One Day I Will Write About This Place (12 page)

Freddie puts the tape on, and we watch it, hear the heartbeat, see the gravestone: SMOOTH CRIMINAL; the dead silence; the neo-­ancient Egyptian woman turns her head; fingers crack, a cat purrs, hats poised leaning over one eye like the past about to come to life, clothes rustle. Then Michael Jackson appears in a white suit, shining. He tosses a coin. For the longest moment, it falls into place in the jukebox.

The whole beat of the song is taken away from the instruments and given to his body—­it jerks, slows time, wheels; it jerks when sounds swing; it marks time and seems to move not with time and beat, but in relationship with it. He has detached his body from those restraints. He is teasing time and space. His body is a needle, ducking headfirst into the stiff fabric of the world we know, the whole sepia-­colored past world tucked into his trousers. Now he scrambles history with his bod, makes it all a game for the body to enjoy; he is more flexible than physics. He is a plastic man, and he cannot fail.

…

One day, one slow hot day, we look out of our windows and see the sun is red and glowing. In the flat grassland distance, Kilimambogo mountain is dripping red liquid embers. The fire spreads toward us; the sky is dark with smoke. In the afternoon, the stampede begins. Teachers drone and drone, and from our classroom windows we watch giraffes speed past, chasing hyenas, zebras, small antelope. In the news, we hear that a lion escaped from Nairobi National Park and was terrorizing Langata residents.

That night Wahinya finds a puff adder in his locker. He is reaching his hand in to get some bread and margarine, and something wriggles in his hand, and he screams. The next morning we find two adders stranded on the cold pavement outside our classroom. It is so hot, every day, so dry, we wet our shirts for Double History in the afternoons, and in half an hour they are dry.

Moi and his cronies are on the radio daily. It is in the papers every day. These are dark days, we are told. There are dissidents everywhere. We have to all unite and silence the dissidents. From the radio, we know that foreign influenzes are invecting us, secret foreign influenzes are infringing us, invincing us, perferting our gildren, preaking our gultural moralities, our ancient filosofies, the dissidents are bushing and bulling, pringing segret Kurly Marxes, and Michael Jagsons, making us backliding robots, and our land is becoming moonar handscapes. They took the rain away, the Maxists, the Ugandans, wearing Western mini sguirts, and makeup, they are importing them, inserting them inside invected people, these dissidents, like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and that man called Raila Oginga Odinga.

Luvisia Wamalwa was born again. He came back after one holiday, looking sheepish, and said that he had backslid. Our world is born-­again or breakdance.

…

Wahinya, of the puff adder in the locker, starts to vibrate one day, in the recreation hall. His whole body vibrates, his head nodding up and down, each separate segment of limbs jerking like a robot every evening after supper, music thumping from illegal radio cassette players. Soon many of us are breakdancing.

Meanwhile, groups of students disappear at night to the vast acreage of bush behind the dorms, and we hear them at night screaming Cheezuz, Loord God, and moaning, throats vibrating, drums even. Murage, the breakdancer, who has rings of smudged dark cirrus clouds around his big eyes, spins on the smooth floor, falls to the ground, and spins on his back; his back arcs, like it is about to snap, then his head is a spinning top, whirring like a dervish, his legs turning like cake-­mixer beaters. He stands, tongue hanging, his eyes bursting with red veins, “Chaka Khan, Ch-­Cha-­Chaka Khan… baby baby when I think of you…”

A crowd has gathered around, clapping, and Ondiek, the oldest student in school, and in my class, stretches his arms toward Murage and starts to pray in tongues: be defeated, breakdance devil, be defeated.

As the madness grows, the fever of studying grows. We Mangu boys are engineers by sensibility, and we believe there is a formula to fix any bump. Wayward nature and coincidence can be managed by design. Not ideology or revolution. We discuss new ways to contort, rearrange, re­design ourselves to fit in. We study through the night, sneak away to drink on weekends. Others go to mass gatherings of hundreds of thousands of Pentecostals in Uhuru Park.

