He takes my hand across the table, holds it in his, gazes at me intently. ‘My darling,’ he says, ‘I’m so terribly sorry, I’ve made such a dreadful mess of all this. My wife is bound to find out. We’ll have to deal with her gently, the poor old duck. I don’t want to cause her any more upset than I have to.’
Oh shit. He thinks I’m his mistress.
At first, I try to hose it down. ‘Oh – no, Walt – I think there’s been a mix-up. I’m Kirsten, remember? I’m a friend of your daughter, Fiona.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he says, not really hearing me, ‘we’ll have to come clean to the whole family eventually. But I must talk to Marguerite first, I really do owe it to her.’
A waiter brings over Walt’s Ribena in a wine glass.
‘But once that’s all sorted, my love,’ Walt tells me, ‘I’ve been wanting to ask for so long: will you marry me?’
I can see people at other tables watching us and judging me: a young gold-digger taking advantage of a sick old man. They’re tutting and frowning and shaking their heads; they don’t know that it’s better for me just to roll with this, for Walt’s sake. That I’m doing him a kindness. That it’ll only be a brief engagement – he’ll have forgotten me by the time we get back to the car.
He stares at me, lovesick.
I accept. ‘Yes, Walt my dear, of course I will. I thought you’d never ask!’
‘Oh wonderful, just wonderful.’ He kisses my hand, clasps it between his. ‘Splendid. I suppose the next step is to get you a ring!’
Towards the end of our celebratory meal, Walt excuses himself to ‘use the little boys’ room’ around the corner. After some time, a waiter approaches me.
‘Excuse me, madam,’ he whispers, ‘Bwana Smyth, I think he is lost. Could you come this way, please?’
I follow him through to the courtyard. Bwana Smyth is sitting at a table with a Swedish couple who look very confused.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the man says, ‘have we met before?’
‘Oh, deary-me,’ Walt replies, laughing politely but ignoring the question. ‘And are you both enjoying your stay?’ I can see the panic in his eyes.
‘Walt, there you are!’ I swoop in to retrieve him. ‘Hello, hi, how do you do?’ I shake hands with the Swedes, wink. ‘I’m Kirsten. Lovely to meet you both.’ Then I turn to Walt. ‘We can’t go anywhere without you running into old friends, can we? Quite the socialite, mzee Smyth!’
He laughs, wags a finger and teases, ‘Ohhh, not much gets past you!’ When he grabs my hand, I can feel the relief flowing through his grip. I feel a sudden pang of sympathy and a surge of protectiveness. It’s okay, I want to say, I’ll look after you, you’re safe. You poor old bastard.
The Swedes seem to have twigged to what’s happening here. They smile kindly at us. ‘Nice to see you,’ they say, as I help Walt to his feet.
‘Come on now,’ I say to him, ‘we’d best get back to our lunch – it’ll be getting cold!’
But instead, I lead him out to the car park, where Peter is leaning against the Peugeot reading a newspaper. He sees us coming and races around to open Walt’s door and help him into the car. ‘There you go, bwana – how was your lunch?’
‘Very good, very good, thank you very much,’ says Walt, rubbing his furrowed brow.
‘Home?’ asks Peter, sensing lunch has ended a little prematurely.
‘Yes, back to the house, thanks, Peter,’ I say, where I put Walt down to bed for a long afternoon nap.
A text message from Sarah saves me from spending another Saturday night in my room. Do I want to go to the US Marine Corps’ 235th Birthday Ball with her and Jack? I absolutely do. I haven’t been able to catch up with them since our afternoon at the bar, despite plenty of invites to parties and soirees. This time, the event is not too far from Walt’s house.
But I don’t have a dress. Or shoes. Nothing that will fly at a black-tie affair. I have to borrow one of Sarah’s gowns – a satin number that only just fits – and shuffle along to hide my hiking boots, while trying not to trip on the hem. It’s not a good look, but I’m not about to let a fashion handicap stop me checking out how the world’s mightiest fighting force celebrates its anniversary in a foreign land.
Marguerite – back from her beach getaway – kindly lends me a string of pearls for the finishing touch. She thinks it’s ‘positively splendid!’ I’ve been invited. So do I. Where else am I going to see a novelty cake cut with a ceremonial sword?
