One Day I Will Write About This Place (28 page)

“How much?” he says.

…

We are in a suburb of Lagos near the airport, going to see Lagbaja, the Masked One, a high-life musician popular with university students and intellectuals for his political lyrics. He wears a mask and has his own nightclub called Motherlan’.

We keep passing nightclubs. People dressed to the nines, music thump-­thumping from large buildings. But sometimes there are families with children. I ask my friend, “You mean you guys go to nightclubs with children?”

He laughs. “That is not a nightclub. Those are all night churches.”

In 2005 we are three years into Kibaki’s government, and there is tension. Many things have happened. Many good things—­but tribalism is increasing. Kibaki is Gikuyu, and non-Gikuyus feel his government betrayed a gentleman’s agreement made when a coalition of political groups came together to remove Moi’s party from power in 2002. Raila, who was promised the post of prime minister and who had proposed Kibaki for president, is given the ministry of roads. There is a feeling that a powerful group of people around Kibaki, some of them from Kenyatta’s time, are determined to secure the grip of Gikuyus in power. We all thought that these sorts of games were over. They brought us to the brink. But our politicians are still playing them. Now that Kibaki has lost the trust of non-Gikuyus, Gikuyus are terrified that if he loses power we will be victimized. The beneficiaries of all these games are the political classes and their children. Most Gikuyus remain poor; most Kenyans remain poor.

Five years ago, in 2000, I landed at home, for my mother’s funeral, and found myself in a small steamy office of a security official at the Mombasa airport. I did not have a yellow fever certificate. A group of red-­eyed officials had cornered me as I picked up my luggage. I tried to plead, using my mother’s death, patriotism, Kiswahili, hand-­wringing, ah bana, please, I said, head tilting sideways, Boss, Chief, Mkubwa, Mzee, Mamsap, Sir. There was no yield. A long shabby man just stared at me, smiling. So I reached into my pocket and gave him one hundred dollars. As I walked away, I could hear them smirk behind me.

In 2002, less than a month after the election, I walked through the airport and found to my surprise that all officials smiled, said hi, welcomed me home. “Where are you coming from?” a woman asked me, smiling. “Many people are coming home now,” she said. If I asked anybody, of any tribe, so, how are things? I could expect a familiar answer, sometimes gossip: they stole the mayor’s chain. We were the most optimistic country in the world. Much bar talk was even sympathetic about Moi—­people were angry that during the inauguration, the crowds, the largest in Kenya’s history, had thrown mud at Moi. How unseemly. There were stickers with the flag everywhere. All the cool twenty-­something designers for the Sheng-­speaking new and detribalized generation of Kenyans were making baggy clothes with the flag placed proudly somewhere funky, a toned buttock, a hood, a bandanna.

If you carry a Kenyan passport and are leaving Kenya to go to London, with a valid visa, on our national carrier, there is a particular little humiliation you need to go through: you are pulled aside, by somebody from our national carrier, and asked to explain why you need to go to London. You are asked questions; your passport is photocopied and examined closely.

Tourists with better geopolitics sail past you.

So, one day, two years ago or so, well into Kibaki’s season as president, a young woman, with a good middle-­class accent and that breathy sing­song air hostess voice, looked at my passport, then looked at me, then looked at my passport, then looked at me, then asked me, “What tribe are you?”

I was startled. Something was wrong with this pattern. She manifested no tribe at all in her body language, in her English even. She was a young Nairobi girl in an air hostess uniform. In many years of flying, nobody had ever asked me what tribe I belonged to. Of course, this is not to say that tribe did not matter.

If I belonged to the same tribe as the red-­eyed crew who waylaid me those years ago for a yellow fever certificate, I would have escaped, but they would not have asked overtly. And I would not have asked them.

I would have been clued in to them; it is easy enough to tell who shares your mother tongue. What we would do is start to chat casually in our mutual tongue, in low voices—­all of us conscious, for no clear reason, that this was a way of dealing between ourselves, and it is okay, but it can be shameful if it is too public.

