One Day I Will Write About This Place

by Binyavanga Wainaina

  Now Lionel Richie is Swahili Jamaicanly saying we are going to part-ay, karamu, fiesta, forever. When his mouth is closed, it puffs out with interesting possibilities—to my dentally naturalist eye. It promises dramatic teeth, tall and craggy-faced Mau Maus on horses galloping along the raw pink highway of Kenya. They stand in a semicircle at the jawline of the Ngong Hills, looking down at the capital, grimy and determined. They pause for a moment—for the heroic bronze sculpture they hope they will commission to celebrate this hilly revolutionary moment. Teeth facing forward, they gallop down the hill, then storm the city with sharp pointy things heading straight for the biggest-dick building: Kenyatta Cornflakes Center. “Everyone you meet,” calypsos Lionel, “they are partying on the street, all night long.” Yeah. Mouth closed, Lionel Richie promises on-your-mark, get set, go teeth.

  To be a successful sovereign citizen of urban Togo (or Brazil, or Nigeria, or Kenya)—one who is not allied to French scholarships and French departments, to administrative authority and the “private sector”; one not allied by clan or tribe or family relationship to the Gnassingbés or the Kibaki family—one needs to cultivate a certain fitness, a certain rhythm. Your body, your tongue must respond quickly to an environment that sometimes shifts every few minutes. You must constantly invent new strategies to thrive the next day. These strategies need to be drilled into the body, so they are used subtly and suddenly when they are required.

  What is so sublime about the truly great soccer players is the ability of a single individual to completely bewilder a nation: Maradona over Germany and England. Zinedene Zidane against everybody, restrained only by his own pride, his other sovereignty, his realization at the very climax of his art and career that soccer is only a game, and he, a paid performer.

  The Nation newspaper online today announces that the Gabonese Pygmies may soon be learning Chinese because of iron ore. Famous Brands, the South African Company that brought Debonairs Pizza to Kenya, has just bought 49 percent of Wimpy UK. Kenya’s economy has grown by 6 percent, but the poor are worse off than they were last year. Fifty percent of Kenyans are living under the poverty line. Nyanza Province, Raila Odinga’s Luo-speaking political heartland, has a life expectancy of forty-four years; Central Province—Gikuyus who support Kibaki—has a life expectancy of sixty years.

  Now Lionel is smiling. The mouth stretches sideways—looking to lock onto the gold happyhooks that hang down his earlobes. I look closely. There are no battle-weary warrior teeth. Sitting on top of the soft pink crown of his empire is a troop of thirty-two little drum majorettes, pearly and white, light bouncing off their medals as they squeal with teenage self-satisfaction. Ohh Jambo Jambo.

  A cobbler should be able to attack you before you see him, see a chink in your fine leather before you can slap him away. A Kenyan market trader needs to be able to pack up all wares in a minute once a city council askari in civilian clothes has been spotted. Must do this, and turn over enough money for tomorrow’s stocks and today’s bribe, and yesterday’s children’s medication, and this month’s tax to a city council that collects taxes efficiently and will never allow you to trade freely, will never invest your taxes in any infrastructure.

  Teenagers, the Nation online lifestyle magazine informs us, are at a critical stage of their life. Lesbianism is rampant in our schools and must be eradicated by role models. The Kenyan stock market is booming. Kenya’s second-oldest brokerage firm is issuing bouncing checks. It has six hundred thousand account holders. Every listed company is oversubscribed. Kenyans are buying stocks like crazy: diaspora Kenyans, up-and-coming Kenyans, and newly rich Kibaki Kenyans. It is hard to say that things are not better. Government departments work. There are tax collection records. You can get your national exam results by text message. The largest bank in Kenya is a microlending bank. New skyscrapers are all over Nairobi. There is an epidemic of pyramid schemes that the police cannot stop.

  Many Kenyans have lost their life savings.

  Aiii! I can’t take another winter day indoors.

  The moment the sun is up, I take a taxi to the Amtrak train station in Albany. I will spend the weekend in New York City.

  …

  I have a window seat, near the toilet, and four ripe apples. There are slabs of ice floating on the Hudson River. The train follows the Hudson all the way to the city. Outside, the rest of the water is a flapping duvet of gold and white light. The train smells bad. A woman sits on her own. She has an ear-length red perm, polished into a flowing thing, with threads of silver. She has the shoulders of a dancer. A bottle of water rests by her side, and some fruit. She is fresh and wholesome in the very dirty Amtrak carriage.

