by Peter Kimani
I take a sip of the Tusker, for strength. They won’t believe me, but I just say it: “I’m focusing on the thug in front, waiting for a gun to appear, but then I hear a sound on my left, a bleat. The high schooler is bleating like a goat, and on top of that, I look down and she has goat legs.”
Klemo is laughing the spects off his face. “Jaymo, seriously, just stop. Where did you get this story?”
Fat Toni has folded his arms over his potbelly. This is his thinking mode. “As in, Legs. Of. A. Goat?” he asks.
Klemo slaps the table as he laughs harder.
I don’t know why I am telling them this story at all.
Imagine this: We get to Westie and I find myself alighting the mathree, following the goat girl like a zombie, with zero control over my body. I can hear words coming out of my mouth, begging people for help, but it’s like my voice is outside my body, far away. Of course, no one helps.
And the chick isn’t a chick anymore. She explodes out of the uniform and becomes this animal, covered in black, shiny hair. Hips materialize on the sides of her body, as in those giant-size madiabas that move out of sync with the mamas who carry them. I know today is my day; I have met the devil; I’m finished. When she checks on me with a glance over her shoulder, she is smiling and her lips are red, that scary red that makes chicks look like vampires. Walai, now she is bending the space around her: buildings, roads, people. I don’t feel well, majamaa. I think I have vomited. I think I am praying. Forget the fact that I haven’t seen the door of a church since before campus.
And then suddenly we are in some forest. Don’t ask me how. All I know is I am feeling seriously cold, like to the bone. It’s nighttime somehow, and the chick/woman/thing is glowing. She stops, and I know this the moment she will kill me.
“You will taste good,” she says. She opens her mouth, her big, black hole of a mouth, and goes for my head. Her teeth dig in, crushing my brains. I scream. (You don’t remember you’re a man when someone is eating you, bana.)
Next thing I know, I am in Kinoo and the kangee is preparing to slap me: round two. “This is not a bedroom. You don’t have a bed in your house?” he asks.
This is all very funny to Klemo. He is almost falling off his chair with laugher. Tears are making rivers down his face. The fala.
“Let me guess: when you checked your pockets, you didn’t have your phone or your wallet,” says Fat Toni.
The pain of thinking about that phone is too much. 20K gone just like that. Plus the 1K I had for surviving this week, my ID and ATM card (although there is nothing but air in my bank account).
When Klemo is done laughing, he claps me on the shoulder. “Sorry, bro. That’s life in Nairobi. At least you didn’t get hurt. Say thanks to God.”
Part of me knows I was drugged in the mathree. There was no chick/woman/thing trying to eat me; part of me is impressed with these Nairobi thugs and their methods, like how did they drug me; and part of me is scared shitless because that chick/woman/thing was too real. I sip my Tusker to push it all down.
For some minutes we are all quiet. We listen to the Man U fool two tables away insisting that the score this weekend will be Man U 6, Arsenal 0; that Ferguson is greater than Wenger; Wayne Rooney should be footballer of the year. Serious verbal diarrhea. Then the volume on the TV goes up, and I see the waitress pointing at it with the remote. Seven o’clock news. Some political activist is giving a speech: “It is the youth of this country who suffer the most because of corruption . . .”
Man U guy whistles at the waitress. “Woman, are you okay in the head? You think we came here to listen to politics? Put SuperS . . .”
I don’t know why, but I hate this guy like a problem. Maybe it’s the five bottles of Tusker I have downed. Or maybe it’s remembering what happened at the client’s when I finally made it there two hours later, groggy and with a headache the size of a hot-air balloon; how much I had to beg to get that contract back; how I kneeled before that boss lady. Maybe it’s having to walk all the way back to town to get another shredding from Kajenjo, plus a warning letter from HR. Or maybe I just need someone to hate right now.
“Kubaf, shut up!” I shout.
Eight pairs of eyes zoom in on me. Man U guy is already getting out of his chair. “You, nyang’au, what did you say?”
“You are a total kubaf!”
Aah, now this feels right. It’s been a seriously long time since my fist connected with a face.