Ondiek and his Christian Union crew bring the preachers, who land, from Bible courses in Texas and Nigeria, wearing white blazers, maroon shirts, and gray shoes and say Gaaaaaard a lot, and Cheezuz, and all over our school campus there are crusades, and group screams and seizures. With equal abandon, all over Kenya, streets line up with kids now called Boogalo Shrimp and Shaba Doo.
Breakdance
is the biggest movie in Kenya’s history. Our largest stadia hold giant Pentecostal crusades with hundreds of thousands attending. Me, I watch, and read more novels, read and throw them away like chewing gum. I know there is no end to them—whenever I finish one library’s fiction section, a new library, a new section, a new friend introduces me to a new thing. I am reading a lot of sci-­fi.

On the coffee plantations in the hills behind our school, on the giant Del Monte pineapple plantations in the plains to the east, bodies are being found without genitals.
Makende
cutters, we are told. Rumor has it the genitals are going to India. On television, a dirty pale man who has wild eyes and sings for a band called Boomtown Rats is crowned the king of Ethiopia. He is everywhere. Every news broadcast, every song in the whole world. Bob Geldof.

Wherever he is people fall, twist, writhe, lose language skills, accumulate insects around their eyes, and then die on BBC. Food pours.

They feed us yellow American maize in the dining hall. Donated from America. We have a huge
ugali
fight, throwing balls of yellow
ugali
at each other and laughing. We hear rumors that maize flour has chemicals in it, for birth control. It tastes of chemicals, we are sure. We hear it is only fed to animals in America, yes, yes, it smells bestial. It is yellow, a wrong, wrong color for our national staple.

One hungry day, we find ourselves surrounding JosFat’s office. An all-­school riot.

The whole school is singing South African liberation songs. JosFat is sweating. “You want money? You want money?” he says. “I can give you money.” He rushes into his office. Then sneaks out of it hurriedly, through another door in the administration building, and jumps into his car. We throw stones at it and run around the school, breakdancing and shouting and singing South African songs.

We head for the farm. Boomtown rats. We light night fires and roast maize; soon we are pounding out porko miro! Porko miro! We invade the sty, grab the pigs, all of them, and soon pieces of roast pig, some half raw, some burned, some still hairy, are being chewed by us all. We are burping, drunk and happy when the police come. Even the born-­agains eat pork this day.

National exams come; results are hung up. We have the best results in our history. The best in the country. The mythology grows: when the pressure rises, when things get worse, we improve our results. We are special. People like us, engineers and doctors, should rule the world.

…

In 1987 we write our fourth form exams. I fail in all the sciences and do well in all the arts. I am one of the top students in English in Kenya, and probably at the bottom in physics. I move to a new school to do my A-levels, which takes two years. Lenana School. I pick French, literature, and history as my subjects. Mangu does not accept arts students for A-levels.

I spend all useful time in my advanced-level years making plays and novels, or reading and looking for scholarships in America with my best friend, Peter Karanja, who loves novels as much as I do. I do not study much.

Our most successful play is a courtroom drama called
The Verdict.
I play a prostitute with a heart of gold called Desirée who falls in love with a repressed boy who murders his mother. The stage is beautiful. We have raided the chapel for fine Anglican velvets and old wood tables with gravitas. Everything is in the school colors, maroon and white, with the white rose embroidered everywhere.

Lenana is an old settler boarding school. Once it was a cadet high school, the Duke of York, for the children of British settlers threatened by the Mau Mau. It is a whole world away from Mangu.

At the climax of
The Verdict,
the defense lawyer, played by Peter, jumps off the stage and releases a volcano of rhetoric that leaves the audience gasping. We steal much of that from the courtroom scenes in Richard Wright’s
Native Son.
It does not occur to us what Richard Wright would think of us dressed up as if we lived in the colonial White Highlands, in Nairobi, using his words.

We win all sorts of prizes. On a high, five of us start a theater company, the Changes Pycers, and put on a play at the French cultural center with our pocket money. We make our posters and rehearse all over town in secret. Lenana is a boarding school—­and strict.

The school principal is furious when he reads the reviews in the newspapers.

We can’t believe that we have pulled this off.

After school, I spend a term at Kenyatta University, doing an education degree and majoring in French and literature in English. I am terrified I will end up becoming a schoolteacher. A fate worse than country music. Ngugi wa Thiong’o is a writer and playwright, a Kenyan playwright, and people say he says that women should not perm their hair or wear lipstick. I have permed my hair. I like it. Ngugi wa Thiong’o is Kenya’s most famous writer, and was arrested by Moi in the early 1980s and imprisoned. He is in exile now, and he is trying to bring down the government. His books are banned in Kenya. He is a communist and says that to decolonize we have to write our literature in our languages. I don’t like Moi—but if those people take over the government, what music will we listen to?
Nyatiti
? I love writing. I love the theater. I fear writers; they want to go too deep and mess up the clear step­ladders to success. I cannot see myself being this sort of person. I dream of studying advertising. Anyway, the toilets at the National Theatre smell. I can make plays in my extra time. Musicals.

