One Day I Will Write About This Place (15 page)

This year, Kenyans start to arrive in South Africa in significant numbers. Sometimes I leave my room, always at night, and find myself in parties with small groups of young people. They carry stories that flow down the continent: Oh, the roads in southern Tanzania? What roads? And they laugh. Some people came regularly, to buy old Peugeots in South Africa from old white women and drive them back to Kenya for sale. After a few trips, knowing how to bribe; where to hide in plain sight; how to build a bulletproof refugee story; how to pay college fees; what to say in job interviews. (I am not political. Your roads are soo good. They will kill me. The politicians. I am from Rwanda. Somalia. Liberia. I lose my papers. I am orphan. No no am not doctor, I am refugee baby of Geldof. Look, look my face looks like pity baby of Geldof. No spik English.)

You collect information about traffic police in Botswana, who cannot be bribed; about college life in Harare. It is soo clean; education is cheap and good.

Moi rigged the elections, and the economy is sinking. There have been ethnic clashes in the Rift Valley, not far from where my parents live, where I was brought up.

In 1992, thousands were displaced from Rift Valley Province in Kenya. The principal aggressors were Moi’s militias. There are retalia­tions—and soon it is not clear who started what, where or when—­and soon the violence spreads out of the Rift Valley, into Nyanza and Western. It seems clear that Moi’s rule is soon coming to an end, and this serves as a sort of final solution, to rid the Rift Valley of “foreigners.”

I am desperate to go home. But I do not know what I will do there without a degree, with no money. My father begs me, on the phone, to stay and find a way for myself.

I do not tell him explicitly that I am now an illegal immigrant. I do not say I haven’t attended class in a year, I have failed to let myelf dis­appear into the patterns of a school where there is no punishment, no bell, no clear timetable, no real shame, for I am not at home, and don’t much care for the approval of people here.

I switch on the television, switch off the television and watch the swollen glowing belly of the screen for a moment. The night is quiet; I sit up on my bed and light a cigarette. The matchstick belly dances, a giant trembling feather of flame tiptoes across the wall. I reach out to kill the candle. Giant baby finger shadow and thumb shadow meet awkwardly on the wall. Thumb has learned not to think as it moves across hand to make a pincer with pointing finger, but pointing finger is busy carrying Olympic torch with the Big Man, middle finger, who does nothing at all, just stands there all up yours and presidential, but claims some kind of dubious authority based on height. Finger pincer meets flame, which screams for a moment before going dark. I wriggle back into my own pillow, and my tears start falling, and they don’t stop.

Brenda Fassie is back on the radio. A softer, surprising Brenda, singing the gospel song “Soon and Very Soon.” We are disarmed. And sigh. We don’t know if the song is so powerful because of her back­story, or because of the unusual sincerity of her delivery. She should have been called Grace, a lyrical tongue of silver light, built from shacks and gold dumps, of dust and cramps and dreams. Look, she says, what you can make of this.

There she is, an open target, taking bullets, and standing, each time more battered, but still coated in light. Why, why, Brenda, we ask, do you keep on loving and burning? Close yourself, Sis Brr. Close your­self, girl.

…

Chris Hani is dead in his driveway, he has been shot dead, and blood drips from his head and rolls down South Africa’s smooth tarmac, and you stand, dizzy. You make your way to the campus for the first time in over a month.

You buy several quarts of Lion beer. Victory drinks a lot now. He has a potbelly. He is dating a forty-year-old woman, with light glowing skin, a bank job, and a sixteen-­valve car. For sex, he says. I am going to make money, he says. I am going to be rich. Lulama broke up with him. She is a lesbian, he says; she drinks with her gang of friends.

I bark and bellow with my friend Trust, in Victory’s little shebeen. You can hear yourself grunt, and everything you say for the first few minutes is a sort of echo, as you watch his Adam’s apple bobbing.

You can hear the swarms of roars all over the campus.

The country will explode. Chris Hani, the last big barrier of the ANC’s left, is dead. Umtata is burning with anger. Students, even the cheese and wine club fashionistas, are turning over bins and chanting. Chris Hani is dead. We all saw the body on the tarmac on television, blood oozing from a broken head. Mandela, on television, begs people to be calm.

