Nairobi Noir

by Peter Kimani

  This was happening. He was going to be shot dead in cold blood.

  "Afande, we have surrendered," Bryo's trembling voice said. "You can arrest us and we face the law."

  One of the other policemen laughed heartily. "Arrest you? Keeping you alive will only increase the costs. And you know the government is cutting costs."

  "All these boys are innocent, sir," Boi spoke solemnly. "Let them go. They have never harmed anyone. Just follow the law."

  "The only law we know is the law of the Lord Jesus Christ," Kisii told him. "We don't judge people. All we do is to arrange for them to meet the Lord." He laughed loudly.

  Jobo thought about the tournament. He saw Kocha peering earnestly at the gates of Grao, hoping to see him emerge. He thought about the Kalamashaka song:

  Mungu wangu niokoe

  tabu uzitoe,

  roho yangu na ipone.

  Save me, my Lord,

  end my troubles,

  so my heart can be at peace.

  For some reason, Jobo's heart stopped fluttering in his chest. Even when he looked up and saw Kisii with a pistol aimed straight at his head, he did not flinch.

  A police radio crackled.

  Kisii pulled out a phone from somewhere inside his leather jacket, and with the one free hand he pressed a few buttons. His fierce eyes never left Jobo even as he placed the phone to his ear. "You boys," he said, "I keep telling you. When I warn you to go up-country, I really mean it. Do you think I enjoy shooting you?"

  "No sir," came the chorus from everyone on the floor.

  "Then why don't you listen to me?"

  The person on the other end of the line seemed to have answered, because Kisii turned away and began listening. "Affirmative," was the only word he said, then he disconnected the phone and pushed it into the pocket. "Asiyefunzwa na mamaye hufunzwa na . . . ?" he asked them as he pulled the safety catch.

  Nobody answered the saying, until one of the other policemen finished it: "Ulimwengu."

  He who is not disciplined by his mother is dealt with by the world.

  "Okay," Kisii said, glancing at his colleagues, "we are a merciful lot, so we will give you one more chance. Get up and run for your lives."

  What? Just like that?

  Jobo heaved himself up, and then he saw that Kim and Roba had done the same. But the rest of the boys continued lying on the ground. He hesitated.

  "Don't!" Max whispered urgently. "Don't run." He was no longer stuttering. "They want us to run, then they will shoot us in the back and tell everyone that we escaped from lawful custody."

  Jobo looked at the policemen and saw them exchange glances.

  Kisii took a step toward Max. Then he bent over and pressed the gun into his forehead. "Young man, you are so clever, eh? You think anybody cares how you died?"

  "What is that?" another policeman called out, looking toward the gate.

  Kisii stiffened.

  A loud wail cut through the air. It was a woman's voice. "UUUUUUUIIII!"

  "UUUUUUUIIII!" came a different voice.

  "UUUUUUUIIII!" another voice joined it.

  And suddenly the whole air was filled with dozens of cries: "UUUUUUUIIII! UUUUUUUIIII!"

  The voices were coming closer. The policemen looked at Kisii indecisively. He stood up and turned toward the gate, his pistol straight in front of him.

  They pushed him back into the compound. Dozens of women screaming, "UUUUUUUIIII!" pushed him even farther aside as they took a moment to survey the scene. "UUUUUUUIIII!"

  "You will not kill our children while we watch!" one woman screamed at a policeman.

  He took a step back. Then all the policemen took a step back.

  The women came where the boys lay. They lay spread-eagled, shielding them.

  "Shoot us first!" another woman dared the policemen.

  The policemen looked at Kisii with consternation. For the first time he had a stupefied expression on his face. The women continued screaming.

  "UUUUUUUIIII!"

  "UUUUUUUIIII!"

  More women were screaming outside. And more women were coming into the compound. And more women lay over the boys.

  Kisii lifted his pistol in the sky. Jobo shut his eyes tightly.

  Bullets hu-fly

  babies hu-die

  mothers hu-cry

  na siku zina pass by.

  When Jobo opened his eyes again, he saw that Kisii still had his pistol in the air. He thought the man was going to shoot in the air to disperse the women. Instead, he walked slowly toward the boys on the ground. The women hugged them tighter and let out louder screams.

