“Boss!”
The man is old enough to be my father. My face immediately becomes solemn and I greet him in as good and respectful Kiswahili as I can manage. It sounds all wrong and stilted. He hoists my bags onto his shoulders from the cart, smiling and bowing. I am not sure what to do. I continue to speak respectfully. My respect is instinctive; his very accent demands it. This is not even a class thing, or guilt. Kiswahili is just a tool for me, as it is for most Kenyans. An inherited language that a hundred million Africans mutilate. Lamu, this small island, is the home of the original dialect of Kiswahili, and of the Swahili civilization.
We walk down the jetty toward the boat. He has all my bags on his back, and I am stupid. Anywhere else in Kenya, we can pretend we are equals if we speak in Kiswahili; it is the national language and invites a feeling of brotherhood that does not really exist. But Kiswahili is Muhammed’s mother tongue; he does not know how to play national games with it. Lamu is too far away from Kenya proper—and Kiswahili is old and deep here. He is not reading my signals, and I am resentful. I dig out crumpled notes and place them awkwardly into his hands as I board the boat, turning away from his gratitude.
The main jetty area is covered in orange: flags, posters, T-shirts, campaign banners. People are huddled in groups listening to the radio.
Mr. America in Kiswahili is salamu alaikuming all over the place—and it occurs to me that I am now, to the people of this island, what he was to me when we boarded the plane.
It is evening, and people are dressed up, men in long white kanzus, women in black buibuis, henna designs on their hands and fingers and feet. A lean blond couple strolls by, both dressed in linen—probably from Shela, the village next to Lamu where jet set celebrities have holiday homes. A group of shirtless teenagers are surrounded by a cheering crowd as they dance a stick fight; there is a donkey race for young boys. Young Bajuni women in green and gold buibuis move in giggling huddles, eyes ringed in kohl, gold everywhere. I catch one eye, which bats, moves down shyly, and then covers itself with a flick of fingers and whoosh of fine green cloth. She turns into the fragrant huddle, which swells with speculation.
The town slopes upward gently, and all the narrow twisted paths lead to the seafront. The town is cleaned by rain and water heading downhill. There is a lot of donkey shit. I walk past the long, sea-facing avenue and turn into a thin alley, into the bowels of the town. Buildings lean into each other, scrape each other; walls loom over narrow twisted paths.
Lamu has always had a reputation as a libertarian town. People spend most of their time indoors, and even individual houses are built with the idea of public and private, with increasing layers of intimate space the farther away from the door you are. The doors are thick, tall, and elaborately carved from wood; just outside are benches built into the wings of the main door. It is here that guests are received. There is a heavy metal knocker near the bottom of the door. You knock and sit and wait. Most people don’t get to enter the home.
In the old days, traders would come in from India and from the Middle and Far East. As soon as you enter most traders’ homes, you will see a small staircase that leads you to the room where foreign traders were hosted sumptuously, but still distant from family. Guests were treated well. They were sprinkled with rose water. Orchards in courtyards had lemon, lime, and banana trees and rose apples. When Ibn Batutta spent time among the Swahili in Mogadishu and Kilwa, he was fed with stews of chicken, meat, fish, and vegetables served on beds of rice and cooked with ghee. He ate green bananas in fresh milk, pickled lemon, ginger, and mangoes.
Lamu became a place of pilgrimage for hippies and gay men in the 1970s. Outside the thick walls, and mostly in the evening, people put on their dutiful appearances: mother, elder, imam, tourist.
…
Patrick makes his way to my hotel at night. We have a beer; he is happy to see me, he says. “Why didn’t you call me? I called and you never called back.”
“I was busy,” I say.
He does not look impressed by my answer. “Are you following the election?”
He laughs. “Me? No. Am just a beach boy.”
…
The election rages on the radio. There are pocket radios on everywhere, and people gathered in small groups around them. Yesterday I told off Patrick. He had disappeared with my money for a whole day while I stewed without mobile phone credit. I was furious. There are rumors going around that militias are gathering in the Rift Valley. He was partying somewhere. He shrugged, as if to say, why do you upcountry people and white people, who to us are really the same people, move so aggressively against the tide of things?
