One Day I Will Write About This Place (31 page)

A soccer player seeks to find chinks in the structural arrangements
of an opposing team—needs
to make his body and mind flexible; needs
to have an eye that does not just understand the structure of the opposition
but also can seduce, fake, deceive, con, charm. Can score and
secure victory by finding a hole, a gap, seeing avenues where zigzag
paths
exist; sweet-talking
your way through the barbed wire of the Port Area
that serves the whole of West Africa; bullshitting your way into the fat
cat’s office; seducing, with a nimble tongue, the stiff and proud daughter
of the fat cat; and then you have access to the duty-free goods of a
subcontinent.
Strolling through gates manned by violent giants into the inner sanctum, the president’s zoo, his home, and the treasury of your
country. At any time, a giant monster, or a team of them, will be ready
to bring you down with all the violence they know how to produce. Your
tongue, the flexibility of your limbs, your sexiness, the timbre of your
voice; your understanding of the structure of power you face—these
are your only tools.

This intelligence is not harbored in the mind. Repeated practice
transfers the ideas of the mind into the instinct of the body. No gun to
the head can make this body perform.

Now Lionel Richie is Swahili Jamaicanly saying we are going to
part-ay,
karamu
, fiesta, forever. When his mouth is closed, it puffs out with interesting possibilities—to my dentally naturalist eye. It promises
dramatic teeth, tall and craggy-faced Mau Maus on horses galloping along the raw pink highway of Kenya. They stand in a semicircle
at the jawline of the Ngong Hills, looking down at the capital, grimy and determined.
They pause for a moment—for the heroic bronze sculpture they hope they will commission to celebrate this hilly revolutionary moment.
Teeth facing forward, they gallop down the hill, then storm the
city with sharp pointy things heading straight for the biggest-dick
building: Kenyatta Cornflakes Center. “Everyone you meet,” calypsos Lionel,
“they are partying on the street, all night long.” Yeah. Mouth closed,
Lionel Richie promises on-your-mark, get set, go teeth.

To be a successful sovereign citizen of urban Togo (or Brazil, or Nigeria,
or Kenya)—one who is not allied to French scholarships and French
departments, to administrative authority and the “private sector”; one
not allied by clan or tribe or family relationship to the Gnassingbés or
the Kibaki family—one needs to cultivate a certain fitness, a certain
rhythm. Your body, your tongue must respond quickly to an environment
that sometimes shifts every few minutes. You must constantly invent
new strategies to thrive the next day. These strategies need to be
drilled into the body, so they are used subtly and suddenly when they
are required.

What is so sublime about the truly great soccer players is the ability
of a single individual to completely bewilder a nation: Maradona over Germany and England. Zinedene Zidane against everybody, restrained
only by his own pride, his other sovereignty, his realization at the very
climax of his art and career that soccer is only a game, and he, a paid
performer.

The
Nation
newspaper online today announces that the Gabonese
Pygmies may soon be learning Chinese because of iron ore. Famous
Brands, the South African Company that brought Debonairs Pizza to
Kenya, has just bought 49 percent of Wimpy UK. Kenya’s economy has
grown by 6 percent, but the poor are worse off than they were last year.
Fifty percent of Kenyans are living under the poverty line. Nyanza
Province, Raila Odinga’s Luo-speaking political heartland, has a life expectancy
of forty-four years; Central Province—Gikuyus
who support
Kibaki—has a life expectancy of sixty years.

Now Lionel is smiling. The mouth stretches sideways—looking
to lock onto the gold happyhooks that hang down his earlobes. I look
closely. There are no battle-weary
warrior teeth. Sitting on top of the
soft pink crown of his empire is a troop of thirty-two little drum majorettes,
pearly and white, light bouncing off their medals as they squeal
with teenage self-satisfaction.
Ohh Jambo Jambo.

A cobbler should be able to attack you before you see him, see a
chink in your fine leather before you can slap him away. A Kenyan market
trader needs to be able to pack up all wares in a minute once a city
council
askari
in civilian clothes has been spotted. Must do this, and
turn over enough money for tomorrow’s stocks and today’s bribe, and
yesterday’s children’s medication, and this month’s tax to a city council
that collects taxes efficiently and will never allow you to trade freely,
will never invest your taxes in any infrastructure.