PART II
The Hunted
BLOOD SISTER
by Peter Kimani
Karen
They say when life offers lemons, you make lemonade. And what do you make if it brings a mzungu? Mzungu mix? That sounds like mchuzi mix, a spice that Kibra folks love to death. They put it in sukuma wiki, which they eat from Monday to Monday, as mchuzi mix comes in beef, chicken, and pork flavors, turning the veggies into meats. As we have come to learn, especially from our politicians, not everyone can afford meat, na kumeza mate si kula nyama!
I hope you don’t mind my politicking. I’m still smarting from my dalliance with politicians in the last general election. I was appointed a youth leader in our ward, which means I was awash with cash. My goodness, I had never handled so much cash in my life. We were supposed to dish it out, like njugu karanga, but I kept a tidy amount for myself. When I am dead broke, I recall the smell of the new bank notes. It makes me feel rich again.
But the story that I want to relate is about the mzungu who came into my life after the polls. If truth be told, I quite liked the idea of mixing her up to produce a mchuzi child, a mixed-race tot . . . Only that, as I came to learn, Jackie wasn’t the type to bear children. Certainly not with a man from the other side of the valley.
Which is interesting, for I naively thought her mission was to bridge Kibra and Karen, since the two areas fall under one constituency, Lang’ata—and Kibra is the hotbed of Lang’ata politics. Anyway, I don’t want to politic. I want to tell you about Jackie, the jungu who came into my life and, my goodness, those were the days of our lives!
Listening to that, one would think I am an old man in his sixties! Well, at thirty-two I consider myself an old man. Come to think of it, I am old enough to be a grandfather, what with the haste with which our generation, vifaranga vya kompyuta, is producing.
Before Jackie came into my life, she was preceded by yet another jungu, a grizzled old bird that, looking back, was my true kismet. Let me explain: I was what folks in Kibra call a hustler, which means I could be found everywhere and anywhere, doing nothing in particular.
My gang and I were at the base chewing veve and listening to dobba, when someone alerted us about a jungu taking pictures of the ghetto. I might not have made much from the season of politics, but I was enjoying the dividends of being a youth leader. With a mound of veve jutting through my cheek, my gang and I arrived where Mama Camera, as everyone came to call her, was issuing her disposable cameras to children.
Mama Camera, wearing flip-flops and dark glasses, told the children to take pictures of their day-to-day life. She said the photos would be used in a project called “ShootBack” and the best images would be included in an exhibition in Europe.
But before she could finish her sentence, I demanded to know who had authorized her to come to Kibra. She appeared puzzled by my question. I also saw her lip tremble. Trust me, I am the rude boy of Kibra, and I can be nasty when I mean business. The way I spat out the question must have warned Mama Camera that I could bring diambo.
“You think anyone will let me into your country wearing flip-flops and allow me to dish out cameras to ghetto children to spy on us?” Before she could answer, I prodded on: “And what nonsense about pictures of ghetto life. You want to sell our pictures to museums depicting us as monkeys?”
For a while, Mama Camera made no response and I presumed she hadn’t heard me. I was about to repeat my question when she broke into a wan smile and motioned me to draw closer.
I drew closer. My main motive wa
s to scan her properly. I was just twenty-five, an age when everything lay in the realm of the possible. I wanted to sorora if she had any valuables that I could snatch. And if the old bird sat badly, as people of Kibra say, unavuka naye! Cross with her. I mean, I had a classmate who specialized in European female pensioners and his pictures on Facebook showed he was permanently on the beaches of Malindi. So I wouldn’t be the first graduate from Matope High School to end up as a male prostitute.
Anyway, I flashed a smile and Mama Camera flashed her fake smile back. When she removed her dark glasses, tears stood in her eyes. “You are too intellizent to wazte your life in ze zlum,” she said in her accented English. My heart instantly went out to her.
Here was an old bird who couldn’t even speak proper English dreaming of changing Kibra! I’m talking about a hundred years of history since the British brought our Nubian ancestors from the Sudan as army reserves, and left them marooned there. And here was an old German bird from Leipzig who thought she could solve our problems by sambazaing disposable cameras! It was like the foolish tourist mauled by a lion when she offered him a biscuit in the Maasai Mara!
