One Day I Will Write About This Place (25 page)

Escape here, says the hand-­painted ad; sample a little bit of rural home. Two drunk men try to carry a cow into a
matatu,
their legs waggling like earthworms. In the distance, coffee plantations gleam, like gold.

After a few months, this mural disappeared. The bar owner was bored with it and threw it away. He bought a pool table and a VCD player.

Every few weeks I go to Nakuru and spend some time with Baba. We have a beer at Njoro Golf Club, eat there even, and talk. He is the chairman of the club, and spends a lot of time there restoring things and making them work again. It’s strange to us—­we are all used to seeing each other through my mother’s gentle public relations. It is hard to believe this Baba who makes mistakes, who can be unsure of himself, who is not up and out of the house at 8:00 a.m. every day. The new people at Pyrethrum Board have been mismanaging things, and it is hard for him to stand aside and watch what he has worked for be destroyed by incompetence. The new managing director is from Moi’s tribe. A diplomat, with no experience working with farmers. I get angry and flap my hand about when Baba tells me this, and he remains measured and sensible, writes reports, and goes to Nairobi often and discreetly to meet ministry people and suggest ways to keep Pyrethrum Board alive.

I stop at a tin and clapboard and recycled tin barbershop, which is asymmetrical and coiled around a get-­together of wiggling paths, made slick by large advertorial murals—­painted, again, by Joga.

Mash and Ndizi stand outside, as they do every day, eyebrows offering suggestions whenever eye contact is made with a potential customer. Kalamashaka, the original rappers in Sheng, growl out of a music system that sits outside: “I’m so thirsty Sprite cannot quench my thirst / I’m so tired trying to maintain an image…”

Kalamashaka live up the road, in Dandora. Only here, in the slums of Nairobi, has some sort of three-­in-­one language developed, Sheng, and slowly hip-­hop musicians are bringing Sheng to life all over the country: angry burning songs about the struggle of life in a falling city, on new FM radio stations that have opened the previously restricted airwaves.

Joga’s work on this barbershop has a metallic aspect. Master P’s golden face leers, filling a whole wall, gold glinting on his teeth, on his fingers, around his neck.

There is a small portrait of Osama bin Laden on the door, and the rest of the walls and the stand-­alone sign on the ground are taken up by paintings of soft slick African American haircuts. On quiet nights I have turned a corner and a giant Joga face—ruby-­colored lips parted to whisper green-­card lottery dreams in an air hostess voice—slaps me to attention.

Mash has a face like a Cadbury drinking chocolate advert, shiny yellow cheeks and dimples. A James Hadley Chase novel,
No Orchids for Miss Blandish,
peeks out of the side pocket of his denim jacket. We met a few weeks ago, at an open-­air book exchange near the KBS depot. Ndizi, his business partner, has remained elusive, sliding away smoothly whenever I try to pin him down, always friendly, always aloof.

K-­Shaka rap: “Are you thinking of bringing a ridiculous cast to my funeral / Please hide the machete before thoughts start roaming.”

We chat, and my eyes wander. Paths zigzag, crash into shops, and swerve off, so at ground level you can’t see any farther than a few meters, an instinctive maze fulfilled by a naked citizenry, a protection from surprises: Police. Authorities.

When Mungiki militias took over in this area, they started to build straight roads and demolish shacks. They said that straight roads make it hard for thieves to hide. Most of us think Mungiki are the lowest of the low. Fanatics. Mafiosos. Mash is a Mungiki supporter; he says crime has stopped and young men have something to believe in, something to do.

All the systems that function here are built on small relationships. You—­your branded individuality and its costumes, and your manner, and the trade or activity this costume represents—­are the institution that matters. You negotiate your power in every conversation.

Joga comes out of the barbershop to say hi. He often hangs out here. He has changed. The awkward nineteen-year-old I met a year ago, wearing the shyness of the village, is gone. He is now a celebrity. Eastleigh, only a few hundred meters away, has “discovered” his work, and he has new commissions nearly every day. He has his first contracts with the formal city, and the respect that this brings.