With the setting sun casting a golden sheen across the green of Nairobi’s Windsor Golf Hotel & Country Club, I find myself clinking champagne glasses with the diplomatic clique of East Africa. We mill about on the slate pavers, nibbling at samosas and cucumber sandwiches, smiling at grey-haired men and their epaulets, eavesdropping on ambassadorial gossip.
Sarah and Jack introduce me to one of their Kenyan friends, a rapper and minor celebrity named Sauti. None of the VIPs recognise him; more than once he’s tapped on the shoulder and asked to send for more refreshments from the kitchen. ‘It’s alright,’ he says with a grin, when we gasp in embarrassment. ‘The waiters know me, and that’s what counts. We’ll get first dibs on the hors d’oeuvres.’ On cue, a server brings us a fresh tray of salmon blinis and asks him for a selfie.
This ball, Sarah tells me, is the event on the expat calendar. It’s all anyone’s been talking about for months. It all seems a bit buttoned-up to me, but I get it. Just about everywhere in Nairobi – except for the High Commission and private residences – is out of bounds to foreign office staff, an overly cautious approach to security that restricts their social lives to these sorts of cordoned-off occasions.
As dusk falls, we’re ushered along a candlelit path to a glittering marquee set up on the fairway. There’s some confusion when, at the third security check, Sarah sets off one of the metal detectors. The guard waves a madly beeping black wand over her chest until finally she remembers the mobile phone she has stuffed down her bra. She pulls it out of her cleavage, holding it aloft in surrender. ‘Relax everyone – I’m not a terrorist!’ she says, and everyone laughs, but it’s a bit close to the bone.
A few months earlier, jihadist militants killed seventy-four people watching the World Cup soccer final at a rugby clubhouse in the Ugandan capital, Kampala. Suicide bombers walked in and blew the entire crowd up, retribution for Uganda’s military presence in Somalia, where Al-Shabaab is based and the African Union is running a UN-backed peace-keeping mission. Headless bodies were left sitting on white plastic chairs, while footballers carried on playing on a blood-splattered screen, oblivious to the carnage. Those sorts of horrors are now threatening Kenya, too. Nairobi, after all, was one of Osama bin Laden’s early targets: more than two hundred people died when he sent a truck carrying a ton of explosives to the US Embassy in 1998. It’s only a matter of time before the mujahideen strike here again.
My friends and I are sitting at a grab-bag table: a few Brits and Australians, a Swedish woman and her Dutch husband, a Rwandan and his German wife. The waiters bring rounds of drinks and hot towels, eucalyptus-scented to freshen our greasy fingers.
The lights dim. A man in ostentatious military regalia stands up. We hush.
We hush for nearly an hour, being told how the US marines are the finest warriors Planet Earth has ever seen. Flat screens are hoisted throughout the tent to ensure every table has a clear view of the birthday message sent from Commandant General James F. Amos to marines around the globe. It’s a twelve-minute loop of American flags waving in slow motion, cross-fading through a montage of gun-slung heroism from Korea to Afghanistan, set to a stirring drumbeat and Hollywood strings.
The British woman beside me has had a gutful. ‘Fuck me, it’s like the trailer for a summer blockbuster,’ she whispers.
‘Subliminal retainment,’ suggests her friend, summoning another round of gin and tonics for the table.
The emcee introduces our guest of honour, the US Ambassador to Kenya, Michael Ranneberger. He has quite the ré
sumé: it seems he singlehandedly pulled Kenya from the brink of political chaos in the wake of the country’s disputed 2007 election result. This outbreak of civil unrest saw around a thousand people killed and hundreds of thousands internally displaced as rival ethnic factions turned on each other, and police tried to quell the violence with bullets. We’re told that while some people criticised Mr Ranneberger for ‘overstepping the diplomatic mark’ as he steadfastly drove the formation of a coalition government, ordinary Kenyans were grateful to have American guidance at that critical moment in their history. (The ordinary Kenyans serving us dinner tonight miss the opportunity to thank their saviours. I catch several leaning against the marquee supports, yawning as their legs tire beneath them.)
Throughout the tent, bemused eyes swivel around the room to find each other. A few throats are pointedly cleared, but they’re drowned out by a frothing patriot in the corner, who whoops and claps at every comma. I don’t fully understand the dynamics in the room, but it’s clear Uncle Sam’s version of events has pissed a lot of people off. ‘What’s going on?’ I whisper at Jack.
