’Ivoire?” I ask.

  “Ah. My brother, who can survive there? There is war. I live in South London. And in Chad. I also live in Accra sometimes.”

  “Oh, where do you work?”

  “I am in oil—we supply services to the oil companies in N’Djamena.”

  We talk. No. He talks. For a full hour. Yves is thirty-three. He has three wives. One is the daughter of the president of Chad. The other is mixed race—a black Brit. The third lives here in Accra. I wait for him to turn to his girlfriend by his side. He does not. And she does not react. It is as if she is worried the makeup will crack if she says anything. It is impossible to know what she is thinking. He has money. She will wear the mask he needs. Every so often, he breaks from his monologue to whisper babyhoney things in her ear.

  Yves knows Kofi Annan’s son. He claims to be on a retainer for a major oil company, seeking high-level contacts in Africa. He looks at me, eyes dead straight and serious, and asks me about my contacts in State House. I have none to present. He laughs, generously. No problem. No problem. Kenya was stupid, he says, to go with the Chinese so easily.

  This is the future. But most people do not see this…

  He turns to Alex. “See this pretty boy here? I am always telling him to get himself ready. I will make it work for him… but he is lazy.”

  Yves turns to the group. “You Ghana boys are lazy—you don’t want to be aggressive.”

  The group is eating this up eagerly, smiling shyly and looking somewhat hangdog. The drinks flow. Cuteface now has a bottle of champagne.

  Later, we stand to head back. Yves grabs Alex’s neck in a strong chokehold. “You won’t mess me in the deal, eh, my brother?”

  Alex smiles sheepishly, “Ah no, Yves, I will do it, man.”

  “I like you. Eh… Alex? I like you. I don’t know why. You are always promising, and nothing happens. You are lucky I like you.”

  Alex looks very happy.

  We separate at the hotel lift, and Yves slaps me on the back.

  “Call me, eh?”

  Early the next morning, we take a car from the Accra bus rank at dawn. It is a two-hour drive to the border. You cross the border at Aflao, and you are in Lomé, the capital of Togo.

  …

  Gnassingbé Eyadéma was a Kabye, the second-largest ethnic group in Togo. The Kabye homeland around the northern city of Kara is arid and mountainous. In the first half of the twentieth century, many young Kabye moved south to work as sharecroppers on Ewe farms. The wealthier Ewe looked down on the Kabye but depended on them as laborers. Eyadéma made sure to fill the military with Kabye loyalists. It was called “the army of cousins” and was armed by the French. Alex is Kabye.

  Eyadéma threw political opponents to the crocodiles.

  Lomé is hot, dry, and dusty. People look dispirited, and the city is rusty and peeling and bleached from too much brine and sun and rough times. Hubert points out a tourist hotel to me. It looks like it has been closed for years, but the weather here can deteriorate things rapidly. The tourist industry collapsed after the pro-democracy riots in early 2005.

  Hubert is not Ewe. And he supports Faure Gnassingbé: “He understands young people.”

  It turns out that his family is originally from the north.

  We take a taxi into town and drive around looking for a bureau that will change my dollars to CFA francs. One is closed. We walk into the next one. It has the characterless look of a government office. It smells of old damp cardboard. They tell us we have to wait an hour to change any money.

  In the center of the city, buildings are imposing, unfriendly, and impractical. Paint has faded; plastic fittings look bleached and brittle. I have seen buildings like this before—in South African homeland capitals, in Chad and Budapest. These are buildings that international contractors build for countries eager to show how “modern” they are. They are usually described as “ultramodern”—and whe
n they are new, they shine like the mirrored sunglasses of a presidential bodyguard. Within months, they rust and peel and crumble. I see one called Centre des Cheques Postaux, another Centre National de Perfectionnement Professionnel.

  There are International Bureaus of Many Incredibly Important Things, and International Centers of Even More Important Things. I count fourteen buildings that have the word développement on their walls. There are International Bureaus of Many Incredibly Important Things, and International Centers of Even More Important Things. I count fourteen buildings that have the word développement on their walls. In Accra, signs are warm, quirky, and humorous: Happy Day Shop, Do Life Yourself, Diplomatic Haircut.

  Everywhere, people are wearing yellow Togo team shirts.

  We decide to have lunch. Hubert leads me to a small plot of land surrounded on three sides by concrete walls. On one side of this plot, a group of women are stirring large pots. On the other, there is a makeshift thatch shade, with couches and a huge television. A fat gentleman, who looks like the owner of the place, is watching Octopussy on satellite television. There are fading murals on the walls. On one wall, there are a couple of stiff-looking white people waltzing, noses facing the sky. Stiff and awkward, cliché white people. An arrow points to a violin, and another arrow points to a champagne bottle. It is an ad for a hotel: L’Hotel Climon. 12 chambres. Entièrement climatisé. Non loin du Lycée Française.

  One another wall, there is an ad for this restaurant.

  A topless black woman with spectacular breasts—large, pointy, and firm—serves brochettes and a large fish on a huge platter. A black chef with sparkling cheeks grins at us. A group of people are eating, drinking, laughing. Fluent, affluent, flexible. I order the fish.

  When we are done, we make our way out and look for a taxi. There are more taxis than private cars on the road. Hubert and the taxi driver have a heated discussion about prices; we leave the taxi in a huff. Hubert is furious. I remain silent—the price he quotes seem reasonable—but Nairobi taxis are very expensive.