Teenagers, the
Nation
online lifestyle magazine informs us, are at a
critical stage of their life. Lesbianism is rampant in our schools and must
be eradicated by role models. The Kenyan stock market is booming.
Kenya’s second-oldest brokerage firm is issuing bouncing checks. It has
six hundred thousand account holders. Every listed company is oversubscribed.
Kenyans are buying stocks like crazy: diaspora Kenyans,
up-and-coming Kenyans, and newly rich Kibaki Kenyans. It is hard to say that things are not better. Government departments work. There
are tax collection records. You can get your national exam results by text
message. The largest bank in Kenya is a microlending
bank. New skyscrapers
are all over Nairobi. There is an epidemic of pyramid schemes
that the police cannot stop.

Many Kenyans have lost their life savings.

Aiii! I can’t take another winter day indoors.

The moment the sun is up, I take a taxi to the Amtrak train station
in Albany. I will spend the weekend in New York City.

…

I have a window seat, near the toilet, and four ripe apples. There are
slabs of ice floating on the Hudson River. The train follows the Hudson
all the way to the city. Outside, the rest of the water is a flapping duvet
of gold and white light. The train smells bad. A woman sits on her own.
She has an ear-length
red perm, polished into a flowing thing, with
threads of silver. She has the shoulders of a dancer. A bottle of water
rests by her side, and some fruit. She is fresh and wholesome in the very
dirty Amtrak carriage.

I take out my laptop and continue browsing. Luos in America and
Gikuyus in America have crowded the chat rooms—all
screaming at
each other with very bad spelling. I can’t stop looking at the woman,
she moves so well, looks so… television. She is in her forties and has
a Roman column of a neck, long and leaning forward a bit. It is held up
by tight cords and wires that thrust down from a chin held high. Eyes
smoulder, nearly shut, low rumbling charcoal clouds of mascara starting
to promise rainfall. It must be a breakup. By text message maybe.

I am sure I have diabetes. I have all the symptoms. Pentecostals
are announcing and denouncing a new Kenyan prophet. His name is
Pastor Owuor. He says he has a PhD in molecular biology, from Israel.
But now God speaks to him. The woman’s fingers tap and fiddle with
the bottled water, tendons running up and down her black fingers, like
piano keys. The train clip-clops and whinnies as it turns. I turned thirtysix
last month. Diabetes hit Mum’s side of the family, all twelve of them, when they were in their thirties. Mum got it when she was thirty-four.
Mum’s mum got it in her nineties, but she ate boiled food and lots and
lots of fresh vegetables.

A thousand morning suns have split the trees and turned the
Hudson River into a highway of light. Maybe the woman is a musician,
at Bard College, or Vassar. Jazz. Yes, jazz.

Next December, the pastor says in giant rallies all over Kenya, an
earthquake will destroy Nairobi. Bridges, towers will crumble like dust;
blood will flow and the river will burst its banks.

In Togo, Rock has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. The
whole of Togo is furious. Rock decides to call a press conference, to announce
a major sponsorship deal. There are balloons in the press conference
room, and a few bespectacled Dutch businessmen, I imagine, one
who has known and bribed and loved the Gnassingbés for forty years,
and his Dutch ancestors have known and bribed fat, rich, and violent
warlords for a couple of hundred years—so
waxy Dutch cloth, of quite
astonishing expense, is bought by millions of West Africans. In the
room there are long, lithe hostesses serving Gnassingbé bottled water
and Gnassingbé biscuits, and they are dressed in tight print fabrics and
head knots that would silence Erykah Badu. They are Mama Opels in
training.

In the room there are a few sullen Eyadéma grandsons in mummy’s
soft yellow skin and pouty pink lips and giant gold chains and OutKast’s
wardrobe; in the room there are tight-faced
fat women, still Benzing,
powdered, with round surgically blanked faces; fat football officials in
shoulder-padded
shirts, and patrols of multicolored
pens in their front
left pockets; and at the back of the room, standing, right in front of
the red-eyed
soldiers bearing guns, are lean, underpaid local journalists
with ruled notebooks and Bic pens.