‘Pretty much everyone here was involved in sorting out the 2007 crisis,’ he explains. ‘But the Americans always take credit for it. It’s kinda their thing.’
The band starts playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. Half the room stands, hands-on-hearts singing, while the remainder drain their glasses and grit their teeth, wondering aloud why their country even bothers being here, or anywhere, for that matter, when the Yanks can do it all so well themselves.
In reality, America isn’t here just to help Kenya’s fledgling democracy. That’s a good cover story, but their main business is to surveil and assassinate Islamists, either with special forces soldiers sent into Somalia from this side of the border, or with air strikes and drones. When they’re not doing that, they’re trying to shut down the piracy and drug-smuggling operations that fund the jihadist groups. ‘You wouldn’t believe how much of Europe’s coke and smack gets there via Africa,’ the German tells me. ‘And it’s not just coming through terrorists – half the Kenyan parliament is involved.’ Operation Enduring Freedom has been running here in the Horn of Africa since it was launched in 2002, just a few days after the US Senate authorised President George W. Bush’s war on Saddam Hussein. It turns out Kenya is as much a part of the War on Terror theatre as Afghanistan or Iraq, it just doesn’t make the news back home.
Eventually, alcohol kicks in to dilute the stifling atmosphere. A nearby table of American women takes over the dance floor, and the DJ plays the obligatory ‘Africa’ by Toto. Soon old white men are dancing with young black women, and old white women are dancing with young black men. I have a brief spin with an off-duty waiter who tells me he deals cars from the bar he works at and makes excellent cocktails – if I’d like to we could go try some? We could … but I’m on duty with Walt in the morning, and I don’t fancy kicking my shift off with a hangover.
As I make my exit, a group of marines in blue dress are executing a choreographed rendition of Soulja Boy Tell’em’s ‘Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)’, bouncing around the parquetry in perfect unison.
It’s hard to leave.
One morning, I decide to use the many hours of sitting quietly while Walt reads the newspapers to read up on Kenya’s history.
White guys weren’t the first outsiders to pitch up in this part of the world. In fact, they were just about the last. Omani Arab traders had been visiting East Africa since Jesus was a kid, establishing outposts all along the coast and on the nearby islands of Pemba and Zanzibar, shipping out exotic treasures through a trading network that grew to reach as far as Indonesia. The Arabs didn’t bother exploring the perilous interior themselves, instead recruiting locals to haul caravans laden with ivory, rhino horn, gold and slaves out from the uncharted land that unfurled to the west.
Over the centuries that followed, these coastal settlements were further populated by Persians and Gujaratis and South-East Asians, and gradually established their own distinctive Swahili culture, with Islam as the predominant religion.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive on Kenya’s shores, showing up around 1500. They’d spent the better part of a century getting acquainted with the western side of the continent and, having finally rounded the southern tip, were now securing a route to India, setting up naval bases along the way and firing motivational cannons at anyone slow to acquiesce. The next few hundred years saw them squabbling with the Omanis over control of the coastal centres and the spice and slave trade routes that ran across the Indian Ocean. The port city of Mombasa changed hands several times before the English showed up, eventually taking formal control of it at the end of the 1800s. They’d emerged from the ‘Scramble for Africa’ with the East Africa Protectorate, a vast swathe of land with what they saw as untapped potential, ranging from arid desert to fertile highlands to Lake Victoria. Thought at the time to be the source of the Nile, the lake is a body of water so large it produces its own weather systems. But none of that potential would be tapped without a railway connecting the interior to the coast.
In 1896, construction began on the Uganda Railway, which soon became better known as the ‘Lunatic Express’: a single, metre-gauge track running a thousand kilometres from Mombasa to Kisumu via Nairobi – a city that did not yet actually exist – costing five and a half million pounds and four human lives for every mile laid. It was a hellish endeavour. The route was fraught with unforgiving terrain and wild animals, and while the Brits might have claimed the moral high ground for their part in ending slavery, they had no qualms shipping out tens of thousands of indentured labourers from India to lay a million sleepers across the savanna.
‘Coolies,’ Walt calls them when I ask whether he knows much about the track, though it was completed in 1901, a few decades before his time. ‘They were used to the heat and knew how to build railways. Well, we couldn’t have done it with the natives.’ Walt sees the look on my face and throws his hands up defensively. ‘They were barely bloody tame at that stage!’