Trust’s cousin has a car. We drive around town. The whole of Umtata is on the street, crying and singing, feet pounding. We park at a giant open-air shebeen called Miles, after its millionaire owner. He has recently converted it from an old warehouse. It is at once a giant wholesale outlet for the thousands of Victorys of Umtata, and also a place where all the slinky car people can show off their music systems, and girls of the St. John’s Colleges of the world can choose the most compelling thumps and valves and bass and mags. An open-air, summer-­party place. You can buy meat and sausage and barbecue.

Our car is parked next to Tsietsi and his friends. Tsietsi used to stay across the corridor from me when I lived on campus. He has a gun and is a bad drunk. He claims to be a well-­known gangster in Johannesburg. His friends are covered in gold and cologne, the new language of these post–Berlin Wall times.

He likes to hang with some Zulu boys from Durban. One of them is Brenda Fassie’s ex-­husband’s brother. He looks just like his celebrity brother, Ntlantla Mbambo, but he has a clubfoot. A year or so ago, Brenda Fassie and Nhlanhla were having problems, only a few months after their wedding, which was in every magazine, every newspaper, every television program.

Tsietsi and his gangsters have a huge stereo in their room on campus. They leave the door open—­this way any woman passing by may peep in and be invited for some Fish Eagle brandy. Victory has banned Tsietsi from his shebeen. He likes to pull his gun whenever he is upset. A young woman—she can’t be older than sixteen—walks past his car. He grabs her arm. She resists. He is pulling her close. She is screaming.

I am hot with life and it feels good. I let the vodka jump down my throat. I can feel it running down the pipes, can feel the fumes out of my mouth, and I am so hot, I wait for them to catch fire.

Gasoline catches fire. My fist is in his mouth, and his teeth have cut into my knuckle. I pound him and pound him. Now he is crying.

It is terrible and I don’t know what to do. He bawls, loud and naked.
Ndiyaku… ndiyaku…
he is pumping his finger up and down like hip-hop or a cocking gun, or some obscure signal to the gangsters of the world that I am marked.

His friends just stand there, doing nothing.

Trust is streetwise. He is from Diepkloof, Soweto. Johannesburg is bigger and more violent than Nairobi. He knows I am in trouble. Me, I don’t care. It’s so good to feel alive again.

…

Trust grabs hold of me from behind, and he is all apology, his eyes never leaving Tsietsi and his friend, hand pumping downward gently, like hydraulics, “Ah-­sorry maagents, ohh-­magents, he is drunk, ma-­gents, he will sort me out, ma-­gents, sorry ma-­gents. He is just a drunk
Kwererekwere,
ma-­gents… these foreigners, you know, ma-­gents, they are funny like that, ma-­gents, Chris Hani is dead today, ma-­gents, people are just being crazy,” says Trust.

Then it lands. Pang.

A quart bottle of Lion beer shatters on my head. The feeling is beautiful. Tsietsi is strutting forward, his friends holding him back, his thumbs thrusting down like the buttocks of a sixteen-­valve car, his chest thrust forward, as he pushes forward, and is pulled back. I burst out laughing. I can spread this heat all over the world.

I start to move toward Tsietsi. Tires screech behind me, and Trust bundles me into the car. Ciru is in the car with us. I don’t know how she got here. She is crying. I ignore her.

I feel wonderful. There are little delicious explosions in my head for days—­small starbursts, spreading out around my skull, like my mother’s kiss. I lie in bed for a full day afterward, my heart beating, ideas and dreams punching, biting, hissing and kissing and rolling in, as shadows move like mud on the white ceiling of my small room.

Then I fall asleep again, waiting for the next surge.

It is 1995. Mandela is the president. We all danced and cheered for the inauguration. And I am going home. They sent a ticket. My parents. The day after tomorrow, I will be sitting next to my mother. I will wonder why I don’t do this every day. I hope to be in Kenya for nine months. I intend to travel as much as possible and finally to attend my grand­parents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary in Uganda this Christmas. Ciru will fly to Kampala and join us.