  I take out my laptop and continue browsing. Luos in America and Gikuyus in America have crowded the chat rooms—all screaming at each other with very bad spelling. I can’t stop looking at the woman, she moves so well, looks so… television. She is in her forties and has a Roman column of a neck, long and leaning forward a bit. It is held up by tight cords and wires that thrust down from a chin held high. Eyes smoulder, nearly shut, low rumbling charcoal clouds of mascara starting to promise rainfall. It must be a breakup. By text message maybe.

  I am sure I have diabetes. I have all the symptoms. Pentecostals are announcing and denouncing a new Kenyan prophet. His name is Pastor Owuor. He says he has a PhD in molecular biology, from Israel. But now God speaks to him. The woman’s fingers tap and fiddle with the bottled water, tendons running up and down her black fingers, like piano keys. The train clip-clops and whinnies as it turns. I turned thirtysix last month. Diabetes hit Mum’s side of the family, all twelve of them, when they were in their thirties. Mum got it when she was thirty-four. Mum’s mum got it in her nineties, but she ate boiled food and lots and lots of fresh vegetables.

  A thousand morning suns have split the trees and turned the Hudson River into a highway of light. Maybe the woman is a musician, at Bard College, or Vassar. Jazz. Yes, jazz.

  Next December, the pastor says in giant rallies all over Kenya, an earthquake will destroy Nairobi. Bridges, towers will crumble like dust; blood will flow and the river will burst its banks.

  In Togo, Rock has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. The whole of Togo is furious. Rock decides to call a press conference, to announce a major sponsorship deal. There are balloons in the press conference room, and a few bespectacled Dutch businessmen, I imagine, one who has known and bribed and loved the Gnassingbés for forty years, and his Dutch ancestors have known and bribed fat, rich, and violent warlords for a couple of hundred years—so waxy Dutch cloth, of quite astonishing expense, is bought by millions of West Africans. In the room there are long, lithe hostesses serving Gnassingbé bottled water and Gnassingbé biscuits, and they are dressed in tight print fabrics and head knots that would silence Erykah Badu. They are Mama Opels in training.

  In the room there are a few sullen Eyadéma grandsons in mummy’s soft yellow skin and pouty pink lips and giant gold chains and OutKast’s wardrobe; in the room there are tight-faced fat women, still Benzing, powdered, with round surgically blanked faces; fat football officials in shoulder-padded shirts, and patrols of multicolored pens in their front left pockets; and at the back of the room, standing, right in front of the red-eyed soldiers bearing guns, are lean, underpaid local journalists with ruled notebooks and Bic pens.

  International correspondents with their long Dictaphones, and dirty jeans, and five hundred words before whiskey, are slouched over the red velvet chairs, in the VIP section in the front, looking for the Story: the Most Macheteing Deathest, Most Treasury Corruptest, Most Entrail-Eating Civil Warest, Most Crocodile-Grinning Dictatorest, Most Heart-Wrenching and Genociding Pulitzerest, Most Black Big-Eyed Oxfam Child Starvingest, Most Wild African Savages Having AIDS-Ridden Sexest with Genetically Mutilatedest Girls…

  The Most Authentic Real Black Africanest story they can find for Reuters or AP or Agence France.

  But: this time, because this is the World Cup, a billion or two viewers, and
endorsements, and there is a pretense that everybody comes in there somewhat equal, they will actually look for a normal story about normal human beings doing normal things. This is the only time CNN will show you a former favela resident playing and thriving and normal and actually speaking for himself, and not shooting, or shooting up, or in the throes of unbearable CARE International–seeking suffering.

  Sitting next to the foreign correspondents are their dark, slinky girlfriends, the better-educated daughters of some Ma Benzes, one of whom nearly became Miss Togo, another who nearly won her region’s Face of Africa competition.

  A twenty-five-piece army band starts to play. Trumpets (the elephant is about to speak).

  Rock announces that a Dutch textile company has bought the rights to print cloth with the Hawks’ logo on it. In Togo, the words cloth and Dutch are nearly as electric as the words World Cup.