We are sitting in a cheap bar in Westlands, Nairobi, Peter and I, getting drunk and celebrating. It is 1990. Peter is off to America on a scholarship. I am leaving too, to study for a bachelor of commerce degree at a small university in one of South Africa’s black homelands, Transkei. My parents are worried—­the government, pressed by the IMF, is about to stop subsidizing university education. I am already a student at Kenyatta University, doing a degree in education. Because courses are very competitive, I failed to get the course I chose, law. Education would have been fine with the subsidy, but after one semester, for the first time since Independence, Moi announces that we have to pay our own fees; our parents have to support our university education. Baba and Mum were not keen on letting us leave the country so young at first, but the university system is in some chaos, and now that they are being forced to pay, we may as well pay for courses we can choose.

Uncle Kamazi, Mum’s younger brother, who teaches mathematics and statistics at the University of Transkei, helps us through the application process. South Africa is opening up, he says; there is opportunity there. It is cheaper than America or Europe. We have family there. Baba likes the idea. Mum is all for it. I want to leave, Ciru wants to leave.

A woman stands and walks toward our table.

She is older, and glamorous, in a short blue shimmery dress. She sits next to us without asking and flicks her fingers at a waiter, her skin Hollywood yellow and matte, lips shiny pink, eyes lazy and smoky.

Mpah!

“A Black Russian,” she says to the waiter, who bows, and our eyes widen. We have no idea what a Black Russian is. We know things are very black indeed in Russia. That walls and countries are falling all over the place.

Her accent has something in it, German maybe, mixed into her Kenyan accent. Her hair is long and shaggy, the color of caramel chocolate, like Tina Turner’s.

“I am on holiday,” she says, in an air stewardess voice. “My husband is from Austria. We are divorced.”

We order Black Russians. We get drunk and dance. She plays the big sister, the naughty older cousin, the dangerous young aunt—­flirting with us, laughing at our youth, shocking us by saying the things her husband liked to do in bed.

“He did not like me to perm my hair,” she says, tossing her mane. “He wanted me to grow dreadlocks. He did not like me in makeup. He liked to see me eating with my hands. He would make me sit on his lap, and if I put my hands in the food and mopped the soup with bread and put it in my mouth, I could feel his
mkwajo
rising under me. Sometimes he would play a video of a woman being fucked from behind by a big black man, and shouting in her language. I think she was a West African. She was shaking her buttocks, big fat buttocks, like those dancers from Congo. He got very excited. I got a lot of money when we divorced.”

Our schooling machine, nationwide, merit-­based, proud, and competitive—Kenya’s single biggest investment—­is falling apart, and the new season sounds like Band Aid. It’s all over CNN. Open mouths, and music, thousands and thousands of white people throwing food and tears and happiness to naked, writhing Africans who can’t speak, don’t have dreams, and share leftovers with vultures.

My friend Peter and I spent much of our A-­level years in Lenana School mastering the language of American scholarships and avoiding actual study. If our fields and labs and classrooms look the same as they did ten years ago, we don’t notice.

Since the 1950s, all the Kenyans who did well in exams have not had to worry about money. The idea was that this was the way to make new people. The children of dirt-­poor peasants could become doctors. This is where my parents came from. Now, the IMF has insisted that we stop spending so much government money on education. It is truly the only thing that works in Kenya. There is a national network of schools, and every year tens of thousands find their way into skills and futures. Now the Berlin Wall has fallen, and our great universities, where the rich and those who came fom poverty were finally equal—­that is gone. Even those with money cannot afford much. They were not prepared for this. There is suddenness to things. Big big things around the world are changing overnight, and there is a sense of panic. It is possible to believe what Geldof is promising, that we will fall down a big Africa hole. The project to make people like us is ending. Now those who have, grow, and those who don’t stay behind. Those who have can leave. Some parents sell their most precious assets to send their kids away.