by Peter Kimani
She had lost her dancing job at Mahutini Bar after she became pregnant and had never been able to pull herself together after that. She could no longer afford to keep her children and she was tired of their empty stares when she came home.
It had not been easy getting Njenga and Lois back from the children’s home. It wasn’t until she saved enough money doing casual jobs that she went for them.
She told the matron that it was Njenga’s father who’d orchestrated their abandonment at the children’s home. That was what won the matron over. They spent thirty minutes singing the “men are evil” symphony with the matron as the main conductor.
“Aki wanaume . . .”
“Eii!”
“Wanaume ni wanyama!”
“Eeeh!”
“Aki pole sana Mama Njenga!”
Nyokabi walked away with her children, Njenga clinging to her arm harder than Lois did.
A sewer rat scuttled across the bridge and she stepped out of its way. Something bad always happened when the sewer burst. The landlord of the apartment complex they lived next to had never bothered to fix the pipes and so every so often they would protest—loudly gushing, and with olfactory pomp.
Today had been a harder day than usual.
Nyokabi was sitting outside at the matatu stage near Mahutini Bar when Madam wa Vitz beckoned her. All the wash women called her Vitz because she had a Toyota Vitz and made anyone who cleaned her house clean her car too.
It was not the first time she had cleaned Madam wa Vitz’s house. It was their third meeting. Madam wa Vitz never asked her name. Her eyes always slid over their heads as they sat there, like a woman inspecting managu at the market. They were all the same, but she wanted the ones without bristles. The managu that looked like it had the least problems always won the day. Nyokabi became the managu that made it home that day.
She did not give Nyokabi a ride in her Vitz; she gave her the house number and the time she was expected to be there.
Madam wa Vitz had no children. Or husband. Madam wa Vitz had more clothes than Nyokabi and her two children had combined. Madam wa Vitz had more food in her fridge than Nyokabi and her two children could afford in a single week.
“There are some leftovers in the fridge. They have been there for more than a week. Tupa zote nje. Sidhani kama nitakula.”
Nyokabi stuffed the food into her bag when Madam wa Vitz was not looking.
Madam wa Vitz took her to the bedroom for further instructions. It was always the same. Turn the mattress over. Fold and arrange the clothes in the wardrobe. Beat the bedside carpet. Change the bedsheets.
But there was some money on the bedside table. One thousand shillings.
Madam wa Vitz had not left instructions on what was to be done with the cash. The money beckoned to Nyokabi. Beckoned to her as a drunk man would a barmaid.
Nyokabi thought of the things a thousand shillings could do for her. Pay Ras security money. Milk for Lois. Would Madam wa Vitz even miss the cash if she took it? The crisp note was straddled by two hundred– and one hundred–shilling notes.
The week-old food Madam wa Vitz asked her to throw away cost more than a thousand shillings.
Nyokabi tucked the note into her bra and dusted the carpet with more gusto than she had ever done in her last three visits.
But Madam wa Vitz had a CCTV camera in her house that was connected to her phone. She waited until Nyokabi finished her chores before she confronted her: “Sasa umemaliza?”
Nyokabi confirmed that she had finished her chores.
“Sasa unangojea nikulipe after umeniibia pesa?”
“Madam nisamehe.”
But Madam wa Vitz had already called the police and they drove into the compound as Nyokabi murmured a prayer.
Madam wa Vitz said she could not pay someone who had already stolen from her. The officer who got out of the van held a chunk of Nyokabi’s buttocks and did not let go until they were seated side by side in the back of the vehicle. He kept his hands on her thigh as he asked her why she was using her breasts to hide money when she could put them to better use.
“Such as breastfeeding you? Did you not suckle from your mother’s breasts to your satisfaction?” Nyokabi asked him.
He called her a malaya but did not let go of her thigh.
Later, Nyokabi let him pummel her with his manhood. She never reached the police station.
* * *
Njenga knew he had to do something about Ras to help his mother. Sometimes he wished he had a huge magnet to use. That way, his mother would not have to worry about anything because he would use it to collect all the scrap metal he could and sell it to Light Industries. That way, his mother would never have to send him away.