  Market women are salivating. Mercedes-Benz dealers start sending text messages to East London and Düsseldorf.

  Snap snap. An android mobile phone takes a picture of the sample fabric on display. Somebody sneaks out of the room—an Ivorian, perhaps—and calls his guy in Abidjan, tells him to catch a flight to the fabric factories of Guangzhou, China, tonight to have five containers in Lomé by the weekend.

  Tomorrow, the Chinese traders in Lomé market will do the same. Cheaper.

  But soccer wins over the drools of fabric.

  A journalist asks Rock about the players who are holding him hostage. He loses his temper in a George Bushish way and accuses the journalist of being unpatriotic.

  Rock loses the war against error. Togo is humiliated in the Cup of Nations.

  The Hudson has split into two. One branch glides away from us, and the train follows the larger branch; there are chunks of ice piled up against the aging railway line. Kenyan rivers have not yet been tamed by engineering. They gush and spill and dry up, no sedate movements. The train clatters into a tunnel. The woman is talking on the phone, and there is traffic running up and down the cables on her throat as the clock ticks just above a collarbone and tears are pouring down her cheeks.

  In front of a huge crowd in Thika town, Pastor Owour says there will be rivers of blood in the city in December.

  …

  The woman is smiling all pearly-teeth, and crying. A full black-skinned Goldie Fawn smile, her phone on her ear. Her voice is too whispery for me to overhear—and her mouth is smiling: thirty-two tap dancers on stage. A cab driver told me, a few weeks ago, that the industrial infrastructure of New York State is being unpacked, crumpled into scrap metal, and shipped off to China down the Hudson on barges. I am going to vote for Raila. I don’t love him. Kibaki is sort of okay. A bit sleepy, but there is no way I am voting for a second term for any president while this constitution is still alive. Too much power. I do not want to vote for a better Gikuyuland. I want to vote for a better Kenya. If I can’t trust my vote to a leader of another tribe, I may as well take a green card and not go back.

  …

  Winnie Amayo, who is chatting online today, has nothing to say about the election. She is concerned about the coming earthquake:

  God… showed me dead bodies full of blood and other people had been shot but they had not died. They were criying but there was no body to help them because people were running to other countries to be refugees. it was at noon time and the blood begun to smell because of the hot sun shine. That smell came into my nose and then I closed my nose then I woke up. I began to cry in prayer telling God to have mercy on us because we have never been refugees but instead we have been hosting refugees in our country. That night I watered my bed with tears.

  I can see this Amtrak woman curtsying at seven, after a dance recital, this mouth stretched to its tendon-tauting end, in pursuit of happiness, a beautifully shaped head held up by cables and columns, and teeth: this mouth is an auditorium, a performance space—and it can hold many pounding crowds of screaming citizens, and lions and gladiators. The columns on her throat will hold up her imploding day.

  …

  I am home in Kenya in the American summer, when Togo meets South Korea in their opening World Cup match.

  The entire continent watches, almost every man and woman—a billion of us: in small towns in Germany where day is euros and incontinent old Germans, and night is neo-Nazis; in foreign correspondents’ sea-facing living rooms in Accra, where long sexy limbs are flying and weave is disheveled and a girl with a long tubular face and pouting lips is screaming, as the foreign correspondent sips whiskey and types, “Africans in the heart of Togo’s dark jungle, in the middle of the dead animals of fetish-markets today cheered…”

  “Africa forgot war and misery today, to celebrate the rare good news…”

  The entire African continent: some living in musty dormitories in Moscow; dusty and tired and drunk, living among abandoned warehouses and dead industries of New Jersey; in well-oiled boardrooms in Nairobi and Lagos and Johannesburg; in cramped tenements in the suburbs of Paris; inside the residences of the alumni of the Presidential School of Lomé; in the markets of Accra and the corrugated iron bars of Lusaka; in school halls; and social halls in the giant markets of Addis Ababa; in ecstatic churches dancing in Uganda; on wailing coral balconies in Zanzibar; in a dark rumba-belting, militia-ridden bar in Lubumbashi; in rickety video shops in Dakar; in prisons in the Central African Republic; in miniskirts on red-lit street corners in Cape Town, peering into SuperSport bars; in school halls in Cherengani; in Parliament cafeterias in Harare.