While we were talking, a young Kenyan woman, a doctor, joined us for a beer, and we started talking politics. When she left, he asked me if the woman was a Gikuyu. I said no. He said, “Yeye ni mjanja sana.”
I told him she was probably Luo. He was confused for a second. Then he nodded, and said, “Ni mjanja kama mzungu.”
What he was saying was, she is very cunning, or clever, like a white person. He did not say, or mean, wise, or educated, or even intelligent.
I drink with a banker. He is excited. Kenya has changed already, he says. The old middle-class banks are over. Banking for the masses has arrived; anybody can get credit, open an account. There are hundreds of new good schools, colleges, many new private universities. The biggest new depositors do not live in middle-class Nairobi. They provide services to the masses—food, construction, mobile phone credit, small loans, hardware. The most organized union in Kenya is the primary school teachers’ union. They have their own banks—with billions, they are building their own homes. Growth is arriving from below, not from the money of political patronage. Those new moneymakers can force policy. The banker is a big Kibaki supporter. “Raila is dangerous,” he says, his face grim. “He can’t win, whatever it takes.”
“What about the constitution, a new constitution?”
He sniffs. “Ha. We need to stabilize things first.” He means let the Kibaki clique consolidate power.
I spend the night walking up and down the jetty and chatting with people. There are radios everywhere, and we follow the results. I hear people say they cannot pay their bills; the cost of food is now impossible. In the morning, I try to draw money from the only ATM in town. It has run out of cash. The count has begun, and it is clear there is rigging. Gangs of angry young men are making roadblocks in Kibera.
The flight out of Lamu is delayed. Nairobi is dangerous.
Why this time? Five years ago we had a near-perfect election. Who knows? Could be the price of oil; the beef in China; paranoia about Gikuyu entitlement; paranoia about Kalenjin entitlement; Luo betrayed again; if they win won’t there be reprisals?
Moi; Kibaki; Raila; Ruto; December circumcision ceremonies; trickle-down economics not trickling down enough; instant text messages; xenophobic Texas-, New Jersey-, and London-based Kenyans insulting each other like mad people on the Internet, having discovered xenophobia in chat rooms; high panga sales in our supermarkets; colonialism; Kenyatta’s land grab; Moi’s land grab; trickle-up corruption; the Federalists; the Centralists; spontaneous combustion; neoliberalism; preplanned combustion; slush money for violence from politicians; slush money for violence from wealthy athletes; Kibaki messing with our electoral commission. Raila will rig! Angry young men; hungry young men; too much democracy too quickly; old men who refuse to cede power; young men who want power too much; too little democracy way too slowly; misplaced grievances; our president, a terrible politician.
Too much hope, too little reform.
While our baggage is being checked, I overhear a conversation between the baggage handlers. Even here, everybody is split. Orange Democratic Movement people stand around their radio. Party of National Unity people stand around their radio. After a dispirited argument about the elections, one of the baggage handlers sighs and says, “These days Kenya is like England.”
I laugh, and ask her why.
“I don’t know.
So many things like England. Now even here in Lamu you see more Kenyan tourists than British… ”
Her colleagues are nodding.
“Even food in the shops is like England. They way they package it like it is imported. Things are expensive.”
“Mpslp,” she says, blushing, and all politics is silenced for a common moment. “You know what I mean.”
The plane lands and we head to board. We are all nervous. It says on the radio that Kibera is burning. There are riot police all over Nairobi.
The final results come out tomorrow. Rigging is rife in both main parties. All the supermarkets have run out of knives and pangas. We are worried. We are not worried. Tourists still frolic on the beach. It is hard to imagine the chaos all those pangas promise. After all, things have been worse before. We don’t do all that Uganda stuff, we tell ourselves. It is going to the wire, unfolding live, cameras all over the country bringing the hottest reactions, the angriest protests; they are neck and neck. Kibera is always causing trouble anyway. No sport ever has been so thrilling. Under this constitution it is winner take all. Half the country will feel cut off whoever wins. All monies and plans come from Nairobi, from the central government. It is possible we will not know who has won until the very last votes are in. The airline steward passes me today’s newspaper, and winks.
