Mombasa Road Retravelled

by KJ Griffin

  Chapter 13

  Little Stevie ignores Dismas's outstretched hand and turns instead to me:

  'Can we go in the sea, Dad? And then do running when Farah comes?'

  'Sea later, running tomorrow. I want to talk to this important man right now.'

  Dismas chuckles, whereupon Little Stevie finally looks past Dismas to the quartet of policemen lurking just behind my mate, the minister, then back to me:

  'Is this man another friend of yours, Dad? From back when Uncle Steve was shot?'

  'That's right,' Dismas answers for me, then turns to the policemen behind:

  'Moses! Benjamin! Take Mr Wood's bags from the motorbike and get them to his room.'

  For once I'm glad to indulge in what a little ministerial luxury can do, resting my weary arms while the sullen policemen heave our battered rucksack to the detached chalet we've been allocated at the end of the row.

  The manager is here to greet us now too. He's a white bloke, and I find it amusing to ignore this smug proprietor of paradise beach-front bandas as perfectly as Little Stevie and Dismas do for their various reasons, while the slick bastard hovers obsequiously in search of a little recognition.

  But a nod is all I will give him:

  'Come on,' I tell Dismas and Little Stevie, brushing the owner away like an inconvenient fly. 'Let's all walk down to the beach.'

  The tide is in, fully covering the thick sand bar that gives this place its name. Massive breakers whipped up by the stiff, southerly kusi breeze roar sonorously all around. Coconut palms have strewn their spiky litter all over the course grass, and when we hit the holiday-brochure golden sand, we find it heavily soiled by massive clumps of seaweed.

  We must look an odd trio, Little Stevie in shorts and a biking jacket, me topless but with my bike leathers still on below and Dismas in his ministerial suit, ruining his polished brogues in the course sand.

  The months when the kusi traditionally blew the dhows back to Puntland and Yemen are the coolest of the year, and now we've got nothing but thousands of ocean miles between us and Australia, it feels surprisingly cool, while Dismas's hideously orange tie flaps like a bad-taste jib in a force-nine.

  Dismas and I stand for some time staring out to sea, watching Little Stevie paddling gingerly like a five-year-old, steadfastly refusing to wade in further than ankle-depth. In general my son hates water, and his encounters with both swimming pools and sea to date have been brief, inconsequential affairs that I remember only for the severity of his reactions.

  It's Dismas who breaks the silence:

  'So, Brian. You called? and I have come!'

  With the tepid ocean breeze cooling my glowing, sun-chapped face, I'm feeling mellow now, very mellow, but there's still something I want to have out with Dismas.

  I keep my eyes firmly out to sea as I ask:

  'Tell me about Safari City, Dismas? When did you realize you had sold out to the baddies and fucked up on that one?'

  My mate, the minister, is quiet for some time, then finally sighs deeply enough to be heard above the moaning wind:

  'I know it must have seemed to you back then, Brian, that I was refuting and turning my back on everything I had ever told you about land ownership, community and belonging.'

  'You're damn right,' I grunt bitterly. 'It did!'

  Dismas frowns. Now it's his turn to look out to sea:

  'Well, Brian, I thought Safari City would happen with my support or without it, you see, so why not try to get in on the inside? At least, I told myself, that way I could try to provide jobs for my Masai brothers who had lost their land.'

  The wind has blown sand in my mouth. I spit it out, but the bad taste that remains is not from the sand of Sand Island alone:

  'But doing your deal with Safari City certainly helped your career, didn't it, Dismas? I mean, you were a lawyer herding goats when you taught me everything I know about the evils of land ownership, now you're Minister for Bloody Tourism!'

  Little Stevie is wandering away from us into the breeze, so we follow him at a distance, stumbling over large clumps of seaweed:

  'But like I told you, Brian, fine ideas without the power to implement them are worthless.'

  'But you would? implement them, I mean, if you got power?'

