I Built No Schools in Kenya

by Kirsten Drysdale

  By morning all is forgotten. Walt is fawning over Marguerite at breakfast, flirting with me and Alice, cooing at the dogs and the birds. He’s even being nice to Millicent – takes his pills when she asks him to, brushes his teeth without complaint.

  Marguerite goes out to get a blow-dry. While Walt sits reading the papers on the patio with Millicent, I take a Skype call from Fiona who wants an update on the situation. I tell her about his little rampage last night – and she immediately blames it on Marguerite. ‘I think we just need to say “no” to golf from now on.’

  ‘I don’t think it had anything to do with the golf,’ I say, confused. ‘I mean – golf was in the morning. This was late last night. He wouldn’t have remembered by then that we’d gone at all.’

  ‘No, you see, it stirs him up too much. Too much excitement. He may not even realise – it’s all about routine.’

  ‘But he really enjoyed it!’ I say, horrified that she would want to ban the one activity that I’ve seen put him at total ease.

  ‘No. It’s too much for him to handle. Physically, as well as mentally. His heart can’t cope – it increases the chance he’ll have a heart attack or a stroke. Marguerite should know better.’

  ‘But it’s just putting on the practice green. It’s not like they’re going for big walks around the course or anything.’

  ‘The problem is trying to stop Dad from doing too much once he’s out there. I think it’s safest if we just don’t take him at all. I don’t trust her not to let him overdo it.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say reluctantly. ‘No more golf.’ But I don’t really mean it. I’m not going to tell his wife what she can and can’t do with her husband of forty years. They’ve come this far already – surely they deserve to see out the end together too.

  Apart from Walt’s unpredictable upsets, we settle into a comfortable routine – Alice, Millicent and I sharing the load with Walt, while also doing what we can to help Marguerite keep the household ticking over and organise her busy social life. There are hair appointments to book, and bridge games to attend, and printer cartridges to be replaced in the printer that always needs unjamming. Alice and I often volunteer to do a run with Peter or James to pick up groceries, or fuel for the generator, or to collect the newspapers from the Club – even if we’re technically off duty, it’s a pleasant escape from the house, an encounter with the outside world and a reminder that the Smyths really are an aberration.

  One of my favourite errands to run is the Thursday morning trip to the City Park market, to buy fresh fruit and vegetables for the week. Peter leads me through the stalls, helps me barter for pawpaws and mangoes, tells the women off in Swahili if they try to rip us off, the place erupting in theatrics and laughter when they’re caught. He’s scrupulous with the Smyths’ money, refusing to pay more than we should for anything, keeping careful track of how much we’ve spent on a scrap of paper, down to the last shilling. Sometimes, if we have time, we go to the open green park behind the market, where we buy ten-bob bags of peanuts to feed the monkeys. Peter and I load up our pockets and hair with nuts, then sit still on the edge of a park bench and wait for the monkeys to climb all over us. They balance on our heads, our shoulders, our laps, nimble fingers tickling all over in the hunt for their favourite treats.

  Fiona calls every day – sometimes twice a day. She sends text messages and emails, asking what Walt had for lunch, who Marguerite’s been talking to on the phone, whether there’ve been any visitors to the house, making sure we’ve remembered to keep the pills well stocked, checking if there’s anything we need sent over from England. At first, I indulge her with tedious detail, thinking that overwhelming her with transparency might help put her mind at ease. But this does little to placate her – in fact, it often leads to more demands, more questions. So I limit myself to responding only once per day, with a summary of that day’s events and Walt’s mood and condition.

  Meanwhile, the more time I spend with Walt, the more I learn to pick up on his idiosyncrasies, and the better I get at reading his mind. It’s like being immersed in a new language – one made up of fidgets and sighs and tics and pursed lips, and patterns of behaviour that eventually reveal meaning.

  A sharply exhaled breath on its own doesn’t mean much, but if it’s closely followed by another I know his mood is about to turn dark. It’s a cue to intervene with some upbeat chitchat, or to call one of the dogs over for a scratch – although I soon learn that Jua, the golden retriever doppelgänger of Walt’s dog in England, can cause her own problems.