So I thought maybe this young woman was not serious. So I asked her, jokingly, whether the authorities in England had blacklisted Gikuyus. No. She laughed. “But… but,” she asked, “this name of yours, Binya-­minya-­faga, where is it from?” She was smiling her air hostess smile, head tilted to the side happily.

“Nakuru,” I said, naming my hometown. The name Binyavanga originated in Uganda. I was not about to make this easy for her. She jabbed me happily with her elbow. “Haha,” she said. “Haha, you are sooo funny, but, really, where is that name from? I just want to know.”

I switched to Kiswahili. This is easy enough to deal with in stern Kiswahili. “My sister,” I said, looking very brotherly and concerned about her manners. “Yaani, what is your business with this?” Kiswahili, the language of an old civilization, used to handling diverse people, full of rhetoric and manners, is perfect for revealing unreason. It is our national language, and it is more painful to be accused of ethnic bigotry in Kiswahili. In Kiswahili we feel a brotherhood and we are in the habit of this. If you fail with this approach, then real shit is coming.

“Are you doubting that I am a Kenyan?” I looked her straight in the eye. In Kiswahili this is devastating.

She was taken aback. The queue behind me was impatient.

Backtracking, she said, “Oh. No. Ai! You mean it is wrong to ask? Kwani I can’t just ask you? I am just asking? Your last name is Gikuyu… where is the other name from?”

She still did not let me move. Finally I lost it and said, “Are you saying I can’t check in until I answer your question?” She pouted and let me pass, and for a second I saw her small sneer.

After the incident with the air hostess, three years into Kibaki’s reign in Kenya, my name has begun mysteriously to twist tongues. Binyawho? Manyabanga? Sometimes people laugh at it. All the people who find their tongues unable to pronounce my name are Gikuyus. My own tribe. Some members of my family. Friends even. One person stops me on a street to tell me how happy he was to see me in the newspaper—­but that name of yours, my friends are asking, you are half what?

Now that we have a Gikuyu president, for the first time in my life, to be Gikuyu is a public event. You are tagged and measured, and then people let you in; there is a national conversation taking place, and this conversation is happening in Gikuyu, for Gikuyu, and of Gikuyu.

The rest of Kenya has become the Tribes. There is a text message being sent to Gikuyus calling Luos and people from western Kenya “beasts from the west.” This sort of thing is being peddled even among the middle classes. The direct targets of this are the Luo, personified by Raila Odinga, who is becoming the devil in hundreds of text messages and Web sites. For decades the public face of Kenya’s struggle for identity has been symbolized by the battles of towering Gikuyu politicians fighting towering Luo politicians. In our vague unthinking way, we Gikuyus have come to see Luo meaning the coming of communism and emotionalism, and the collapse of order.

To be Gikuyu, it is said, now every day, in nearly every forum in which Gikuyus gather, is to be reasonable. We are the invisible middle-­class objectivity of Kenya. For others to belong among us, they have to behave like us. We do not need to examine ourselves.

We need to tame the tribes.

Years ago, I sat with an old man I respect, and he told me that Kenya would work wonderfully if we had an overt policy to develop people according to their tribal abilities. Positive tribalism, he called it. The Luhya are strong, and they make good laborers. They also speak English very well, he conceded. The Luo are very artistic and creative. They are good tailors. The Kamba make good soldiers because they are loyal. The man went around the pizza called Kenya, naming every slice and according it grace. It completely escaped him that every skill coincided nearly perfectly with the first acts of labor division introduced by the British, that he was, in fact, affirming exactly how we were defined and given roles to play in colonial Kenya. These identities were, in his mind, our permanent tribal personality. I asked him, so what will the Gikuyu do in this utopian Kenya? He was surprised, and frowned. It had not occurred to him. The Gikuyu just were, and everybody else was ethnic.

Something slipped into his generation’s view of a possible Kenya. Those early Gikuyu technocrats under Kenyatta inherited, nearly exactly, the British idea about who does what. Who runs things. Who can. Who can’t, and why not. The tribes were primeval and could not escape their fate. This impartial and objective view is always presented as the conclusion of a long and thorough analysis, which, by complete co­incidence, comes up with the finding that if you look at it all, all of Kenya, analytically, especially now that our president, Kibaki, is Gikuyu, any reasonable person will come to the conclusion that we Gikuyus are the best people to allow the tribes to develop.

