by Peter Kimani
Table of Contents
___________________
Introduction
PART I: THE HUNTERS
She Dug Two Graves
Winfred Kiunga
Eastleigh
Number Sita
Kevin Mwachiro
Kilimani
Andaki
Kinyanjui Kombani
Dandora
A Song from a Forgotten Place
Troy Onyango
Tom Mboya Street
Mathree
Makena Onjerika
Globe Roundabout
PART II: THE HUNTED
Blood Sister
Peter Kimani
Karen
Say You Are Not My Son
Faith Oneya
Kariobangi
For Our Mothers
Wanjikũ wa Ngũgĩ
Pangani
Plot Ten
Caroline Mose
Mathare
Have Another Roti
Rasna Warah
Parklands
PART III: THE HERDERS
Belonging
J.E. Sibi-Okumu
Westlands
The Hermit in the Helmet
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Kawangware
Turn on the Lights
Stanley Gazemba
Kangemi
The Night Beat
Ngumi Kibera
Mukuru kwa Njenga
About the Contributors
Bonus Materials
Excerpt from USA NOIR edited by Johnny Temple
Also in Akashic Noir Series
Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition
About Akashic Books
Copyrights & Credits
INTRODUCTION
Concrete Jungle
Nairobi, shamba la mawe—Nairobi, the stone garden—is a pithy formulation intimating the city as a place of pleasures and perils. Its colonial founders declared it their Eden, the garden where they found easy nurture, living close to nature. They christened it the Green City in the Sun. It was this allure that, centuries earlier, drew Maasai herdsmen to the space that they knew as Enkare Nyrobi—the place of cool waters. They found enough water and pasture for their animals.
Over the past one hundred years, Nairobi has evolved from a supply depot for railway workers to the largest metropolis in East and Central Africa, with an estimated five million residents. This has come with a unique set of challenges: water is always in short supply, power blackouts are rife, and traffic jams are so bad, even lions come out of the wilds to marvel at the snarl-ups! This is no exaggeration; Nairobi is the only city with a game park, and the kings of the wild occasionally stray on major city highways to kill boredom . . . as do pastoralists who insist the city occupies their grazing fields. A place of hunters and herders is a good way of thinking about it.
The Maasai were not the only community displaced to make room for what became the White Highlands, the centerpiece of the colonial agri-based economy. Other communities were similarly dislodged from their ancestral lands in central and eastern regions of the colony, where they had been converted from self-sustaining herders and hunters into rent- and tax-paying subjects of the Crown. This precipitated an exodus of villagers into the new, segregated city where suffrage, labor, and residence were assigned according to racial hierarchy: whites, Indians, Arabs, and Africans, in that order.
Nairobi remains one of the most unequal cities in the world. The western part of the city boasts a United Nations headquarters—the only one located in the so-called developing world—with heated pools and other trappings of comfort. On the other side of town, in the Kibera slums, hundreds of thousands are hemmed into a few hectares of earth, without running water or electricity, so dwellers have invented "flying toilets." Nothing lofty, really, just a mound of shit wrapped in polythene and hurled to the farthest reach of the arm. And in keeping with the spirit of the city, which means finding lucre even in the most propitious of circumstances, slum tourism has become quite popular in Kibera.
The journey toward a just, multiracial, multiethnic society, as you, dear readers, will attest from this collection, remains on course, the most abiding evidence being the seamless, if unintentional, infusion of Sheng throughout many stories in this collection. This hybrid Kenyan patois, fusing Swahili with other indigenous languages, was the by-product of the quest by youngsters in Nairobi's Eastlands area to communicate without their parents—with whom they shared very modest dwellings—getting in the way.
By incorporating words and expressions from other Kenyan languages, the youngsters were making a salient proposition: out of the old, they would create something new; out of the many languages, they would make one collective whole, and claim it as their own. It is this principle that Nairobi Noir affirms; from the chaos that marked its origins, a thriving city has emerged.