I shudder, take a deep breath, and try to Zen away the sheer awfulness of his characterisation of human beings. The world was a different place, becomes my silent mantra. You can’t tell someone who has dementia to get with the times.
‘And all this stuff about man-eating lions?’ I say. ‘I thought that was just a silly Val Kilmer movie. Are you saying The Ghost and the Darkness was actually true?’
‘Oh yes,’ Marguerite chimes in from the study, where she’s been writing emails to various cousins and friends. It’s how she spends most of her downtime – emailing or Skyping or texting friends in the UK; she puts on a merry face about being back in Kenya, but I get the sense her heart is in England. She walks out to join us and pours herself a cup of tea. ‘Nasty buggers, those Tsavo simbas. Still are. They’re different to other lions – the males don’t have manes! Something in the blood. High testosterone, they say. Oh!’ She turns suddenly to Walt, giggling. ‘Maybe the one that nearly got you was their great-great-grandchild?’
Suddenly, the lights in the living room go dark and the radio falls silent. Moments later, there’s a symphony of beeps as the diesel generator kicks in and the fridge and microwave are powered back on. Walt’s up and out of his chair to investigate. I follow him and Marguerite into the garage, where she, James and David explain several times over that the generator is running because the power has been cut, but it should be back on soon and there’s nothing to fret about. Eventually, Walt’s satisfied that all’s as it should be, and we return to the patio.
In the meantime, Magda has arrived. I’m thankful for the timing of the generator distraction – it’s much easier explaining the generator to Walt than it is another car pulling in the driveway.
‘Ohh, hello, Walt!’ she says, greeting him with a warm hug.
‘Ohhhh, well, well, well, it’s you,’ he says, smiling happily – she’s one of the few people he seems to remember.
‘I see the power has gon
e out here too again,’ she says. ‘At our place too. Yes. Every day this week!’
‘Oh no, how ghastly,’ says Walt, having already forgotten our recent trip to the garage.
‘We were just telling Kirsten about the railway, the Lunatic Express,’ says Marguerite.
‘Oh yes, that awful train line! The poor people who had to build it. Really. They were treated very harshly,’ says Magda, then turns to me. ‘I have some wonderful books you can borrow, if you like. Have you read Facing Mount Kenya, by Jomo Kenyatta? Do you know who he is?’ I do – but she doesn’t wait for me to respond. ‘He was the first President of Kenya.’
‘Ho-ho, “free-dumb, and independent”!’ Walt sniggers. I’ve come to recognise this as the ugly catchcry he favours whenever he hears the word ‘independence’.
Magda ignores him. ‘He was a very interesting man, Jomo Kenyatta. Yes. He studied economics in Russia and England.’
‘Did he!?’ says Marguerite.
‘Yes.’ Magda blinks at her, apparently puzzled that someone living in Kenya wouldn’t know this. Then she turns her attention back to me. ‘He was Kikuyu. The book is all about the Kikuyu people and their customs. Do you know of the Kikuyu? Peter is a Kikuyu, I think. They are one of the biggest tribes in Kenya. I will lend it to you – you will find it very interesting, I’m sure.’
‘Yes thanks, I’d love to borrow that,’ I say. ‘And I’ve just read there was a massacre, while the train line was being built.’
‘Well, of a sort,’ Walt says. ‘A skirmish.’ He raises his eyebrows as though to play down a scandal. ‘Some of the overseers had been “fraternising with the natives”.’
‘Fraternising’ and ‘skirmish’ are quite the euphemisms, it turns out. The real story is that in a place called Kedong, five hundred men were speared to death by Masai warriors as revenge for the rape of two young local girls.
None of these horrors much slowed the track’s progress down – nor did the malaria and fatal accidents that put more than two thousand skeletons into the ground by its side. The British were desperate to get the edge over their colonial neighbours: Germany was having a crack in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in the south, the French were in the Sudan, the Italians were sitting on the Horn of Africa, ordering the Somalis and Eritreans around and lusting after Ethiopia. If Britain didn’t secure an inland route, someone else would claim that advantage. So on and on the Kenyan track inched, each day more bolts, more wood, more tonnes of steel laid out, with over a thousand bridges built to carry a locomotive strong enough to knock elephants out of the way, climbing and winding up from sea level to the mountains and diving sharply back down into the Great Rift Valley – a feat of engineering designed to ensure the whole East African exercise would pay off for the British one day.
I Built No Schools in Kenya Page 13