I am home from teaching in America. Paul and William, my nephews, are eight and seven. Jimmy is doing well. He has two daughters. His house is full of kids running around. I laugh at him and say how he used to tell us he would live alone like a hermit. He tells me the economy is doing well. He is a legend now, in Nairobi retail banking circles.

He finished a triathlon and was on the company billboard.

Mary Rose, his eldest, is named after Mum. She looks just like Jim. She has the same high energy. Emma, the baby, is a flirt.

In the past two years, during political campaigns, text messages called on the members of the House of Mumbi (the mother of the Gikuyu Nation) to let things “stay at home.”
Ka mucii
was whispered from cab driver to passenger, from politician to market trader. Text messages flew everywhere. John Githongo, Kenya’s anti­corruption czar, who broke ranks with a corrupt Gikuyu elite, was branded a traitor.

Wink wink. Nod nod. It is our season. Kibaki season.

Over the past two years, people complain that nice middle-class Gikuyus are now speaking in their language in office corridors. It is a strangely schizophrenic place to be. Many Kenyans assume I am not Gikuyu and share their concerns with me. Meanwhile, an equal and opposite paranoia about the Gikuyu is starting to spread around Kenya. Many Gikuyus freely share with me their newly discovered contempt for everybody else. The mood is triumphant. We are back. Kenyatta’s face is on our currency.

For it has come to be, now, in this fever, that part of what it means to be a Gikuyu is to be not a Luo. To be Gikuyu is to be not a tribe. And to be a Kenyan is to be not Gikuyu. We are saying we are the template of Kenya, and you other people had better fit yourselves in. If you behave, we will be nice to you.

I say my hellos. I say my good-byes. I can’t wait to leave.

I arrived in Accra, Ghana, yesterday. This is my first time in West Africa, on writing assignment for a World Cup anthology. Years are flying by now, as my writing career starts to take shape. It is 2006.

I spend much of the first night in a cybercafé in Osu, trying to
find out as much as I can about Togo. The café is full for most of the
night, full of young men, mostly, all well dressed, and, from my sideways
glances, all looking for scholarships or at dating Web sites.

I am going to Togo tomorrow, to sniff around for a World Cup–related book project. Togo is suddenly in the headlines because its team,
against all predictions, has qualified for the World Cup.

What a happy, happy city. People are laughing and greeting and
laughing and greeting. Working, selling, building.

Many Google trails yield much information.

The French, since the days of de Gaulle especially, love fatherly
African dictators who love French luxury goods, and French military
bases. It makes them money, makes them feel they have their own
commonwealth
that gives them a feeling of international drama; it
makes for good dinner-party
talk and much student agitation. Omar
Bongo, of Gabon, imported a French chateau; Emperor Bokassa had
a Louis XIV–style inauguration and died in Bangui; Léopold Sédar
Senghor died in France; and Félix Houphouët-Boigny
of Ivory Coast
built the biggest Catholic basilica in the world in his home village.

Gnassingbé Eyadéma, who died recently, was cut from the same
market fabric. He managed to remain in power for thirty-eight
years with no small help from the French, who ignored most of the abuses
of his government and gave him much military aid for decades. Chirac
called him a friend of France.

Nations that have cut themselves off from any way of measuring
themselves against the normal transactions of their population become
comical, in a crocodile-grinning, Idi Amining way. The constituency of
these leaders was France, their cold war partners, their clan insiders,
and the executives of the main extractors of their main overseas export.
A Togo Web site reports that a former Mitterrand aide was arrested
in Lomé for selling arms.

…

I meet Alex at breakfast in Accra. He is a carver of wooden curios who
has a small shop at the hotel. His uncle owns the hotel. He spends his
days at the gym, playing soccer, and making wooden sculptures of voluptuous
Ghanaian women. For tourists. He shines with beauty and health and fresh-ironedness.
He seems ready, fit and ready. I am not sure what for. We chat. He doesn’t speak very much. I ask him if he can help
get me somebody. He plays finger football on his mobile phone and finds
me somebody to take me to Lomé.