  Dismas laughs bitterly:

  'It's too late now to play around with land rights, Brian. Look what has happened in Zimbabwe. We don't want Zimbabwe to come to Kenya. And any attempt to redraw land ownership rights will just cause more inter-tribal fighting.'

  'That's where I can help,' I smile slyly. And now we've caught up with Little Stevie.

  'How can you help, Brian? With your football matches? Take care, my friend. Some of the Big Men I meet have already heard a lot about you. Too much, I think! They are getting interested in Football Kenya. That will not be good news for you, bwana.'

  'Then just as well I'll be handing over all the power to you, Dismas! If you want it, that is?'

  Little Stevie is in our way now, standing in front of me with his arms folded, teeth chattering and goose bumps all over.

  'Can't we go running, Dad?'

  The stiff ocean breeze and the talk with Dismas has rejuvenated me.

  'Tell you what, son. You let me talk to Dismas here for ten minutes more and then I'll go running with you. That will be our first run together since Meru.'

  Little Stevie turns away from me and starts talking to himself:

  'Dad collapsed in Meru. Don't worry, Stevie boy, I'll be alright?'

  I could stand there and listen to Little Stevie reciting everything I must have said back in Meru when the pains returned and I lay too long semi-conscious in the road, but that's not really necessary because all that counts right now is the knowledge that this is Little Stevie's way of accepting my offer. He'll wait patiently now for three hours if I need them. So I carry on:

  'If you say Football Kenya's being watched, that's because we're getting big, isn't it?'

  Dismas nods.

  'Which means that my financial controller, a lady called Luxmi, and her office team back in Parklands are sitting on a large and growing database of the dispossessed from all over Kenya, all of whom can be texted with a few clicks of Luxmi's computer.'

  Dismas is looking quizzically at me, stroking a few grey hairs on his chin that could either be the vestiges or the unpromising beginnings of a goatee.

  'I am listening, Brian.'

  'Therefore any Kenyan politician who had a ready-made land redistribution policy of rich appeal to the masses would have an enormous and instantly contactable support base sitting right there in Luxmi's office. This would give him enormous political clout.'

  'But I am not going to make Zimbabwe here in Kenya, Brian. I've already told you that,' Dismas answers firmly.

  'I'm not talking about land, Dismas. Far from it. I'm into air!'

  This time it's Dismas who looks like he's swallowed sand. Mouthfuls of it.

  'Air?'

  'That's right, mate,' I nod.

  For a while all we can hear is the wind howling in our ears, Dismas's tie flapping more furiously than ever and the odd snippet from Little Stevie, who's now walking by my side and muttering a very long-winded story to himself that sounds like something to do with runs we used to go on in Italy.

  'Air?' Dismas replies. 'I think you are talking rubbish, Brian!'

  'Not at all! Think about it! The air we breathe is the last free resource that hasn't been sold off to private ownership. If, as you've always said, it's ridiculous for a single individual to claim exclusive ownership over even a square metre of the free land of Mother Earth we were all born onto, then what's more ridiculous about claiming ownership of a cubic metre of the air above us? Or several, come to that. And if the cubic metres you own just happen to be floating right above the land owned by say, Pwani Oil Co., then you could reasonably charge the land owner for passage of sunlight and rainwater through your airspace onto their ground freeholding, and vice versa for pollution from the gro
und contaminating your cubic metres of pristine air.'

  A lawyer of Oxford training, Dismas is quick on the uptake now, but I see his brow furrow and his shaggy eyebrows knit together.

  'You will find that property ownership is assumed to extend upwards to a reasonable level above ground, Brian. And after that, the air is classed as national airspace.'

  'Yes, but what's reasonable? Who decides what reasonable actually is? People like you do, Dismas! Reasonable sounds like a very loaded word that clever lawyers like you could twist inside out! And as for national airspace, it is precisely the commonly owned national airspace that you will be seeking to divide into equal lots for all the landless of Kenya. Think about it: this could be the first national sell off that doesn't go from people straight to tycoons, but from government to ghetto. Of course, like real estate itself, huge swathes of Kenyan sky will be essentially worthless, but I'd imagine that a freehold allocation of virginal Kenyan sky sitting above say, the Nairobi Hilton Hotel, the Masai Mara or the UN complex in Gigiri will attract a decent rental income.'