  Slowly, Kisii crouched low. "I'll be back," he said softly to Jobo. And then he stood up, made a lighthouse scan of the compound, and nodded to the other policemen.

  They all walked out slowly

  na siku zina pass by . . .

  ______________

  Author's note: This story contains quotes from songs by Kalamashaka ("Tafsiri Hii," "Niokoe") and G.rongi ("Kichungi").

  A SONG FROM A FORGOTTEN PLACE

  by Troy Onyango

  Tom Mboya Street

  In the deep recess of the street, close to where the narrow road hesitates, before melding into a large potholed road, sits a woman in rags and spiky hair that stands on her head like a pineapple crown. She pulls a thin strip of the blanket that reeks of stale urine to cover her bare arms. The midmorning cold bites her skin and her face is ashen. She breathes through her mouth and pulls the blanket harder, the yank precipitating a yell from her twins, like a philharmonic orchestra.

  She tries to quiet them by pressing their faces against her bosom and soothing: Shhh, shhh. The cold has found their bones, and the twins’ cries hit a crescendo competing with the cacophony from the cars in the street. But the babies’ cries are a shrill addition to the bedlam on Tom Mboya Street. Exhausted, she lets them wail and her eyelids flutter a few times before they shut. And she is gone.

  In the time she has been here, she has learned to block out the monotonous chant of the hawkers, the hooting of the buses, the loud Afrobeat music seeping from the stores that sell not-so-original designer jeans and misspelled Timberland boots, and she roams inside her head. An uncaged animal running free in the wild. She has learned that in there, she can be her former self—the Claudette before Laban: bold, carefree, happy, whole, without any of the harsh judgment that the world has cast at her feet. Without the guilt of being labeled a bad mother. Bad woman. Bad everything. Bad. The word bounces on the walls of her world, ricocheting until all she hears are the syllables tumbling and knocking her thoughts, but she finds a place to tuck it. A place she forgets exists within her as soon as the deed is done. The place she has put Hawi, her daughter.

  Hawi, who she knows is long dead—legs up, head down—drowned in a toilet bowl. By her. Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day. But the rain hasn’t stopped beating her from that day. The water falling on her body like acid needles, burrowing into her skin and corroding the flesh away. The bones coming to the fore and even that’s eaten away by the water that falls from the sky in dribs and drabs until she feels she is Hawi, and she is drowning. Like how she was that day when Laban walked in, found her singing, safe in her world, with Hawi turning purple-blue as toilet water flowed from her nose, mouth, ears, and eyes. Like how she feels every time she thinks about the life she had with him. When it was just the two of them, loving recklessly, fucking anywhere, going to dingy clubs that smelled of sweat and stale semen, drinking bottles and bottles of whiskey and vodka. But that was before life happened and events snuffed the joy out of them, leaving only shells of their former selves, clinging to memories eroded by time. Tolerating each other and calling it love. The love life before Hawi. Before the drugs. Before . . .

  The crying of the twins still pierces her thoughts, but she trains her mind again to deliberately focus on the sound of feet as they shuffle past her, all in a bid to get somewhere or nowhere. Feet that rush past her every day, ignoring her, mocking h
er, raising puffs of dust from the pavement and dumping it on her. She hates those feet. Eventually, she slips back into her paradise: an unlimited supply of marijuana mixed with grass, cow dung, and soaked in diesel; cheap alcohol brewed in the back rooms of truck repair shops by women who add their ARV stock to the mixture; no children crying or drowning in toilet bowls; and no city council askaris rushing after her with big rungus that hit her skull and her back with the sound of a coconut falling on a rock. No policemen who arrest her and threaten to put her before the judge, only to bring her to the back alleys filled with heaps of garbage and take turns with her. Definitely no burly, unruly boys who are not yet men with eyes the color of hot glowing coals who will never give her drugs without money unless she agrees to let them fuck her whenever and wherever they want. No gang leaders who ask her to pay tax for the space she sits on every damn day or else they’ll insert dirty Sprite or Tusker bottles in her cunt! (Their words.) Lastly, no men, definitely no men to tell her what to do or what is good for her. She loves it in there.

