Gods and Soldiers (29 page)

Why, when all odds are against our thriving, do we move with so much resolution? Kenya's economy is on the brink of collapse, but we march on like safari ants, waving our pincers as if we will win.

Years ago, a guy, outside a theatre in Nairobi, told me he found Kenya strange. He was from the Caribbean.

“It is as if it is a country that has not thought itself into being.”

Maybe motion is necessary even when it produces nothing.

I sit next to the driver, who wears a Stetson hat, and has been playing an upcountry matatu classic on the cassette player: Kenny Rogers'
The Gambler.
There are two women behind me talking. I can't hear what they are saying, but it seems very animated. I catch snatches, when exclamations send their voices higher than they would like.

“Eh! Apana! I don't believe!”

“Haki!”

“I swear!”

“Me I heard ati . . .”

Aha. Members of the Me-I-Heard-Ati society.

I construct their conversation in my mind:

“Eee-heeee! Even me I've heard that one! Ati you know, they are mining oil in Lake Victoria, together with Biwott.”

“Really!”

“Yah!”

“And they are exporting the ka-plant to Australia. They use it to feed sheep.”

“Nooo! Really? What plant?”

“You knooow, that plant—Water-hyak haycy . . . haia. Argh! That ka-plant that is covering the lake!”

“Hyacinth?”

“Yah! That hya-thing was planted by Moi and Biwott and them in Lake Victoria. They want to finish the Luos!”

And the Illuminati, the Free Masons—where Biwott, a short man who is said to run everything, is supposed to be the hooded Masonic overlord, higher there even, we hear, than the president.

The Nissan drones on, we are in a narrow tunnel made of star-stitched black felt, all fifteen of us lost in our own thoughts. Outside, in the valley below, all I can see is thousands of sepia paraffin lamps, flickering dots, each carrying wriggling dreams—hidden behind stoic faces, and sturdy mud and wood homes, muffled behind the shrieking silence of night.

I know in these red fertile hills, where my own ancestors come from, and where pyrethrum and potatoes are grown, strange cults thrive, hundreds of charismatic churches, tens of apocalyptic churches, and in the dark, tongues flutter and throb, eyes roll; and in the morning, faces are stoic.

At seven, the taxi goes somber as the music is turned off, and the news comes on, and we discover that today President Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi lifted an eyebrow, shut one eye, examined a pimple, drank tea.

There are funeral announcements on the radio, then a song comes on that takes me straight back to a childhood memory.
Charonye ni Wasi.

It must have been a Sunday, and I was standing outside
KukuDen
restaurant in Nakuru, as my mother chatted away with an old friend. It was quite hot, and my Sunday clothes itched, the clean lines of colonial Nakuru met the raw and seemingly inarticulate noise of something else.

Then this song came on . . . Congo music, with voices as thick as hot honey, and wayward in a way Christian school tunes and English nursery melodies hadn't prepared me for. The music was familiar enough, there is no way to avoid rhumba in Kenya, but I
heard
the music for the first time today. Guitar and trumpet, parched like before the rains, dived into the honey and out again. The voices pleaded in a strange language, men sending their voices higher than men should, and letting go of control, letting their voices flow, slow and phlegmy, like the honey. There was a lorry outside, and the men unloading the maize were singing to the music, pleading with the honey. The song burst out with the odd Swahili phrase, then forgot itself and started on its gibberish again. Maroon Commandos.

It disturbed me, demanding too much of my attention, derailing my daydreams. I lean back, and close my eyes. Those were good days.

I am maybe seven.

A flamingo woman, her stick-like legs in cloggy high heels, handbag in her beak. Flying away. We are sitting on a patch of some tough nylony grass next to the verandah. I used to love that flamingo book, it came with a carton of books my mum got from some American missionary neighbours who were going back home. Sun is hot. I close my eyes and let the sun shine on my eyelids. Red tongues and beasts flutter, aureoles of red and burning blue. The colours of dizzy.

Mum is shelling peas and humming; Ciru is running around, with a yo-yo, from the same American carton of goodies. When Ciru laughs, everybody laughs, and when she is running and laughing, everybody is warm and smiling.

Yellow dahlias hang their heads, like they are sad. Jimmy is making a kite. Take a newspaper. Baba will beat you if you use the Sunday paper. Cut one page off its twin. Use a knife to split a stick of old bamboo from the fence. Tape sticks, diagonally, with cellotape. Three holes in a triangle, in the right place. Make a long long newspaper tail. Run. Run. Run.

There are two old kites stuck on the electricity wire.

I don't laugh a lot, my laugh is far away inside, like the morning car not starting when the key turns. It is Ciru number one in school, blue and red and yellow stars on every page. When I laugh it is when Ciru laughs and I find myself inside her laugh, and we fall down holding each other. She is seventeen months younger than me. It is Ciru in a white dress giving flowers to Mr. Ben Methu in school. If I am in the bath alone, I will sink inside and see the thick colours of things outside from inside the water, until my eyes are numb. If I am washing with Ciru, we are splashing and laughing and fighting and soon we are in a fever of tears or giggles.

From here we can see my whole home town, stretched springs of smoke, the silos, one a clump of four tall, glued together concrete cylinders, UNGA (Flour) LTD., and two separate metallic blue tubes where Baba works, at Pyrethrum Board of Kenya. PieBoard. Behind, Menengai Crater; to the left, Lena Moi Primary School, sitting under Nakuru Golf Club. Everywhere, there are purple, puffed up cabbages of jacaranda. Past the silos, green maize and paler wheat stretch out. All around, in the distance, are mountains, we are at the bottom of the Rift Valley.