  ‘Oh come here, Bella, you lovely mutt,’ he’ll say.

  ‘No, Walt – that’s not Bella, that’s Jua,’ I’ll gently explain.

  ‘How absurd. A dog can’t be Jewish.’

  ‘No, Ju-a. That’s its name.’

  ‘Its name is Bella!’

  ‘No, Bella is your dog in England.’

  ‘We are in England!’

  Unprovoked nervous laughter means I’ve got about five minutes to help him find his bearings before he descends into a dizzy spiral of anxiety and repetition that can go on for hours.

  Opening and closing drawers means he’s lost his wallet and is fretting about money.

  Eyebrows at a plaintive angle means he’s worrying about his mother and will soon ask if he can speak to her on the phone. A bouncing right knee means he’s about to start looking for the car keys – a sign that he’s feeling cooped up and needs to get out of the house.

  Millicent, Alice and I gradually learn how to arrange the small details of the world around him just so: he doesn’t like the foot of his sun chair to touch the grout between the tiles on the patio. He insists the concertina doors that lead through to the living room should be folded flat at the hinges when they’re open. His sunglasses should always be left in their case on top of the writing cabinet, so that each time he goes past he can pick them up to give them a polish and put them back again. He likes to sit with his back to the window in the tearoom at the Club, for the car to be parked with plenty of space for him to get out of the passenger side, for the butter to have been out of the fridge long enough to soften, and for his plate to be warm for meals.

  Whatever it is that Walter Smyth likes, we go out of our way to make sure he gets.

  Swahili is the other language I start to learn. It’s got a beautiful sound, fluid like French and rhythmic like Spanish, but unspoiled by guttural harshness. A Bantu language that evolved on the eastern stretch of Africa from Lake Victoria to Lake Malawi, the Swahili (sometimes known as Kiswahili) vocabulary is heavily influenced by a number of Arabic, Persian and Indian words brought by the traders who first visited the coast. It soon became a lingua franca across much of East Africa, especially Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. Most Kenyans also speak English, along with the mother tongue of their tribe.

  I love hearing the Kenyan staff speak it – among each other, and with Walt. And I’m desperate to learn some, so one rainy afternoon, while the two of us are stuck inside by the fireplace, I ask him to teach me the basics.

  ‘You want to know some “kitchen” Swahili?’ he says, teasing, describing the bare minimum attempts most colonials made to communicate with their staff. ‘Or real Swahili?’ People like Walt, who lived on the land, tend to speak it far more fluently.

  ‘Well, ideally more than just “kitchen” Swahili,’ I say. ‘But sure, that sounds like a start.’

  Walt seems to spark up – maybe it’s with relief, or perhaps pride, at being tasked with an intellectual challenge he can cope with. For all his faltering faculties, he hasn’t yet lost his grasp on the language.

  He starts by teaching me how to count to ten: moja, mbili, tatu, nne, tano, sita, saba, nane, tisa, kumi.

  Then the most important day-to-day words: ndiyo – yes, hapana – no, asante – thank you, tafadhali – please, najua – I know, sijui – I don’t know, kitu – thing.

  Then the important phrases: kuja – come, hapa – here, leta – bring, moji – water.

&
nbsp; But Walt’s brand of Swahili is becoming a little too focused on issuing instructions to staff, so I decide to source more practical lessons from the Kenyan staff.

  In the kitchen, I help Khamisi prepare dinner, and he teaches me that sukuma wiki – the name for the spinach greens that, served with ugali, are a staple meal here – literally means ‘push’ or ‘stretch’ the week, reflecting the fact that most Kenyans can only afford meat on weekends.

  Peter teaches me that the standard greeting for ‘Hello, how are you?’ – Jambo! Habari ako? – literally translates as ‘What news do you have?’, and that the answer should always be mzuri sana – ‘very good’ – even if you aren’t feeling mzuri sana. In the car on the way to City Market to buy more fruit, he explains that changing from singular to plural for nouns describing people is simply a matter of replacing the pre-fix ‘m’ with ‘wa’. Mtu is person and watu is people, while Mtoto is child and watoto is children. Even better, mbenzi is a rich person and wabenzi is rich people, so named because of their taste for Mercedes-Benz cars.