“Enda kwa Nyalego, nikirudi nitakuletea kitu poa,” he told Lois. He knew that if he promised her something nice if she stayed behind, she would be less fussy.
Nyalego, their neighbor, sold fish at Mahutini Bar every evening. She laughed with her belly and had a kind, lined face. Her face was yellow with brown patches, but her knuckles were the color of soot. Njenga’s mother told him it was because Nyalego fried her skin with Miss Caroline lightening cream.
Njenga liked Nyalego. She taught them how to clean and eat fish and laughed when they grimaced as she gobbled fish eyes. She even gave them some fish once, but not a second time since his mother took too long to pay.
“Na usikae sana!” Nyalego said.
Njenga nimbly skipped over open sewer puddles as he made his way to Kiamaiko. Something bad always happened when the sewer burst. Njenga shook the feeling of foreboding from his shoulders as he bent down to nudge a piece of metal from a lump of mud and faeces.
What if Ras came back again? What would he tell him then?
If he collected enough scrap metal to sell to Light Industries, then he could help his mother pay security fees and buy food. The cling and clang of metal reminded him that he was the man of the house. It was the sound of his dream coming to life.
This time he would buy chicken legs. It had been a long time since they had chicken legs and anyona. He felt the taste of the pounded bread in his mouth when he thought about it. He imagined how he would roll it in his palm and dip it in the chicken legs stew.
“Si wewe ndio ule boy alijifanya ndume?”
Ras Kimani was suddenly towering over him, asking him if he was indeed the tough guy he had met earlier.
“I’m not asking for trouble. Naunga tu ndeng’a nipeleke Lightie . . .”
“Relax, boy. Unataka kusaidia mathako ama hutaki? Aren’t you the man of the house?”
“I am the man of the house . . .”
Ras told him he would help him become a better man of the house. That he needn’t hurt his fingers scavenging for scrap metal.
“How much will you get if you sell what you collected?” asked Ras.
“Fifty bob,” said Njenga shyly, avoiding the man’s eyes, not sure if Ras wanted him to pay the money to him or not. Fifty bob was way more than he could sell his scrap metal for and he wondered whether Ras would call his bluff.
Then Ras did something unexpected: he offered to give Njenga some money. Fifty bob!
“But you have to promise to help me if I ask for your help too, ni sawa?”
Njenga wondered what kind of help Ras would want from him, but not for too long. He could already anticipate his mother smiling at him and calling him her father. She only called him her father when she was happy.
Njenga took the money and stuffed it quickly in his pocket, as if afraid Ras would suddenly change his mind.
Ras laughed with mild amusement, snorting like a pig, satisfied that the boy had the right appetite for money.
“Meet me here tomorrow before school and I will give you something to keep for me. Tusaidiane. Let’s help each other, sawa?”
But something was nagging at him about the job. Njenga remembered what his mother had always told him—that she would disown him if he ever became a gangster.
“Ukishikwa,
usiseme wewe ni mtoto wangu. If they catch you, say you are not my son.”
But something more pressing squeezed the words from his head and he remembered how much his mother tossed and turned each night praying for Jehovah to provide for them and become their husband and father.
Maybe Ras was their Jehovah. Did Jesus not say He would come like a thief?
* * *
Njenga bought chicken legs for supper that day and watched as his mother and Lois licked the soup from their plates.
When Nyokabi asked her son about the money, he told her he’d worked extra hard kuunga ndeng’a.
“Thank you, my father,” she said, smiling.
He had found Lois waiting alone outside their house when he’d returned home. He did not ask their mother where she had been but saw that her lips were swollen and her dress was torn. He heard her sobbing when they went to sleep.
* * *
Ras was waiting for him in Kiamaiko the next day. He gave Njenga a package.
It was a homemade pistol.
He told Njenga to put it in his bag. Told him to neither ask nor answer any questions about it.
“Unajua ma sanse hawawezi kukusimamisha juu we ni mtoi.”
A ndeng’a. A gun.
Njenga stared at it for a few seconds.
A ndeng’a.
Njenga touched it and felt something running through his arm.
“Hii inaweza patia mtu shock?”