Today, huge swathes of the city resemble a construction site. As I went to work, soliciting and editing contributions from writers within Kenyan and beyond, diggers were revving to tear down old estates in the Eastlands, which are no longer able to contain the ballooning population. More affluent suburbs, such as Westlands, were also in the process of reconfiguration from residential to office blocks. Other estates, such as Kileleshwa, once a leafy suburb, were being remodeled to accommodate large apartment blocks that ensure neither the sun nor the green are visible to its dwellers, calling to mind Bob Marley's "Concrete Jungle":
No sun will shine in my day today
The high yellow moon won't come out to play
I say darkness has covered my light
And has changed my day into night . . .
In that sense, Nairobi Noir is an act of excavation, rediscovering the city's ossified past and infusing life to preserve it for future generations. It is also an act of celebration, reminding readers of the brilliance of the best-known writers to emerge from this part of the world, and heralding the birth of new writers whose gifts, we can safely predict, will shine brightly in the years ahead.
The oldest writer in this anthology is eighty-one, the youngest is only twenty-four; if there is any inference one can draw from this demographic it is that this anthology offers an entire spectrum of Kenyan writing: the past, present, and future. If we can allow one extravagant claim, a collection of this nature is unprecedented in Kenya's literary history.
Although the range of issues explored in this volume is as diverse as its contributors, it all gestures toward a common theme. In this concrete jungle, the hunters and herders live on. As do the hunted . . .
The wealth of Nairobi, no doubt, is its people. One visual that defines that wealth is the muscled men who sit out in the sun, bare-chested, at Gikomba market, knocking scraps of iron into shape. By nightfall, the hunk of iron is miraculously hewn into bright-blue tin boxes, sturdy jikos that make the tastiest nyama choma in the world, among other innovations.
That's the Gikomba of my childhood, though it hasn't changed much. The well-built men still sit out in the sun—Jua Kali, scorching sun, is also the name of the market—but I suspect it's the sons who have replaced their fathers. And the rhythmic gong goes on uninterrupted, pulsating with life to power the city, and by extension, the nation's economy.
Such analysis proffers an interesting paradox: the minions toil under a scorching sun all their lives, putting extraordinary efforts to earn their day-to-day, ordinary living; those in the "leafy suburbs" burrow in a labyrinth of concrete, where the sun never shines.
How do we account for this phenomenon? And how have the conditions of the workers remained unchanged, despite the passage of time? The answer, perhaps, lies in these pages. The opening story is set in Eastleigh, once a bustling middle-
class suburb inhabited by Arabs and Asian
s in the city's segregated past. In recent decades, these demographics have been largely replaced by ethnic Somalis, earning Eastleigh the moniker of "Little Mogadishu," following an influx of refugees from Somalia's conflagration. At the heart of this story is a quest for belonging: the pain of homelessness and the angst of being a constant target of bribe-taking, gun-toting policemen.
The last story in the collection is set in Mukuru kwa Njenga, to the east of the city, where more policemen are on the beat with one solid idea on their minds: how to make an extra coin—by any means. The persistent police presence in these stories highlights Nairobi's noir character: law and order, crime and punishment, in a province regulated by complex characters who create problems for law enforcement. And policemen who are complicit in violating the law.
The stories in between course through the city, excavating refreshing perspectives on race, caste, culture, politics, religion, and crime, among other themes, in ways that will surprise the reader, just like they surprised me. The Green City in the Sun may have turned into a concrete jungle, but it is still enchanting. And the spirit of its forebears, the hunters and the herders and the hunted, still lives on . . .
Peter Kimani
Nairobi, Kenya
October 2019
PART I
The Hunters
SHE DUG TWO GRAVES
by Winfred Kiunga
Eastleigh
Her brother’s body was found in a dark alley in Eastleigh Section One, near the old post office. His torso was a collage of torture marks and bruises, already dark blue against his light-brown skin. Were it not for the notable birthmark on his neck, Ahmed would have been unrecognizable. It was the local imam who saw the body as he was going to make the morning call to prayer.