He no longer wears paint-­splattered jeans; he has on a trendy fleece jacket, baggy pants, and Nikes. He has acquired that loose-­walking way that is referred to as cool. He will stop and lean against a wall, slouching slightly. He will not stare at anybody, like he used to, with eyes that declared his shyness; he will let his glance sit lightly on whoever addresses him. The glance will acknowledge that person’s contribution, and the shutters will close.

He nods his head to one side, one eyebrow lifting in greeting. I nod back.

“Nimemaliza,” he says to the group, and we follow him inside, to see a huge two-meter by two-meter portrait of Jay-­Z.

“Ni kaa photo.” It’s like a photo, says Ndizi. I look at it, and there are little cartoon emphases: gleams exaggerated on his teeth, cartoon bursts of diamond bling! Jay-­Z’s features are exaggerated, for effect. Joga does not see a difference between his pungent cartoon images and photographs.

I grew up with people whose lives dived down from television satellites, and shot past us. Going Somewhere People. We followed: all of us scrumming to enter the bottleneck beyond which international-­level incomes are offered. We are threatened, every minute, by failure, if we question the stepping-­stones of certainty presented to us, if we fail to be fluent in the fashions of MTV and London and New York.

Joga does not know what an art gallery is; he does not seem to believe me when I tell him about the Nairobi art scene at Kuona and the French cultural center. Even here, he has never apprenticed under anybody. He taught himself; his whole evolution as an artist has been mediated only by his translation of what he sees and hears.

Which face do you pick to meet chaos? The one built from the ground up, baring all your past, all your scars? Or the adopted one, wired to a certain manner that you have discovered will open doors to the scholarshipped, resuméd, backed-up, buffered world out there and the piece of stamped paper that promises that you will inherit the earth?

Me, I am like a squirrel, looking for opportunity all over the Inter­net. My story “Hell Is in Bed with Mrs. Peprah” is accepted by a small American magazine, and I celebrate.

But I find out that it won’t be published in time for the Caine Prize deadline. The magazine, in Nebraska, can only pay in contributor copies.

In a panic, the day before the submission deadline, I ask Rod Amis to publish my girlchild story for me on g21.net.

He says he can’t publish fiction. I send him a quickly re­edited version of the Uganda story I published in South Africa.

We decide to call it “Discovering Home.”

Rod submits it, and gets a snooty e-mail from the Caine Prize people in England, saying they only accept stories published in print.

I am furious. I write back, telling them only one anthology has been published in Africa in the past year. Where do they find published stories? I ask.

They don’t respond. Fuck them, says Rod. Bloody colonizers. Yes. Yes, I say.

Joga is stuck in the same place I am. Can only see his pictures as photographs because, like me, he receives ideas from some far-­off capital. Nobody here will pass up a chance at gold and bling and puppy dog jeans. Does he have any idea how fresh his work looks, after the elaborate mimicries of the other Nairobi? I hand over some money to Mash, and Ndizi passes me the rolls of
bhangi.
His dreadlocks splash spaghetti shadows on my shirt.

“Why do they call you Ndizi?”

His laugh sounds like paper rustling on a radio microphone.

“Ndizi kaa Sundaymorning.”

An answer and no answer. A Jamaican accent smudges the seams of his Sheng. His voice has the rich musical undertones of a Luo. I turn and head back slowly for home. I laugh to myself. Joga is better off than I am. Rod can’t afford to pay me a hundred dollars a week anymore, so I can’t even afford to live in this slum.

I last three months.

I go home and ask Baba if I can stay with them in the new house. Ciru has a job, with an Internet start-­up. Chiqy works for a mobile phone company in Nairobi. Her son, Bobo, lives with us while she sets herself up. I babysit my nephews and write and cook. I do small features for local magazines in Kenya. I meet online and make friends with a young Nigerian woman, Chimamanda Adichie, who is also trying to get published. We critique each other’s work. Soon, we are e-mailing every day.
I meet Muthoni Garland online and other Kenyan writers—­a community starts to connect and talk. Soon we are talking about publishing, about starting a magazine.

I am online all day and all night. Baba complains about the bills. An uncle is sent to speak to me. He has this new machine. It can take cheap alcohol and seal it in small sachets. “You talk well,” he tells me. “You can do sales and marketing and make some money.”

I am about to say yes when the e-mail from the bloody colonizers comes.