…
We are sitting in an apartment, a group of friends, artists, watching the election collapse live on television, together with the rest of Kenya. There is pizza, beer, and drama. Politicians and their agents, from both sides, are crowding the electoral commissioner. Kenyatta Cornflakes Center, where the main count is taking place, is surrounded by riot police. We still believe it will be all right. We hear rumors that some close to the president came in at night and fiddled with things. Last night Raila was a million votes ahead. This morning, we woke up and Kibaki had caught up. But we knew it would be close. People do not understand numbers, we say to ourselves. Kivuitu, the head of the electoral commission, is still cracking jokes, so things will be fine. Many key constituencies have not yet delivered their numbers. The commission can’t raise them on the phone. It turns out that they are waiting to see the numbers before fiddling with their own numbers and sending them in. Everybody is rigging, and now we are telling ourselves that the media had agents in all constituencies, so they will keep things honest. It is still only just riveting television. Five years ago we had a good and clean election; this one can’t be much worse.
It is evening when a sudden energy gathers. Kivuitu clears the room and disappears. A few minutes later, in a small room, without having announced the remaining results, without anybody from the independent press, he announces that President Kibaki is the winner. The whole room is quiet; the whole of Kenya is quiet. Then, suddenly, all screens shift to State House, where a few grim people are seated, as Kivuitu inaugurates Kibaki. No millions of people this time.
Then, there is no news. There is music. Cartoons, and the sun sets and Kenya goes dark. Al Jazeera survives for a while and all we see is numbers, fifty dead, eighty dead, one hundred dead. We hear later that, the moment the president was sworn in, you could hear the screams of people as they rushed down hills and valleys to kill, and all the mobile phones of Kenya were jammed up with text messages full of rumors and threats.
These next few weeks, it does not matter that you have known her all your life and she was the first girl you loved in primary school. Your wife of another tribe. Your blade will cut through her stomach, tear through the Tupac T-shirt, and you will clean that blade and move to another room to look for her baby.
Several Kalenjin militias are marching on foot to Nakuru, and Baba won’t leave. I am on the phone with him every hour, begging him. Paraffin and matches cost less than a dollar a day. The ants have crawled out of the logs of Kenya; some will set their own city, Kisumu, on fire, watch it burn and cheer.
You will all sit stunned and watch as your nation—which has broadband and a well-ironed army and a brand-new private school that looks exactly like Hogwarts castle in Harry Potter—is taken over by young men with sharpened machetes and poisoned bows and arrows. As you sit in your living rooms, they will take over your main highway, pull people out of cars and cut their heads off. In Nairobi, they will lift up your railway, the original spine, and start to dismantle it. For days there is no news. We are told the generals are about to take it all over. That Raila has the army and Kibaki has the police and the air force. Television news has been silenced. Our president is silent. He is afraid, we hear. There is a joke that he is under his blankets, in Marks & Spencer pajamas, reading P. G. Wodehouse with a torch, and every few minutes his head pokes out and he asks, “Is it over? Have they gone away?”
Last night a whole small army with bows and arrows were killing people a few hundred meters from Pyrethrum Board. There were battles in the lakeside suburbs of Nakuru. “I am not leaving,” Baba said.
Chapter Thirty-Three
It is 1983. I am twelve. In two months I write CPE, the national primary school examinations. I spend a lot of time in my room pretending to study. I read a lot of novels. I am in trouble all the time with Mum.
When I masturbate in my bedroom, I do not like to think about people I know. I know I am in love with Khadija Adams, who was Miss Kenya and who is an international beauty star and uses Lux soap. But I can’t imagine her breaking glamour and writhing about. I am also in love with Pam Ewing of Dallas—but she is too good for sex ideas, and she is sweet and cuddly. I hate Bobby Ewing and really hate Jenna Wade. Alexis Carrington of Dynasty makes me giggle when she talks all pouty.
