Rugiru read again the sentence that had been underlined, presumably by the Oldest Member.
“How does it feel to be a problem?”
The question intrigued Rugiru. For him and for his family, the everyday demands of life were problems: feeding the children, keeping the house warm, meeting medical bills . . . These were problems.
But it seemed these were not the problems the writer had in mind. He was asking Rugiru: how did he feel to be a problem. Boniface pondered. Never in his life had he regarded himself as a problem.
Then he recalled a conversation with a nephew, who by dint of hard work and a good mind had won a place at university in Manchester. But the toughest part of his journey was not from village hut to school. Or from school to city. It was the day he landed at Heathrow airport. That, he told Rugiru, was when he began to realise that the world treated him – and Africa – as a problem.
For the last time Boniface Rugiru looked around the room, now bare, shorn of its contents, a plume of smoke from the embers of the dying fire drifting up to the high ceiling. He gently closed the door.
A car horn hooted outside. It was probably Charity and Furniver, who had hired a matatu, and invited Mr and Mrs Rugiru to join them on the shamba for the weekend.
As he made his way to the car park to meet them, the Club clock struck the hour. Somewhere in the building a guest must have turned on their radio for the Six o’clock news. And down the passage drifted the sound of “Lillibullero”, followed by the BBC time signal which echoed along the parquet-tiled corridor:
Peep! Peep! Peep! Peep! Peep! Peeeep!
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM POLYGON BY MICHAEL HOLMAN
FATBOY AND THE DANCING LADIES
Ferdinand Mlambo, the youngest boy ever to become senior kitchen toto at State House, is in deep trouble. Disloyalty to Kuwisha’s Life President Ngwazi Nduka has not only cost him his prestigious job: the sinister chief steward to the president, Lovemore Mboga, has humiliated Mlambo by stripping him of his name. Word goes out: henceforth, he will be known as Fatboy. But with the help of Titus Ntoto, leader of the notorious Mboya Boys gang of teenage street children, Mlambo recovers his name and his dignity. In this sequel to his widely praised debut, “Last Orders at Harrods”, Michael Holman again combines the insights of someone brought up in Africa with the experience of nearly 20 years as the “London Financial Times’” Africa editor. With a sharp observant pen, he describes a world of abandoned street children, corrupt politicians, disillusioned journalists, well meaning aid workers, celebrity outsiders, self-deceiving donors, and resilient residents of Kireba, Kuwisha’s worst slum - where the tough but maternal Mrs Charity Tangwenya Mupanga, presides over the popular rendezvous, Harrods International Bar (and Nightspot).
LAST ORDERS AT HARRODS
Charity Mupanga is the widowed owner of Harrods International Bar (and Nightspot) - a favourite meeting place for the movers and shakers of Kibera. While she can handle most challenges, from an erratic supply of Worcestershire sauce, the secret ingredient in her cooking, to the political tensions in East Africa’s most notorious slum and a cholera outbreak that follows the freak floods in the state of Ubuntu, some threatening letters from London lawyers are beginning to overwhelm her. How dare a London store, no matter how big and famous, claim exclusive use of the first name of her late father, Harrods Tangwenya, gardener to successive British high commissioners for nearly twenty years? Well-meant but inept efforts to foil the lawyers by Edward Furniver, a former fund manager who runs Kibera’s co-operative bank and who seeks Charity’s hand in marriage, bring Harrods International Bar to the brink of disaster, and Charity close to despair. In the nick of time an accidental riot, triggered by the visit to the slum of World Bank President Hardwick Hardwicke, coupled with some quick thinking by Titus Ntoto, the 14-year-old leader of Kibera’s toughest gang, the Mboya Boys United Football Club, help Charity - and Harrods - to triumph in the end.
DIZZY WORMS
Mupanga, the resilient and maternal proprietor of Harrods International Bar (and Nightspot) faces her toughest challenge in “Dizzy Worms”, the final novel in Michael Holman’s acclaimed trilogy set in the African slum of Kireba. Faced with a Health and Safety closure, Charity has a week to appeal and the chances of success seem negligible: elections are imminent, and Kireba is due to become a showcase of President Josiah Nduka’s ‘slum rehabilitation program’, backed by gullible foreign donors. But before taking on Nduka and the council, she has a promise to keep - to provide a supply of her famous sweet doughballs to a small army of street children, as voracious as they are malodorous...Michael Holman uses his witty satirical pen to brilliant effect in this affectionate portrait of a troubled region, targeting local politicians, western diplomats, foreign donors and journalists, puncturing pretensions and questioning the philosophy of aid.
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