“Eebe naxariiso! Allah, have mercy!” he screamed, waking up the sleepy neighborhood. Most of the tenements lit up and a few faces cautiously emerged from the small barred windows.
“What’s going on?” asked Fartun, the number one Eastleigh gossip. Everyone called her CNN, a title she accepted. No one answered. The streets were now empty as the imam had hurriedly left for the mosque to avoid the police. He had firsthand experience with their brutal force.
Fartun quickly put on a hijab and ran down the stairs, making an awful lot of noise as she heaved her body against metal doors when she briefly paused to catch her breath on every floor. She was the only one courageous enough to leave the confines of her apartment at that hour. She had to get the latest information, she always argued. Neighbors depended on her to bring fresh and juicy news every day. Two stray cats were gnawing and fighting over the body but Fartun’s approach scared them off. They stayed close by, though, their yellow-green eyes creating an eerie feel in the dark and smelly alley.
After poking and inspecting the body like a seasoned mortician, Fartun shouted her discovery to the waiting faces up above: “It is Ahmed!”
“Which Ahmed?” someone inquired.
“A fair question, Imran, as Section One has over a thousand Ahmeds. It is Ahmed Farah, brother to that pleasant woman called Fawzia, the refugee who refused to spit on her former husband when he begged her to take him back. If I was her, I would have spit on his henna-dyed beard. I hear that he pleaded with her like a dog and—”
“Relevance!” Imran interrupted, halting what would have been a long story of Fawzia’s entire marital history. “We are only interested in the body and the cause of death.”
“Stop badgering me. Are you not the one who wanted to know whose body this is? Don’t interrupt me when I am adding details to the story. Don’t you know that a good story must be embellished, seasoned a bit with other niceties to keep listeners engaged? I am not called CNN for nothing. I do my research, I dig deeper, and I unearth all the details.”
She paused to let that sink in among her attentive listeners above. Most people regarded her as a gossip, but Fartun considered herself a community reporter.
“I heard that this young man was among those arrested last week by the antiterror police unit. I need to talk to a few people to figure out exactly what happened.”
At that, everyone retreated to their apartments. They knew that Fartun would go out to gather more “intel,” as she usually referred to her gossip, and would update them before sunup.
* * *
When Fawzia received news of her brother’s brutal murder, she lay prostrate on her carpet, crying and rocking sideways in deep anguish. Her grief came in torrents, like a dam that had burst its banks, spewing the slush that had accrued on the bottommost part of her being. There was no grip, no foothold, so she let the floodwaters engulf her body and soul. She sank in the miry depths, and for the next hour she just lay there in the obscurity, in the nothingness. She awoke from the hollow pit, eyes swollen like Sodom apples, head throbbing like Burundi drums. She rose slowly and walked toward the mirror. Just two hours ago, before the news about Ahmed, the mirror had reflected a beautiful woman with sparkling eyes. That aspect of her life was a lie, always fleeting. Her true reflection was what she saw now—a crushed woman whom calamity had trampled on, over and over. Happiness was elusive; it came rarely, like Atacama Desert rains.
Now tragedy had completely overshadowed her recent accomplishment. Just three days before, she had bought her own apartment. Now, looking around at the place, a sense of despondency overcame her again. Why even bother? There was no man to share her home with, no husband to make basta for, and no children to liven the huge space. Due to her childlessness, her husband Ibrahim had given her talaq, usually considered a disgraceful means of divorce in Islam.
But she had not always been barren. When the doctor announced that she was pregnant with twins at the turn of the century, the women at the Dadaab refugee camp where they were living at the time began saying that she was as fertile as Mahmoud’s camels. Mahmoud was a Somali refugee whose camels had had twin calves four times. Camels seldom bear twins, so it was a rare phenomenon and one that had amazed the whole camp. But her luck was abruptly changed one fateful night. Instead of double cries expected from a healthy set of twins, there were two small bodies on the doctor’s operating table.