  I especially love the etymology of the word for white person, mzungu (or wazungu for the collective) – and so does Peter, when I tell him what I’ve read about it online.

  ‘So, apparently it comes from the Swahili word for “dizzy”,’ I say. ‘Kizunguzungu?’

  ‘Kizunguzungu, yes, that is where you are dizzy,’ he says. ‘And that means mzungu?’

  ‘Well it says here that “East Africans thought this best described the expressions of the first white people to arrive on their shores, looking lost and disorientated”.’

  Peter laughs, slaps his thighs. ‘Ohhhh, that is very- very funny,’ he says.

  Over the next few days, I find myself making notes of other words and phrases that tickle me. Kuku for ‘chicken’, and wasiwasi for ‘anxiety’. Sawa-sawa – an all-purpose phrase like the Australian ‘no worries’, which literally translates as ‘the same’ or ‘equal’.

  I bump into Esther in the laundry and she says, ‘Oh, pole!’ (pronounced ‘poh-lee’), which leads to an explanation of the many uses of that word. ‘Pole means “sorry”,’ she says. ‘And pole-sana means “very sorry”, because sana means “very”.’

  ‘But pole-pole means to go slowly?’ I ask. I know this because Fiona says we’re to always say it to Walt if he’s walking too fast.

  ‘Yes.’ She laughs. ‘I don’t know why.’

  I love it when Marguerite tells the staff they look ‘very maridadi’ (stylish) when they dress up on Sundays for church, or when Walt teases me for being kidogo (small), or when we all call him ‘the mzee’, an honorific term for ‘old man’.

  I never become anywhere close to fluent in Swahili, but I’m picking up enough to feel like more than a tourist.

  7

  THE GREAT ESCAPE

  I realise I’m starting to go stir-crazy when I have a fight with Millicent about whether it’s acceptable for a woman to wear trousers to meet the Queen. (I argued the affirmative, she argued the negative, and then told me she wasn’t going to ‘sit here and listen to some Australian girl be disrespectful about the Royal Family’.)

  It’s understandable. It’s been weeks and weeks of nothing but the house, the local shops and the Club.

  ‘I can’t do any more small talk about opera, or the 1970s tea trade, or the Gospel,’ I say to Alice. ‘Please! Let’s go out or something. Let’s see if the staff want to go for a drink somewhere.’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ says Alice. ‘I’ll tee something up.’ That she does.

  We tell Marguerite we’re going to dinner with Sarah and Jack, then sneak down the driveway to meet Peter and James at the matatu stage up the road. They’re going to show us the real Nairobi – take us to a local bar, get some authentic nyama choma.

  A matatu pulls up thumping with the syncopated beat of Swahili pop, and for a fleeting moment I hesitate. Two young Western women heading into downtown Nairobi? At night? This is not following DFAT travel advice or heeding the warnings of my parents. If the Smyths find out they’ll have a fit. But the moment passes, leaving me all the more determined to go. I’ve travelled enough to know these things are never as dangerous as people make out, as long as you keep your wits about you.

  The ‘moneyman’ – a young guy in a backwards cap sitting behind the driver – takes our twenty-shilling fares. He directs Peter and James to the back seat, where the other passengers have squished up to make room for them, while Alice and I are encouraged to sit on the laps of two buxom women who are apparently delighted to oblige. One beams at me, slapping her ample thighs in welcome. ‘Come, toto – come!’ I don’t have another option. The van is already carrying four more people than it has seats – though by matatu standards this is decidedly under-crowded.

  Our matatu bounces on into town, collecting more and more travellers on the way. Soon everyone is seated on or under someone else, our limbs and necks bent awkwardly and our faces pressed against the glass in a game of human Tetris, but the moneyman doesn’t stop hustling. Colourful disco lights flash on the ceiling, reggae rhythm blares through the speakers, glittering pictures of Barack Obama and Shakira adorn the walls. The ladies wrap their arms around me and Alice, holding us tight to their bosoms when the driver sails over speed humps or swerves around potholes. Alice and I scream in terror when he nearly careens into a bus. Everyone else laughs.