  'So you are basically seeking to impose a land tax on the wealthy, Brian? That will be difficult for the economy. Businesses will move out of Kenya.'

  'Not if the idea is such a success here that it starts to catch on all over the world. And sky rental values can be set centrally by government. That will give you double power!'

  Dismas shakes his head:

  'This is crazy, Brian. Plain crazy. It would never work, nor would I ever want to be involved in such madness.'

  'Crazy? You yourself showed me all those years back just how crazy the very idea of property ownership is: When the first, primordial peasant stopped roaming the free land of prehistoric times and put up a fence around his smallholding, he set in train an alternative way of life and a whole way of thinking that was always destined to prove death by a million cuts to nomads like your ancestors and maybe even mine too, people who lived with the land without ever claiming exclusive use of it for themselves.'

  'That other way of life is what we call civilisation, Brian. We can't return to the stone ages now.'

  'But we can try to rectify the original wrong, can't we? All property, all land ownership in every country in the world, as you yourself showed me, must logically trace its ultimate roots back to some squalid land grab or other, whether initiated by a big chief or a sceptred king, who claimed feudal rights at the point of a sword, before parcelling out portions of his loot to a band of trusty lieutenants. And in their turn these lieutenants started to trade in their theft over the ages, eventually giving rise to our glorious modern property markets. So today, via the catharsis of a continuum of selling and reselling, the original theft has long been forgotten, but never properly recompensed, and it lies like a cancer at the heart of world poverty today. So I say what you once said, Dismas, that it's time to set about rectifying the original wrong. Otherwise, the kid born into Kariobangi slum grows up to find everything has already gone: the greedy own the very land he stands on and charge him just for resting his weary head at night on a squalid square metre of contaminated soil.'

  'And now under your scheme, Brian, he at least owns a small part of the polluted air he breathes!'

  'Exactly!'

  Our eyes meet for the first time in a long while, and suddenly we're both chuckling, softly at first, then in such loud convulsions that Little Stevie stops his own monologue and asks what's up.

  But Dismas and I continue to laugh loud and long till I see Little Stevie clasp his hands over his ears. That sobers me up pretty quickly; I don't want him freefalling into Distress Mode here and now.

  'And how will these distributions of free air be made?' Dismas asks, still smirking.

  'Anytime you're ready, I can start the ball rolling. Luxmi's already got me the names of a couple of unemployed maths and statistics graduates from the University of Nairobi who'd be glad to do some well-paid number crunching to work out the size and location of the grant allocations. After that, it's just a case of getting people to register their claims. All they'll be waiting for is a politician ready to enact the required legislation that can turn pies in the sky into real live cash. What do you say, Dismas? Is it Minister for Tourism you've wanted all along, or President of the Republic of Kenya?'

  We stand still for some time while Dismas does a lot more chin scratching. Out to sea, the wind is strengthening further and the roar of the deep ocean breakers is refreshingly primordial, drowning out even Little Stevie's renewed, long-winded story, a great inconvenience to the half of him that's doing the listening to all this internalized conversation.

  Eventually Dismas has an answer:

  'Have your people do their sums and make their lists, Brian. Then call me. Maybe we can do business.'

  With that he turns away, deep in his own thoughts and leaves me to break the happy news to Little Stevie:

  'Come on then, son. Let's get our running stuff on. But first a press up challenge!'

  'Down here in the sand?' Little Stevie asks sceptically, for I know that the feel of wet sand on his fingertips will offend his hypersensitivities.

  'Yes, right here in the sand,' I reply, already spread-eagled in the press up position. 'If we can find a little bit that nobody owns yet!'