Brown is near. Green far. Blue farthest.

From here you can see Nairobi road, and often there are long long lines of tanks and trucks and tanks and trucks and lorries going to the Lanet barracks.

President Kenyatta is going to beat Idi Amin.

President Kenyatta is a bull.

I look at pink and blue Lake Nakuru below me, watch the flamingoes rise up like leaves in the wind, our dog Juma grinning, mouth open and panting, and I have this
feeling.

It is a pink and blue feeling, as sharp as clear sky; a slight breeze, and the edges of Lake Nakuru would rise like the ruffle at the edge of a skirt; and I am pockmarked with whole-body pinpricks of potentiality. A stretch of my body would surely stretch as far as the sky. The whole universe poised, and I am the agent of any movement.

These are the maps; you dig your hand deep into the bag and extract them for use later, when your body is sluggish and awkward, and it seems you are wading through thick mud in the dark.

 

Nakuru. I am at home. The past eight hours are already receding into the forgotten; I was in Cape Town yesterday morning, I am in Nakuru, Kenya, now.

Blink.

Mum looks tired and her eyes are sleepier than usual. She has never seemed frail, but does so now. I decide that it is I who am growing, changing, and my attempts at maturity make her seem more human.

We sit, in the dining room, and talk from breakfast to lunch, congealing eggs around us. Every so often she will grab my hand and check my nails; a hand will reach into her mouth to lick a spot off my forehead.

We wander and chat, and things gather to some invisible assessment inside her, and she turns, sharp and certain, and says, “You smoke.”

I nod, eyes tap-dancing awkwardly, waiting for it to come: the full blow of power. It does not come: there is restraint.

They are worried about me, and for the first time in my life, worried enough not to bring it up.

I make my way around the house. My mother's voice, talking to my dad, echoes in the corridor. None of us has her voice: if crystal was water solidified, her voice would be the last splash of water before it sets.

Light from the kitchen brings the Nandi woman to life. A painting.

I was terrified of her when I was a kid. Her eyes seemed so alive and the red bits growled at me. Her broad face announced an immobility that really scared me; I was stuck there, fenced into a tribal reserve by her features:
rings on her ankles and bells on her nose, she will make music wherever she goes.

Two sorts of people: those on one side of the line will wear third-hand clothing till it rots. They will eat dirt, but school fees will be paid.

On the other side of the line live people some see in coffee-table books, we see in weekend trips to the village to visit family, on market days in small towns, and on television, translated back to us by a foreign man with a deep voice that has come to represent timeless days and bygone ways and an Africa ten metres away from us in the living room, and a million light-years from any reality we can process: this Africa is the same as Disney World, and Woody Woodpecker and Groovy Ghoulies and the Boomtown Rats. We are maybe less ironical about it because it comes from too far away from us for us to see into its motives, we can only try to seem familiar with a television language that is the Way the World Works.

So, in Nature Televisionese, these people are like an old and lush jungle that continues to flourish its leaves and unfurl extravagant blooms, refusing to realise that somebody cut off the water.

Often, somebody from the other side of the line.

We, the modern ones, are fascinated by the completeness of the old ones. To us, it seems that everything is mapped out and defined for them, and everybody is fluent in those definitions. In televisionspeak, they are a different species: they are spoken of in hushed reverential tones, like when the naturalist is showing us the birthing albino dragonfly. We are interested only in their general bygones.

The old ones are not much impressed with our society, or manners—what catches their attention is our tools: the cars and medicines and telephones and wind-up dolls and guns and anthropologists and Funding and International Indigenous Peoples' networks.

In my teens, set alight by the poems of Senghor and Okot p'Bitek, the Nandi woman became my Tigritude. I pronounced her beautiful, marvelled at her cheekbones and mourned the lost wisdom in her eyes, but I still would have preferred to sleep with Pam Ewing or Iman.

It was a source of terrible fear for me that I could never love her. I covered that betrayal with a complicated imagery that had no connection to my gut: O Nubian Princess, and other bad poetry. She moved to my bedroom for a while, next to the faux-Kente wall hanging, but my mother took her back to her pulpit.

Over the years, I learned to look at her amiably. She filled me with a fake nostalgia that was exactly what I felt I should be feeling because a lot of poetry-loving black people seemed to be spontaneously feeling this. I never again attempted to look beyond her costume.

She is younger than me now; I can see that she has girlishness about her. Her eyes are the artist's only real success: they suggest mischief, serenity, vulnerability and a weary wisdom.

I find myself desiring her. And I am willing to admit that this could be too because she has started to look like it is funky to look somewhere in this new Zap Mama, Erykah Badu, Alek Wek, polenta and sushi world.

I look up at the picture again.

Then I see it.

Ha!

Everything: the slight smile, the angle of her head and shoulders, the mild flirtation with the artist. I know you want me, I know something you don't.

Mona Lisa: nothing says otherwise. The truth is that I never saw the smile. Her thick lips were such a war between my intellect and emotion. I never noticed the smile. The artist was painting “An African Mona Lisa.”

The woman's expression is odd. In Kenya, you will only see such an expression in girls who went to private schools, or were brought up in the richer suburbs of the larger towns.

That look, that slight toying smile, could not have happened with an actual Nandi woman. The lips too. The mouth strives too hard for symmetry, to apologise for its thickness. That mouth is meant to break open like the flesh of a clapping Sunday.

The eyes are enormous: Oxfam eyes, urging the viewer to care.