  We all jump up and down, and shout and sing when, in the thirtyfourth minute, Kader gives Togo the lead over South Korea with a blistering shot from a very difficult angle.

  Chapter Thirty-­Two

  December 2007. The election is three days away.

  I have had enough. Raila’s party is now nakedly saying in rallies all over Kenya that their campaign is about forty-two tribes versus one tribe—the Gikuyu. The Gikuyu have become “blemishes” in some parts of the Rift Valley. Blemishes that need to be wiped away. They have gone mad, our politicians. Kibaki has selected his own commissioners for the electoral commission. He has broken his promise to consult the opposition. One woman tells me she has volunteered her own money—and she is not rich—to help rig the election in Raila’s constituency. She is Gikuyu.

  Almost all the people I know, for the first time in our history, are nakedly and openly beating their tribal chest.

  I tear up my voter’s card. I board a plane to Lamu, as far away from the poisonous election as I can get and still be in Kenya. The man sitting next to me on the plane is dressed in an African-print shirt with short sleeves. It is a good batik. He does not try to be flashy with it—it is a safe navy color and does not drown his white skin. No fake blond dreadlocks; his hair is brown and cut short. The man has been chatting to me for ten minutes now, and he is irritating. Maybe that’s it. Noo. He is speaking in Kiswahili—but his Kiswahili is perfect. First he speaks in Sheng, then he shifts to clean and elaborate coast Kiswahili. My Kiswahili is not very good. My Sheng is not so good. Maybe I am jealous. Noo. That’s not it.

  It is that he has got it all wrong. His accent is perfect; his tone, rhythm, everything. His timing is wrong. In this country, with its many languages, classes, and registers, much is said by what is not said. There are many understood ways to address someone: sometimes you shift quickly into English; often you speak in a mock Kiswahili, in an ironical tone, simply to indicate that you are not dogmatic about language, that you are quite happy to shift around and find the bandwidth of the person to whom you are speaking.

  The man is dogmatic. And his exquisite politeness is rude. He wants me to thank him for his cultural scrupulousness, and is unwilling to let me speak English, or not speak at all. I am not an individual. I am a cultural ambassador. His proper Kiswahili demands that I be more attentive than I want to be—inattention is impossible when somebody speaks in formal Kiswahili. It demands brotherhood and respect. I must nod, and say, “Ndio, ahaa,
eh? Yes. Ohh!” Eyebrows up and eyes wide in mock interest.

  It is going to be a long flight.

  Lamu town is the oldest living Swahili town in Kenya.

  Lamu was founded around the twelfth century, and there is evidence that international trade had been taking place there for at least a millennium before then. There were larger and more powerful city-states than Lamu in East Africa’s past: Siyu and Pate, for example. These cities are now mostly ruins. What makes Lamu interesting is that the basic architecture remains mostly intact. There are no cars on the island. The narrow streets and the thick-walled stone and mangrove homes remain close to what they were three hundred years ago. The same and yet very different. For in those days, Lamu was much more than a museum. These days it is a world heritage site, acting out its past for its own fond memories, and for the curiosity of others. The town of poetry and trade with India and Persia and China is diminished and poor.

  We walk out of the plane and collect our luggage. Patrick, a young beach boy I befriended the last time I was in Lamu, is standing a few feet away, holding a posy of frangipani flowers and looking sheepish in his stubby dreadlocks and baggy jeans. He winks at me. An elderly white woman—she must be at least sixty—rushes past me; they hug, kiss, she oohs and aahs at the flowers.

  They walk away looking all aloha.

  Young men have come across from the island with carts to take the luggage to the boats. Every hotel has its own cart; most have their own boats. I ask one of the porters about the election. He shrugs. “We will vote for whoever gives us a banquet,” he says.

  We walk toward the mainland jetty on a dusty red path that is lined with stubbly bush. It is hot, and I am stuffy and irritable. There are sporadic groans and mumbles of sleepy blue water between the bushes, and people are yelling in lyrical Kiswahili, pushing carts, luggage bouncing in discomfort. The sea yawns and stretches, a lazy, prostrate, undulating blue, like a morning. And a few hundred meters across the water, I can see daytime standing up: to the right a longish strip of gleaming white buildings, the shining white tower of a mosque. Lamu Island.