Ras laughed. He laughed like someone not used to laughing, like someone who’d just discovered laughing. Like someone who was using laughter to launch himself into an emotion he could not quite fathom.
“You are foolish but I like you. This won’t give you an electric shock but it could kill you if you play with it.”
Njenga took the pistol to school that day. And the next day. And the next.
He earned fifty shillings each time he took the pistol to school with him. One of Ras Kimani’s boys was always waiting for him at the school gate at break time to relieve him of the package.
Until Nyalego was shot dead.
Ras Kimani’s gang opened fire at Mahutini Bar and killed five people.
Njenga’s mother told him that Nyalego took the first bullet.
“It was Ras and his boys. Revenge killings. That’s what they are saying in the news.”
Njenga stopped unwrapping the chicken legs he’d bought and listened to his mother. Something was buzzing around his head and he felt like his hands were suddenly starting to swell.
* * *
Ras Kimani was waiting for Njenga in Kiamaiko the next morning.
Njenga wanted to ask him about the Mahutini Bar killings. The words wriggled up from his stomach to his throat and hovered there, tadpoles learning to swim but drowning each time their heads came to the surface.
He gripped the package tighter than normal and jammed the zipper of his school bag as he tried to shove the pistol inside. He bit his lips and sighed when he thought of how much it would cost to repair it.
He strapped the bag to his back and waited.
“Kuna shida?”
“Nyalego.”
“Who?”
“Nyalego. Aliuliwa jana Mahutini huko sao.”
Ras Kimani pursed his lips. “Wacha umama.”
“But alikuwa friend yetu. She used to help us take care of Lois.”
“Listen, boy. Nobody deserves to die but everybody dies anyway. Didn’t that church you go to teach you that already?”
Njenga hung his head.
Njenga took the pistol and buried it in the bush next to the Mathare River. He did not go to school that day.
But Ras and his boys came for him that evening. His mother was working at her new job as a barmaid at Mahutini Bar.
Lois screamed when they grabbed her brother and earned a slap that sent her sprawling across the room. She landed with a thud on the floor.
They dragged him out of the house. Ras Kimani had a nyahunyo in his hand.
“Wapi mali yangu?” he barked, but the answer was the rubber whip he landed on Njenga’s back as the boy screamed like a Christmas chicken having its throat slit.
“Rrrrrriap! Rrrrrriap! Rrrrriap!”
The nyahunyo came down hard as Ras Kimani’s boys watched. Ras beat defiance from Njenga’s face and back. Njenga was bleeding. He could not see.
Ras asked him where the pistol was and Njenga told him.
But some defiance was still alive in him and he told Ras he could not be a transporter any more.
Ras looked at him and smiled. “Do you want to see your mother again?” he asked.
Njenga said he did.
FOR OUR MOTHERS
by Wanjikũ wa Ngũgĩ
Pangani
Run, Paul shouted to Samina. He was behind her. Run. Run. The sirens were getting louder. Her legs felt heavy. We need to split, he said. No, she insisted. Let’s meet at home, he said. Samina knew he had run off in a different direction because she instantly felt alone. I must run. I must keep going, she thought, despite the stabbing pain in the bottom of her feet. Her vision was getting hazy as she snaked in and out of the streets of Pangani. It was as if the light was playing tricks on her, and maybe it was. Suddenly she was plunged into darkness. Like the sun had been switched off, and then her memory. She had no idea where she was, or whom she was, or why she was running. She opened her mouth. Help. No sound. She tried again. Nothing. Samina, someone called. She woke up with a start, her body drenched in sweat. Her mother Njeri was hunched over her bed, wiping her brow with a cold wet cloth like she had when Samina was seven.
There were tears on Samina’s face. Njeri got to them before Samina. Next, she pulled the covers over Samina. Nightmares? her mother asked. She nodded. The nightmares started when Samina was seven and left by the time she turned nine; they had returned a few months after she turned twenty-one. Samina told her mother she did not know why the nightmares returned, but she did know. Two weeks to be precise. That’s when her nightmares started replacing her life dreams.