There are folks who say I am hard on the outside and soft inside, like a coconut. But I seriously pitied this mama. I wasn’t touched by the sadness in her eye, but by the folly of her conviction that she could change our circumstances.
The veve steam in my head lifted somewhat and I asked softly how I could help her. “Zenk you, zenk you!” she said tearfully. “You will be of tremendaz help to me . . .”
I became her point man in Kibra when she came for her “ShootBack” nonsense. I evolved from her translator to security man and, ultimately, her KYM. That means Kanda Ya Moko, the handyman. But I didn’t use my hands on the old German bird. I still had some pride.
Within a few weeks, all the kids brought back their film which I helped select, not because I understood anything about photography, but because Mama Camera said I understood life in Kibra better than she ever would. So together we went to this fancy studio in Karen and I recall feeling suddenly self-conscious about my smell—the sweat, the dust on my shoes, yaani, u-ghetto pouring out of my every pore. But I bore it all, carefully scanning from one frame to the next, until some thirty reels, each comprising some thirty-six exposures, were reviewed. Out of these, I picked what stood out.
Mama Camera appeared quite pleased with my selection. But it’s the Kibra youngsters who were the most pleased, as all the selected images were blown up large, then mounted on fancy-looking frames and delivered for exhibition one evening near the chief’s camp.
You should have seen the glow in Mama Camera’s eye. She wore a blue print kitenge dress and made a small speech to convey her joy working in Africa—never mind that she was in a tiny spot in Kibra, not the fifty-four states that make the continent. When I was asked to address the gathering, I panicked because I hadn’t had my usual fix of veve or ndom. I mean, I would never address such a kirindi without some steam. So I trembled slightly before an idea swung in rapidly. I clenched a fist and punched in the air:
“Vijana hoooeeeee!
Kina mama hooeeee!
Wazee hoooeeeee!
Watoto hooooeeee!
Power to the people!
Power to the people!”
Apparently, that’s all I needed to jazz up the crowd. Almost every Kibra resident I encountered that evening wore a big grin. Seeing a fellow neighbor making a mountain of sembe, children bathing in the open, a carpenter at work, kina mama plaiting hair, a little girl lighting a jiko, a mongrel watching over some drunk—all these images brought them so much happiness. I couldn’t really understand why. Perhaps it was the joy of seeing themselves through the eyes of someone else.
What most folks found hilarious was the picture of a man with a flying toilet, the black polythene back neatly clasped in hand, like a javelin. The man’s face was a mask of concentration: he seemed aware that one minor slip of the finger and his cargo would come unstuck, with devastating results. The man’s upper lip was curled in an impish smile, perhaps imagining what the mound in hand would do if it hit a target. I don’t want to sound vulgar but this was the shitty life that is Kibra.
Mama Camera returned the following day to report that our maiden exhibition had been a resounding success. I was obviously taking pride in her work, despite my initial protestations. The measure of her assessment was that she, and by extension I, had been invited to curate the photo exhibition at the nearby Karen Blixen Museum. And Mama Camera was of the view that we should make this more than just an exhibition; we should auction the pictures as well.
Something tugged in the pit of my stomach. Wasn’t that the fear that I had expressed when I first confronted Mama Camera? Did she think I had the memory of a fly? She checked herself just in time and clarified that the proceeds would be used to fund the next round of “ShootBack.” Another portion of the proceeds would be used to set up a studio that I could run, to ensure future projects were handled by the youth of Kibra . . .
I must confess I was a little conflicted, even distracted, when I went to the Karen Blixen event, thinking I had sold my soul to the old German bird. Isn’t that what they call divide and rule? Because I had a stake in her business, I was less likely to bring siasa.
But that was only the beginning . . . that was the night I encountered Jackie, the Englishwoman.
“Habari rafiki!” Jackie gushed, offering a soft, moist hand and a business card with the picture of a shrub, the insignia of the University of Anglia, where she was completing her doctoral study. She was in Kenya for her field research.