  In there. Where she finds herself by losing her body and taking on whatever form she wants. In there, where she does not have to listen to Laban tell her, “Claudette, the cocaine is bad for you and the baby.” Is it not you who introduced me to it? she always asked him, without speaking the words. Laban, always the one to touch the flame of the fire first, tell (beg) you to touch it, then pull his hands off, and when the skin on your hand starts peeling away, the pain cutting through your body in waves, he would say, “You shouldn’t have touched the flame in the first place. Can’t you see it is fire? It burns.”

  Fuck it!

  There is no room for Laban in there. In here.

  The sound of a coin falling into her metal bowl startles her from her reverie, and she opens her eyes to see the twenty-shilling coin do its little dance, spinning and wobbling, before settling at the bottom of the bowl; her first reward of the day. She looks up to thank the kind person who has been extravagant enough to hand her a morsel when everyone else has been treating her like she is part of the dirt that covers the ground, part of the wall caked with mud dumped there by The Feet on rainy days.

  A man who looks like he could appear in a paint ad meets her eyes and nods. Her chapped lips part to say, “Asante,” but her gum is heavy and her teeth cling to each other like someone glued them together. The man is long gone, and by the time she manages to squeeze out her thanks, it is swallowed by the dark fumes emitted by the matatu parked nearby with the tout, a boy who doesn’t seem to be anywhere above fifteen, shouting, “Kayole hamsini!” The man’s whiff still clings to the coin as she thumbs it from the bowl and tucks it underneath her breasts. At least now she can get something for the twins to eat. Their crying has died down, and Adonai sucks on his thumb as he scratches his scalp. Lamek has closed his eyes with his head in between his mother’s thighs. The biting cold rages on.

  The street is awake. The hooting of the cars. The clopping of pointed heels on the pavement. Nigerian, Congolese, Nigerian, South African, Nigerian music, competing over which is the best. She has always preferred Congolese music; the way it springs from a place of warmth and tenderness like a beanstalk breaking through the soft earth. Then it rises and rises, growing and filling the whole room with the sweet melody that makes the body jelly and the bones rubbery and one finds oneself moving his waist, legs, and arms as if possessed by a gentle, cultured demon (but still a demon all the same), and one can dance and dance and not feel the sweat trickling down the ridge of his back or feel his legs stiffen at the knees because he’s tired. One ignores all that. Lingala flows and erupts within the body. Not that thing that Laban insisted on listening to. That. That—

  Claudette, can you feel it? That’s Coltrane.

  Claudette, you HAVE TO listen to this. Buddy Rich.

  Oh Claudette, my love, Miles Davis is a fucking god!!!

  The sound of the streets again, splitting and searing and tearing through the thoughts of her moving to Kinshasa or Lubumbashi. That was the dream before she met Laban and fell madly in love. She was nineteen going on twenty. Flesh clinging to her bones in all the right places. Skin glowing like models advertising cocoa butter on TV. Her heart was still untrained, untaught, untamed, and when she saw slim, tall, dark Laban walking down the street, she knew, even before he turned his full body and looked at her, that she would marry him. They would be different from those couples who tried to change each other and ended up fighting all the time. They would love each other, always. They would travel the world together. Accra, Dakar, Lilongwe, Windhoek. Finally, they would settle in Kin la Belle. Ha, Kinshasa.

  She closes her eyes and tries to find herself again in a dingy sweat-filled club swaying her hips to Franco or Madilu or M’bilia Bel, but the song of the street is impatient, nagging, restless. A preacher with a man’s body and a woman’s voice shouting to no one to change their ways or forget about the Kingdom of God. A politician with the voice of an ungreased wheelbarrow lying to his followers on a television inside the barber shop right next to where she sits, staring at her, like someone expecting manna to fall from heaven. The people gobbling the lies and shouting their support. They have been promised money. What currency is sufficient to buy the truth? The truth. Does hunger know or care for the truth? Empty rumbling bellies are not filled with truths, they are given food. Food bought with money. Money that has been scarce, especially when the politicians are using every avenue to get campaign money.