Neither of the twins survived due to intrapartum complications related to female genital mutilation (FGM), a procedure that Fawzia, like other Somali girls, had undergone when she was eleven. The doctor at the camp hospital had tried deinfibulation in the hopes of saving the babies, but it did not work. Postpartum hemorrhage further prompted him to remove her uterus to save her life. This was the worst possible outcome, of course. Without a baby in her arms, what was she? Who was she? Among Somalis, a woman is only worth her children. Minus a womb, she was as good as dead. She wanted to punish the good doctor for saving and killing her at the same time.
Her husband gave talaq even before she left the camp hospital. There was no iddah, the waiting period intended to give the couple an opportunity for reconciliation and to confirm that the wife is not pregnant. For the months that followed, Fawzia was the object of ridicule from the very neighbors who had broken into ululations when they had learned of the pregnancy. It was her best friend Marian who eventually saved her. Marian now lived and worked in Toronto after getting resettled through a scholarship. She had heard of her friend’s predicament and had committed to removing her from the deep mire she was in. She sent Fawzia an e-mail.
My dear Abaayo,
I cannot believe that you did not tell me of the calamity that has befallen you. Am I not your bond sister? Did we not play on the same streets in Kismayo? Didn’t our families leave our motherland on the fateful night of guns? Did we not survive the treacherous journey to Liboi and finally to Dadaab? Did we not share our shah, our anjera, our buskut? Did we not go to the same school? Were we not subjected to the knife on the same day? Did they not remove our “thing” by that same knife? Did you not weep with me when my brother Karim died of cholera?
Why then would you, Abaayo, not allow me to weep with you? Why would you deny me the opportunity to hold you
, so that your tears can fall and form trails on my hijab?
I have sent you 1,500 Canadian dollars. I want you to leave Dadaab, travel to Eastleigh, and stay with my sister Ayan for a while. Register as an urban refugee with UNHCR at the Nairobi office. The money is for you to start a business. I recall that you trained at the camp to be a masseuse. Remember how other girls frowned at the course, saying that it was a dhillo, a whore’s job, to touch another’s body? And how you didn’t care what people thought about it? Why is it that now you believe in the blinkered words of the doom prophets at the camp? What happened to the strong woman I once knew? Have misfortunes put a veil on her face and faith?
I may not be able to actually cross the ocean and the vast lands that separate us. But I will do anything for you, as long as I am able to. So take the money and run. Run from those big-lipped women, run from that dog Ibrahim, run from the mockery. Who are we, if we do not put our feet into the waters? How will we discover new lands, new frontiers, if we grow afraid of the waves?
I dare you to find joy in the unknown.
Your four-leaf clover,
Marian
Fawzia remembered how Marian was always there for her. She shouldn’t forget to e-mail her and let her know of Ahmed’s death. She needed somebody who would grieve with her without judgment.
Relatives had already prepared Ahmed’s body for burial when Fawzia arrived at her father’s home. As a woman, she could not be involved, but she knew the process since she had been part of prepping her mother for burial a year before. She remembered how she and her aunt had closed her mother’s eyes and mouth, straightened her limbs, and then gently washed the body with warm water as they recited prayers. Once they were done and the body had been sprayed with a perfume called Adar, they wrapped it with white cotton cloths from head to foot. It was such a tender process, one that allowed the living to show love, one last time, to those who had gone back to Allah.
Now, as the men took Ahmed to the mosque, Marian wished that she could be allowed to say janaaso, the goodbye prayer for him. She wished that she could be there to bind his body in the green cloth with Allah’s name stitched in gold yarn. She wished she could see her brother’s face, just one more time. But women were not allowed to attend the funeral or the burial, so she stayed at home. She was jealous of the linen, the grass, and the soil that would cover Ahmed’s body. It would be closer to him than she would ever be.