  ‘Ohhhh, pole-pole [slowly]!’ they roar.

  But the driver isn’t going to slow down for a couple of woozy wazungu women.

  Finally, we reach our destination. The streets are busy and there are lots of stalls selling English soccer jerseys. Peter and James lead us through the bustle, fobbing off the hawkers trying to sell us mobile-phone cases and acrylic socks and hair cream. We wind our way through to a local butcher-cum-bar, where freshly slain goat and pig carcasses hang in a glass-fronted display and Justin Bieber bops on a screen in the corner of a neon-lit room.

  Oh god, the beer is hot. Peter and James laugh as Alice and I grimace after taking a swig, struggling to swallow the mouthful of warm bubbles.

  ‘Baridi – you have to ask for it baridi!’ James explains. Only foreigners prefer their Tusker chilled; locals always have it moto, like their Coke.

  It’s such a relief to spend time together away from the rigid hierarchy in the house. They tell us about their families. Both men are married with children. Peter has two, a boy and a girl. James has six – three of each; they’re all still at school and he hopes they’ll go on to study at university. ‘Rebecca, she is my eldest. She graduates next year and hopes to become a teacher,’ he says, beaming with pride.

  We discover Peter was once an apprentice mechanic – that’s why he’s so good at keeping the Peugeot going – but found it was too hard to get that sort of work. A job with the Smyths was a much safer option.

  He and James want to know more about where we’re from. Are there many mechanic jobs in Australia? Is it hot? Have we seen kangaroos? Are there any black people there? There are, we tell them, but not as many as in Africa. Some are from other parts of the world, some were in Australia long long before Europeans arrived. We explain that the colonisation of Australia was a sorry affair, that there are parts of the country even today where – to our great shame – Indigenous people live in poverty.

  Still, they think our country sounds like a utopia.

  ‘Life in Kenya is very, very hard,’ Peter says. ‘We have so much corruption. The government doesn’t do good for the people – those politicians just do good for themselves. That is our biggest problem.’

  ‘Do you like working for Marguerite and Walt?’ Alice asks, direct as ever. I don’t think it occurs to her that they might not feel they can be honest with us. But they both say they do and seem to sincerely mean it.

  ‘Yes! It is a good job,’ says James.

  ‘Even though they can be so difficult?’ I say.

  ‘They are not so bad,’ says Peter, waving the suggestion away. ‘Many bwanas are difficult.�
� I have to admit, I’m surprised to hear this. A part of me had assumed they’d harbour some resentment over working for former colonials. Maybe they do, on some level. Or maybe the Smyths are actually pretty good employers in the scheme of things. (After hearing this, I start paying more attention to the stories in the newspapers of domestic worker abuse – the terrible cases of maids and nannies who are beaten and underpaid by their employers. Around two million households in Nairobi employ household help – mostly these are rural people from poorer, less educated backgrounds. There are only about sixty-seven thousand whites in the country, and these cases of exploitation appear to me to be class-based rather than racial. Even more of a problem seems to be the Kenyan workers – mostly women – who are sent to work in the United Arab Emirates, where they’re treated as little more than slaves.)

  A couple of baridi Tuskers later, we move on to a restaurant across the road. This too has skinned animals hanging in the window – only this time, they’re ours to pick from for dinner. Peter and James point out a goat to the man at the door, then we head upstairs to an open-air restaurant decked out with plastic garden furniture.

  The waiter brings a jug of soapy hot water around the table, ceremoniously pouring it over our hands as we wash them into a bowl. We order another round of beers – ‘Pole, we only have moto here,’ the waiter apologises. That’s fine, we’ll cope. Halfway through the hot beers, it appears: half a goat, roasted, on a wooden board with salt piled in the corners, and side plates of kachumbari (a salad of finely diced tomato, onion and green chilli) and ugali. The cook comes out from the kitchen with a panga: a two-foot-long machete, the same kind famously used by Mau Mau fighters in the fifties – and hacks the meat into bite-sized pieces while we watch on, salivating. ‘Karibu!’ He grins, leaving Peter and James to demonstrate how we are to eat the entire meal with our hands.