Dear Caine Prize Shortlisted Guy, called Binya… vanga. Do you want to come to England, and have dinner in the House of Lords, and do readings, and go to the Bodleian Library for a dinner of many courses, with wine, and all of London’s literati? At this dinner, you will find out if Baroness Somebody Important will give you fifteen thousand dollars in cash, and even if she doesn’t, you should come because being shortlisted and having dinner at the House of Lords and such is like a big deal, a really big deal. Will you come?

Oh yes. I go.

I win the Caine Prize, and cry, bad snotty tears, and come back with some money. A group of writers and I start a magazine, called
Kwani?
—­which means so what?

I am traveling a lot now, sometimes on magazine assignments. I always look for reasons to travel in Africa.

One day a very nice Dutch man calls me up. “Are you Binya-­wanga? The writer?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I heard about your work. I work for the European Union Humanitarian Something. I want to produce a book about Sudan, about sleeping sickness in Sudan.”

“I don’t really do development writing,” I say.

“Oh, no no. We want a proper… African writer to write a book about what he sees. You know, literature. We will publish it and pay for everything. You will go with a photographer. It will be something different. Powerful. Literature and photographs.”

“You mean you will pay, and I can write whatever I see?”

“Yes.”

“And you can say that in the contract?”

“Yes.”

So I go to Sudan, and come back shell-­shocked. I start to write. I fictionalize parts of it. I met a South Sudanese doctor who worked for the SPLA. He would work the whole morning and get violently drunk in the afternoon. Sometimes his superiors would send him to Nairobi to get in shape, then return him to the front to patch broken bodies together and throw them back to the war. He refused to leave his work and get a decent job somewhere. I decide to make him a poet. It is the first poetry I have written.

I send the finished text to the nice Dutch man.

He is quiet, for a long time. Then I am called to a meeting. His supervisor is in town, from Brussels. The EU is very jittery about the book. They say that EU policy says there is only one Sudan, but my story says South Sudan!

They are also concerned about language… some… improper… unseemly… language. Many things are not in line with EU policy. They have a proposition. Scrap the book. Keep the money. What they can do is fund an awareness-­raising photo exhibition. And for the exhibition, I can write a few paragraphs—­within the parameters of EU policy on Sudan, of course. You keep your full fat fee, of course. I tell them to fuck off in seemly language. I raise the money elsewhere, and
Kwani?
publishes the book.

I start to understand why so little good literature is produced in Kenya. The talent is wasted writing donor-­funded edutainment and awareness-­raising brochures for seven thousand dollars a job. Do not complicate things, and you will be paid very well.

…

Moi has been voted out. We have our first proper democratic government since the 1960s. I came down from Nairobi, where I am now living, two days ago, to my hometown, Nakuru, to vote. I decide to take a trip up Moi’s heartland, through Baringo, and all the way to Pokot, beyond the tarmac, where I have never been, and where I am told people ask you, did you come from Kenya?

The road extends out into the distance, knobbly gray tarmac, straight and true, and making equal: Nakuru town; the agricultural showground; the dead straight line of jacaranda and their morning carpet of mushy purple on rich, brown damp earth; ex-­president Moi’s palace and its attached school in Kabarak; plains of grain and cattle; stony, sky land, hot and dry; a pile of lonely casks of fresh milk, slowly souring by the side of the road; another pile of recycled bottles filled with dark, beer-­colored Baringo honey, waiting for a market that is not coming; an arm reaching out to show off a wriggling catfish to the odd city car; a huddle of schoolgirls in purple school skirts swollen by the wind into swaying polyester lamp shades, giggling; goats seated in the center of the road just past Marigat town; dried riverbeds; groups of shining Vaselined people walking or cycling by the side of the road, to church, sometimes ten or more kilometers away; ten or twelve tribes, three lakes. The whole unbroken line of human evolution here, in the base of the Rift Valley, as I head out to visit Pokot.

This road was the promise of a president, for his people. The honey projects, the milk, the irrigation scheme not far from here that once produced eggplants the size of small pumpkins—­all these things failed to find markets.

…

Until a few weeks ago, Moi was every policeman, the photo on every wall; he was all the cash in the bank, the constitution. We wanted him gone; we were afraid of life without him.