This afternoon, while kids ran around outside the lines of classrooms during games, I used a paperclip to break into Andrew Ivaska’s desk. Andrew’s parents are Baptist missionaries from America, and he has a whole library of novels. Mum won’t let me go to the library. I have been itching the whole day to do something malicious, to jab somebody with a pen. Inside the desk is a brand-new, unread copy of The Black Stallion by Walter Farley. I put it in my bag, between the textbooks. As soon as I get home after school, I rush to my room and lock the door.
I am under my orange bedcover. I need forty-five minutes before Mum comes knocking. The kid in the book is called Alex—he is quiet, stubborn, and lonely. One of those people who quietly go about their business, grittily working, scrubbing stables, loving horses and not showing off, and depending on themselves. So then Alex is stuck on this island with a giant black stallion—a wild beast that wants to kill him. In his mumbling cowboy way, Alex decides to ride Black Stallion. Alex has decided to want something impossible. And he wants this impossible thing so much he is prepared to lose everything. He will not admit this, so he pretends to make his lust a mechanical problem: he will find fix-it solutions. How to jump on the back of the animal, how to rig devices to keep him on the back of the beast, how to bribe the horse with various tidbits. As he goes about his business in his fatherless and lonely way, rigging devices, we drip with his want. He will not say how much he wants to conquer the horse. We want to conquer the horse. We want that horse more than anything. I want to be thrown, fall on my back, and limp for days.
The evening chill has landed. I stand and look outside the window. The lake and hills are foggy, like a movie—there are no tin roofs or sudden fields of illegally grown maize to disturb the English countryside look. I can almost imagine horses. Not a cow in sight, no random goats; even our goat is not yet out to pasture. I put on the radio, rush to find General Service. We have two main radio stations, General Service and National Service. General Service is in English. Every morning after the news, they play soft music like ABBA and Boney M. and Kenny Rogers and Lionel Richie. Sometimes an orchestra called James Last, which plays soft misty versions of famous songs. The news is all about President Moi. James Last is good music to masturbate to: I can lie down and see misty television bodies doing naked misty things in the screen of my head.
Ten years ago, this suburb had been, for sixty years, t
he carefully built illusion of settler bureaucrats. All white, no black Africans allowed to live here. Only servants who would be beaten if they were seen wearing shoes—it made them uppity. The settlers moved out fast after Independence. So fast, their houses were cheap. Baba bought a cottage in Nairobi that is our most valuable family asset. By 1972 Mum could drive us to town and all we would see were kids like us, living in a landscape like this, which was made for people who wanted to imagine an English spring in a stolen land. Kenya from my misty dawn bedroom with General Service seems ageless and ours. The only problem is National Service radio, all those songs in so many languages that suggest some other pungent reality, songs complicated enough to suggest mess and history. This music does not want to conveniently fit the shape of thrusting forward and shaping yourself like the next opportunity; it throbs with undefined past sounds, and shapes and ideas, and it is inconvenient, if only because the Anglo-Kenyan garden does not look like that music sounds.
The one Kenyan musician who is allowed regularly on General Service is Kelly Brown. He has an Afro, glittering clothes, and an R&B dance hit in Germany. He comes from Mombasa but has changed his name. Abdul Kadir Mohammed does not work in 1980s Europop circles. As people disappear into Kenya’s newly engineered dungeons, as people die of hunger and disease and roads crumble, we are feverishly passing exams and dancing to Kelly Brown, his Afro bobbing, sequins glittering: Me and my baby tonite-ah, we hold each other tite-ah, she gives me evuh-rythang, coz she’s ma best thing. Oooh ah. Ooo ah. Ah cant gerrinuf of your luuuurve.
I am supposed to be studying. This is why I masturbate. If I don’t masturbate, I will have to spend the day trying to hide my hard-on and never know if people can see it or not, and then my nose gets all sweaty, and then I have to LOOK AWAY from all breasts, and it seems that all the girls have breasts. What can I do to avoid them?
One Day I Will Write About This Place Page 25