There are so many possibilities that could overturn this journey, yet I cannot leave without being certain that I will get to my destination. If there is a miracle in the idea of life, it is this: that we are able to exist for a time, in defiance of chaos. Later, you often forget how dicey everything was; how the tickets almost didn’t materialize; how long you took, time lost and you were snarled up in your own hair for days; how the event almost got postponed; how a hangover nearly made you miss the flight…

Phrases swell, becoming bigger than their context, and speak to us as truth. We wield this series of events as our due, the standard for gifts of the future. We live the rest of our lives with the utter knowledge that there is something deliberate that transports everything into place, if we follow the stepping-­stones of certainty.

For the first time in months, I find I can move with conviction. I pack, scrub, clean, comb, and even get to the aiport on time. I tell myself that the problem with me is simple. I am homesick. I hate my course. My body agrees.

…

I take the cheap Transtate bus in the afternoon, to save money for drinking with Trust, who has moved back to Johannesburg, where he works as a management trainee for a major insurance house.

This is the bus that black laborers take to and from Johannesburg. It is full of miners and businesswomen who buy things in the city to take back home to sell. All sleeping and drinking and quiet. Deep gothic gospel chorals chant on the stereo. And Dobie Gray, and Percy Sledge.

If you look out of the window into the dry countryside of the rural homelands, you see not crops, not human life; you see discarded plastic, as far as your eye can see, Transkei daisies they are called, like the millions of drifting people who work and consume shiny products. In this bus are men in overalls, with scarred faces, bleary eyes, and lips burned to pink splotches, from liquor. They sit in groups, in every bus rank of every small town we stop in, drinking clear bottles of cheap liquor. At lunchtime they eat sorghum beer, which is thick and nutritious, but leaves you drunk after lunch. Work, and drink, and work, and drink.

We drive past small rural towns, where girls and young men stand outside shops: a mountain of fried chicken packets pounded into the ground by months of feet; brochures grinning at you with shiny trinkets, from the floor, from a barbed-wire fence; magazine cutouts of clothes and glamour plastered on the walls of people’s rooms. On every surface there are shiny trinkets of gold plastic and blue and pink and bright yellow and green drinks being sipped out of packets that have a young beautiful person leaping in the air in rapture, a straw in her mouth. Yogi Sip!

Mandela is president. And Brenda Fassie now looks haggard and beaten. False teeth and shame. There are now new black people in suits and ties, on television, on the streets. There are black people with American accents, with white South African accents, soft breasts, six-­pack abs and regular features and good straight teeth, all over the radio, on television, in magazines showing off their new homes in white suburbs, their 2.3 children gleaming with happiness and swimming pool health.

There are black people talking about the market in serious credible tones. A good chunk of my finance class is in Johannesburg, working for Arthur Andersen. Marketing people are talking about a new thing called branding. Branding is changing South Africa, somebody told me once when we were drinking somewhere. You can no longer just tell people to buy the blue dress. Marketing has decided that to sell a thing you have to take time to create the right thoughts, feelings, perceptions, images, experiences, beliefs, attitudes. So, suddenly there are jobs for people who know all cultures. White people can no longer sell things to black people. It is about money, and money has decided to become like a rainbow. Kwaito—­a South African version of American hip-hop, hard, material, and cynical—is in.

Brenda appears on television railing one day: drunk, high, and incoherent. “This is not real music,” she says. “Kwaito is not real music.”

One day, it seems like an age ago, on a campus trip to Durban, we stopped the bus in the middle of the road to piss in the wilderness past Kokstad. The sky was huge; the air was cool and dry and smelled of tarmac fumes and daytime heat. The bus stereo system was on, and we were all drunk and somebody started to sing, and soon all drunk sixty of us were arranged in lines by the side of the road, doing the Bus Stop, laughing and singing, not one note out of place. The sky was huge—­we were only a few miles from the border, and beyond the road were giant white farms—­and we all knew there were guns there and threats, but in this moment we were all one woven mat of bodies singing struggle songs. I found I knew the words, but not the meaning; I knew the intent. Cars honked rudely, and we boarded the bus and sang all the way back to Umtata.

Mandela is president. We are entering the city limits of Joburg. I am going home. We find, for the first time, nothing at all to like about Brenda Fassie. We don’t want casualties from the past; they remind of us of the essential cruelty of hope.

What if change comes and we find ourselves unable?