Samina’s dreams were simple. She would get a job after her accounting certification, so her mother could retire from her second job selling vegetables and fruits at the Garrissa Lodge market. Njeri’s salary as a teacher at Pangani Primary School was only enough to pay for essentials but not anything extra. Take, for instance, the times when the city council decided to ration water, despite excessive rainfalls in the country. Njeri would resort to buying water from private companies rumored to be owned by government officials. Or when electricity went out, which in recent years had become routine, Njeri would need extra money to buy candles. She occasionally lamented that if Samina’s father was around, it would be easier, but Samina saw no need to labor on about a father who no longer existed. That’s what she told people about her father, the truth really being that he had disappeared before she was born.
This is what fueled Samina’s dream to go to college. No, not her father’s absence. A government employee should have known better than to impregnate a college student and then leave her. It was her mother that she always had in mind. They would move from Pangani to Nakuru after graduation, once she saved enough. Her late grandparents had spent their entire lives there. She had visited them a couple times, so she was aware of the crisp, fresh morning air and the vast lands covered in green. Pangani was dusty and loud and crowded. It was also windy, which only helped spread the odors that arose from the ditches where trash grew because the city council did not work or refused to work.
There were other options available for assisting her mother. Take her former neighbor. She dolled herself up in little dresses and visited drinking dens lined with fancy cars in Kariokor. It paid off because she moved to the blue-colored apartments across from Kimathi Street where the indoor plumbing never failed to work. Or her closest friends Satu and Batula who had worked out more efficient ways to make money. They did not harbor dreams of visiting drinking dens, or spending their hours under the sun selling things that took too long to sell, or
of going to college. During their meetups on weekends, over roasted potatoes, barbequed meat, and khat-infused drinks, Satu and Batula would try to lure Samina to their holy ventures. They called them holy because they operated in abayas and hijabs. They had tried recruiting her on many occasions, but each time she declined. Samina had learned many lessons as a child about taking things that did not belong to her, let alone hiding in abayas.
Aren’t you afraid of God’s wrath? On no, they said, and pointed out that they had sufficient reasons for walking around in religious garb. Satu said the whistling from the young men hovering in Pangani waiting to secure jobs ceased when she was decked out in the loose-fitting, full-length robe. Batula added it also kept the police at bay. They liked to hound her, telling her to go back to the Dadaab refugee camp, as if she had not been born in Nairobi or as if her grandfather, who was of Somali descent, had not been detained for joining the Mau Mau war of liberation. Also, and perhaps the genuine reason, Samina thought: nobody could pick them out of a police lineup.
Their jobs were straightforward. Transport. The packages could easily fit into the pockets sewn into the dresses they wore underneath the loose, long abayas. Like Samina, their fathers were not present. Satu’s father was killed in an armed robbery gone wrong in Runda. Batula’s father had been a boxer since his youth. No one knew if the stroke that killed him was a result of the blows to his head or the fact that he passed by Satu’s mother’s shebeen every day. Satu’s mother’s homemade brew was always in demand. She mixed what she called secret ingredients into the fermented corn and wheat drinks. Next, she poured the drinks into calabashes, unlike her competitors who used plastic bags so that the clients had to struggle to squeeze the viscous, porridge-like alcohol from the corners.
A few weeks before the nightmares that had stopped when Samina was nine started recurring, Satu and Batula asked to meet up with her. They came bearing barbequed chicken, soda, and laughter. Looking at them wrestling to get the chicken off the bone and drowning it with the fizzy drinks, one would not have known they were all twenty years of age. Satu was taller and big-boned so she appeared older. Also, she had too many words in her mouth, so she spent lots of time sharing them, mostly with women in shops. Batula had fewer words but was brash, and this is one of the reasons Njeri was not a fan of this trinity. The other being that every time Samina was sent home from school for snickering and talking in class, Batula and Satu were the other culprits. Njeri would swear and shake her finger at Samina and say things she did not mean like Batula and Satu would be the end of Samina. That was years ago when they were in high school, but Njeri was still stubborn. Samina didn’t concern herself with telling her friends they were not welcome in her house, but this was also why the friendship worked—because none of them bothered asking unnecessary questions. Deep down, of course, Samina was aware that her dreams did not include her friends’ proposals.