International correspondents with their long Dictaphones, and
dirty jeans, and five hundred words before whiskey, are slouched over
the red velvet chairs, in the VIP section in the front, looking for the
Story: the Most Macheteing Deathest, Most Treasury Corruptest, Most
Entrail-Eating
Civil Warest, Most Crocodile-Grinning
Dictatorest, Most Heart-Wrenching
and Genociding Pulitzerest, Most Black Big-Eyed
Oxfam Child Starvingest, Most Wild African Savages Having AIDS-Ridden
Sexest with Genetically Mutilatedest
Girls…

The Most Authentic Real Black Africanest story they can find for
Reuters or AP or Agence France.

But: this time, because this is the World Cup, a billion or two viewers,
and endorsements, and there is a pretense that everybody comes in
there somewhat equal, they will actually look for a normal story about
normal human beings doing normal things. This is the only time CNN
will show you a former favela resident playing and thriving and normal
and actually speaking for himself, and not shooting, or shooting up, or
in the throes of unbearable CARE International–seeking suffering.

Sitting next to the foreign correspondents are their dark, slinky
girlfriends, the better-educated
daughters of some Ma Benzes, one of
whom nearly became Miss Togo, another who nearly won her region’s
Face of Africa competition.

A twenty-five-piece army band starts to play. Trumpets (the elephant
is about to speak).

Rock announces that a Dutch textile company has bought the rights
to print cloth with the Hawks’ logo on it. In Togo, the words
cloth
and
Dutch
are nearly as electric as the words
World Cup
.

Market women are salivating. Mercedes-Benz dealers start sending
text messages to East London and Düsseldorf.

Snap snap. An android mobile phone takes a picture of the sample
fabric on display. Somebody sneaks out of the room—an
Ivorian,
perhaps—and
calls his guy in Abidjan, tells him to catch a flight to the
fabric factories of Guangzhou, China, tonight to have five containers in
Lomé by the weekend.

Tomorrow, the Chinese traders in Lomé market will do the same.
Cheaper.

But soccer wins over the drools of fabric.

A journalist asks Rock about the players who are holding him hostage.
He loses his temper in a George Bushish way and accuses the journalist
of being unpatriotic.

Rock loses the war against error. Togo is humiliated in the Cup of
Nations.

The Hudson has split into two. One branch glides away from us, and the
train follows the larger branch; there are chunks of ice piled up against
the aging railway line. Kenyan rivers have not yet been tamed by engineering.
They gush and spill and dry up, no sedate movements. The
train clatters into a tunnel. The woman is talking on the phone, and
there is traffic running up and down the cables on her throat as the clock
ticks just above a collarbone and tears are pouring down her cheeks.

In front of a huge crowd in Thika town, Pastor Owour says there
will be rivers of blood in the city in December.

…

The woman is smiling all pearly-teeth,
and crying. A full black-skinned
Goldie Fawn smile, her phone on her ear. Her voice is too whispery for
me to overhear—and
her mouth is smiling: thirty-two
tap dancers on
stage. A cab driver told me, a few weeks ago, that the industrial infrastructure
of New York State is being unpacked, crumpled into scrap
metal, and shipped off to China down the Hudson on barges. I am going
to vote for Raila. I don’t love him. Kibaki is sort of okay. A bit sleepy,
but there is no way I am voting for a second term for any president while
this constitution is still alive. Too much power. I do not want to vote for
a better Gikuyuland. I want to vote for a better Kenya. If I can’t trust
my vote to a leader of another tribe, I may as well take a green card and
not go back.

…

Winnie Amayo, who is chatting online today, has nothing to say about
the election. She is concerned about the coming earthquake:

I can see this Amtrak woman curtsying at seven, after a dance recital,
this mouth stretched to its tendon-tauting
end, in pursuit of happiness,
a beautifully shaped head held up by cables and columns, and
teeth: this mouth is an auditorium, a performance space—and
it can
hold many pounding crowds of screaming citizens, and lions and gladiators.
The columns on her throat will hold up her imploding day.