  Down the street, a few meters from the old red-and-white building, the city council askaris, clad in their gray khaki uniforms, are rounding up hawkers, idlers, loiterers, and daytime prostitutes. Women with children dangling from their hips and fear balanced on their heads run toward her. She sees the three askaris before they see her and she gathers the twins in her arms, blanket dragging on the ground. She disappears into the alleyways, walking until she finds herself at the edge of the city center. The tarmac melts and a black river flows in its place. Still, she runs. She knows what they will do if they find her.

  She remembers clearly how the bald one with a leathery scar on his forehead pulled her from the streets one evening. It was a Sunday, she recalls, for the streets were deserted and the churches were full all day. He wasn’t supposed to be there on a Sunday evening. Just as she wasn’t. The council askaris never worked after the sun had folded up and hidden from the city. She heads down a small road whose name she has forgotten. They never roamed when the neon lights flooded the streets, blinding her. But he came that day. He pulled up in the dirty white van. She is still running. She saw him late. She takes a bend upward and finds herself back on Kirinyaga Road. He grabbed her by the arms, bundled her like a baby, and threw her into the back of the dirty white van. A lorry brakes hard at her feet. Inside the back of the van, the smell of death. She can see Odeon now. They drove for so long. She stops, the twins heavy in her arms. He opened the back of the van, got in, and closed it. She looks at Adonai whose face is crunched into a fist. She only started crying when he stopped grunting. Adonai and Lamek, nine months later, with the help of the man who sold scrap metal, dog food, and human body parts under a bridge the Chinese had finished building. She half floats, half glides as if she has lost all sense of direction.

  She is back on Tom Mboya Street, farther down near the club whose male patrons dress in women’s clothes and the women dress like men and the tall green building that can be seen from almost anywhere on this street. She resents this side of town for it is full of street boys who would do anything to get their next meal (throw plastic bags full of feces, inject you with a syringe full of blood they claim is from an AIDs patient, push you in front of a moving bus, gut you with a serrated knife). She would never harm anyone just to get something to eat. She would use her babies to beg from strangers before she would even think about hurling a bag of shit at someone. She has to find a place to put the twins down before her arms fall out of her shoulders.

  A man in flowing jet-black dreadlocks that fall o
n his thin shoulders walks past her carrying a woman’s handbag like it belongs to him. He smiles at her. She looks away. Farther down, a wail pierces the dense air. Mwizi! She sits down and closes her eyes. Nisaidieni jameni. A song she has heard more times than she can count. A song of lost dreams. Kibeti yangu. A song from a forgotten place. She knows and the lady knows, too, that no one can help her. The people gathered around her are both witness and accomplice to the vile act. They stand and shake their heads and say, Nairobi ni mbaya. They all know Nairobi is the mouth of a shark and none of them would dare go against the gangs unless one has a death wish. The city is full of bloodthirsty vampires and the bright neon lights can’t keep them at bay. They lurk in the shadows—Tom Mboya Street, Luthuli Avenue, River Road—and when they smell the blood coursing through the veins of their victims, the heartbeat a drum singing their songs, they pounce and drink from the first jugular they find. That is the city, and no amount of wailing will help.

  She closes her eyes. The askaris, the hawkers, the bright neon lights, the man with flowing dreadlocks and a wide smile, the woman’s cries—they are all gone.

  * * *

  At the farthest end of the street, a woman sits and doesn’t see the three men approach. She doesn’t notice them because she’s in her own world. The world she has managed to build inside her head. The world where there is no pain. Pain in the lower part of the abdomen from the policemen who come to her every night and take turns with her. Pain from the city council askari with a leathery scar on his bald head thrusting and her begging him to stop. Pain from pushing the twins out of her nine months later. The twins who now sleep peacefully under the blanket that she uses to cover her body from the cold. She is in a world that has no cold, when she feels a cold hand on her shoulder. She opens her eyes, blinking to adjust to the world with pain and cold, and is alarmed to find three men staring down at her. She lets out a scream, for she thinks it is the city council askaris she evaded earlier.