Days later, I typed, deleted, typed, deleted. How does a black ghetto boy ask out a rich white girl? Her reply came in gray-blue ink, a drip of the color of her eyes. I know Kenya produces the best tea in the world, she gushed. I would be absolutely delighted to share a cup with you.
There was more to share. We both shared a country of birth.
“My umbilical cord is buried here,” she said to convey her connection to my land.
“Does that make you Kenyan or English?” I asked.
“That’s for you to find out.” There was a playfulness in her tone. I was absolutely delighted.
The afternoon tea soon grew to evening wine, afforded by KYM assignments from Mama Camera that miraculously arrived every second Friday, just before the close of business and the start of the growing business between Jackie and me.
Our first trip together, to Karen Connection for drinks, was by mathree. I quickly established that Jackie was not using the shared taxi for lack of money; she wanted to polish her Kiswahili. And mathrees have lots of people interested in chatting up a pretty white girl.
I noticed a chipped tooth as she spoke. Her words had a biting effect on me; you seldom encounter white folks who want to speak Kiswahili; the more likely scenario is that of locals adopting fake, false, and forced foreign accents, like the talking heads on Capital FM. Not that I cared, I am a Jambo FM fan.
On the third Friday since our matatu ride, I tasted the wine on Jackie’s tongue, touched her blond hair. “Fake blond,” she clarified. She felt comfortable enough not to fake anything.
I clutched her hair again, and whispered in her ear: “Let’s take a ride.”
“I don’t think I’m wearing the right underwear,” Jackie giggled.
“I would rather you wear nothing,” I said.
She was quite tickled. We were at her rented apartment in Karen. She led me through a maze of rooms until I was fearful I could not find my way out. Where most Kibra folks hibernate in ten-by-ten hovels, here was a single individual living in a house the size of Hilton Hotel.
The wine on her tongue was fading, like vapor rising off tarmac after the rains. There was promise of more rain down in the valley. “You are colonizing my breasts,” Jackie swooned with pleasure, when she finally revealed the naked truth.
“For Africa and Asia,” I mumbled with a mouthful of nipple. “The two continents impoverished by the
Empire.”
Jackie snuggled closer. She wanted me to slide into a tube before the ride.
“Am I your first white girl?” She expected me to say: Am I your first black guy?
But I did not. I rolled over. Our bodies lay side by side, like the rail tracks that cut through Kibra and Karen. Jackie was a vessel with two compartments; one for blacks, one for whites. She was doing a head count of the passengers getting on board. I limped off, the nipple melting in the mouth hardened into a bitter lozenge. I spat it out. I heard the rattle of the Mombasa train hurtling down Kibra. The train faded away. Marvin Gaye haunted on Capital FM.
“What’s going on?” Jackie asked, cheerfully imitating the song on air.
I turned on the lights and faced her. “You aren’t me taking for a ride, are you?” I asked.
“I thought you wanted a ride,” she replied.
* * *
Jackie left for England soon after. I was troubled by the memory of our encounter. Her clean white skin was blinding. I mean it. My eyes could see in the dark. And I was depressed for having failed to rise to the occasion, weighed down by the historicity of the moment. How could I, a poor black boy from Kibra, lay an Englishwoman? I had failed to rise to the occasion when Kenya needed me. Retaliate for the rape of my country by hers. Only that Jackie is half-Kenya—a KC, Kenyan cowboy, as we call the tribe.
The news that I was dating a white girl reached Kibra even before I limped back there, wounded by my failure. And Kibra being Kibra, my private humiliation had turned into a great public triumph. All the fine lasses from Kibra, even those considered mababie, wanted to be with me. I mean, really cute girls who spoke English through their noses. One girl’s father even had a car, which he cleaned and polished with such dedication every weekend, I think he spent more time fondling the vehicle than his wife. It was an old orange Volvo. Franco’s rhumba would boom from the car’s pimped-up speakers, as the man whistled along. He must have been very absorbed in his labors for he seldom realized he had lathered the car twice before, or even that his pants had dropped down an inch to reveal the crack in his bum.