One Day I Will Write About This Place (7 page)

My groin is hot with friction. I can hear the night outside; crickets are the sound of a vacuum. I am careful to make sure every slit in the curtains is sealed. The man is dancing with the woman in his arms, like white people, or square dancers, but this is a Gikuyu traditional dance. It also looks like a Scottish dance. One man has a feather in his hat. Another man plays an accordion. The old dances were banned by the missionaries, and now many dances happen in rows and columns. Impede. Imperil. Improve.

Baba is Gikuyu, but I can only understand one or two words. Ciru is laughing and squealing, and the world is so big. Wambui will laugh and laugh like Dracula. Accordionland stretches like a giant trampoline forever. I will be unbearably butterflying, turning in circles like the dancers, dizzy without respite. The choirs are back singing, and Wambui is singing with them, some Moi praise song.

I lie back and watch the ceiling. Juma sleeps on my thigh, and I let my mouth shape a perfect O. I start to mouth the song, mimicking Wambui’s accent silently in my head and letting silver pictures flow, of my Amigos Disco, Afraha Stadium,
uhuru
world.

Wambui has a lot of stories about lost women, about Ugandan women who steal Kenyan men, about women poisoned and cursed, about women who give birth to beasts because their neighbors cursed them. Wambui once told us about a Ugandan woman with big buttocks who lives in Ronda and sells red mercury, which is more expensive than gold, because it is nuclear, and America is buying it. It comes from Congo. And it makes women give birth to rotting vegetables. The women are very beautiful and like to trap men.

Wambui told me that in the old days, before the arrival of colonial missionary
mprrs,
young Gikuyu couples would take off all their clothes and dance the whole night. Women would have their private parts tied up so they would not misbehave. Otherwise, they would dance and dance and play with each other’s bodies, would forget themselves, she said.

Baba has a book called
The Mind Possessed,
which has wonderful pictures: in a voodoo possession ceremony, a group of people roll on the floor, having jumped out of their rows and columns, the whites of their eyes disappeared; a white woman is having an orgasm, as buttocks thrust into her.

Imperil. Baden-­Powell, who invented Scouts, made King Prempreh of the Ashanti kneel before his quickly assembled throne, made of boxes of biscuits. Gikuyus are complaining that Kalenjins are sitting on them.

The downfall of King Prempreh of Ghana, from
Diary of Life with the Native Levy in Ashanti
by Major R. S. S. Baden-Powell

The president’s convoy arrives, and large rusted gates swing open on the television screen as the commentator starts to boom. The mass of people queue up behind the convoy to enter and circle the athletic track. They all go around the track, gleaming and shining. President Moi and his cabinet mount the VIP section. People stand in lines in the field and listen to the national anthem, mouthing loyally, the president’s ivory and gold stick lifted for all to see.

There is a group of ministers’ wives expressionless from makeup. There are the lines of soldiers spread all over the rusty stadium—­their shoes and instruments and garters and buttons and trumpets fine and sharp and true. In front of the president, a line of long-­distance runners in blazers wait for awards.

Wambui says, “Ah, this is boring.” She turns down the volume, and we watch the parade in silence. She puts on the giant Sanyo radio behind the sofas. It stands on four legs, and it is covered in brown vinyl. Wambui’s favorite radio show is on. DJ Fred Obachi Machoka is the Blackest Man in Black Africa.

Salaams come from Francis Kadenge Omwana wa Leah, with greetings from Zambia. Zachariah Demfo of Lake Babati. Robbie Reuben-­Robbie from Kitale Salaams Club, who says, “Keep on keeping on.”

Boney M.’s “Rivers of Babylon” is playing. Jimmy said the song is taken from Psalms in the Bible. I don’t believe him. It is too cool. Wambui starts to dance, arms flying.

“Oh, I rove Boney M.!” she says. She starts to sing. The letter
r
climbs into her Gikuyu tongue intact, slaps against the roof of her mouth, and is broken into a thousand letter
l
’s. Only one of them can survive. It runs down her tongue, an accent jet plane, and leaps forward into the air, “By the livers of mBabylon…”

Ciru and I look at each other and start to laugh.

The president stands on the now silent TV screen, behind him a row of provincial commissioners in khaki and pith helmets; in front of him are rows and columns of human order: tribal dancers, soldiers, Scouts. Two lean Kalenjin long-­distance runners climb up to the podium to receive medals from the president, who is from their tribe.

I close my eyes. Gikuyu letter
m
breaks free of his place in the stadium and runs around manically, looking for the Gikuyu
b
. They stand together and hug, bonded by fear into a new single letter, a tribe.
Mbi.
Sometimes you try, but your tongue can’t wrap right around the rules.
A, mbi, ci.

Policemen circle them; the president pauses.
N
starts to agitate, standing there in straight colonial stadium lines. In National Stadium lines.
D
shakes like an accordion and wriggles across to
n
; they start to do a waltz. Kanu Khartoon Khaki wants them to behave, be what you are supposed to be, stay still and do what Kenya Khaki says. KANU, our one party, is father and mother, says President, and Khaki people salute.
A. mBi. Ci. nDi, E, F, nGi.

Wambui dances across the carpet, mouth open, singing her M’Boney M. song, mangled in her Subukia accent.

“M’by the livers of m’bambyl-­oon, where we sat n’down, yeeah we wept, when we lemeber Zion. Kitanda Whisking, blabbin’ us away captivtee, inquire-­ling for us a song, but how can we play the Rord’s song in a stlaaange rand…”

We roll on the floor, laughing at Wambui. She glares at us. Face hot, lips red. I will
mpah
you, she seems to say, lips pouting and eyes feral. But she stops singing. “Send your salaams,” screams Fred Obachi Machokaaa. Roby Reuben Rrrrrrrrbobie is asking for Habel Kifoto and the Marrr-­oon Commandos.

Wambui squeals and jumps, her breasts bouncing, “Ohhhh. Haiya. Chalonye ni Wasi? I rove this song.”

I lie back on the carpet. I close my eyes, my back prickling, and let her limbs climb into my mind’s living room—­where the turgid disco ball throws a thousand nipples of light on me and skirts twirl and glitter with silver. Her full fiction world comes surging like current, and happiness bursts out of me like a trumpet.

Mprrrrr…

Wambui, my Wambui is a trumpet, a Gikuyu Scottish strumpet, a woman in long skirts from a Barbara Cartland book cover, from Mum’s secret cupboard,
We Danced All Night.
Wambui is broken English, slangy Kiswahili, Gikuyu inflections. She is Millie Jackson. A Malloon Commaddo. She is a market woman. A (L)Rift Varrey girl. Third generation. Her aunt is half Nandi, her grandmother a Ngong Maasai. Wambui is Gikuyu by fear, or Kenyatta-­issued title deed, or school registration or because her maternal Gikuyu uncle paid her father’s fees, or because they chose a Gikuyu name to get into a cooperative scheme in the seventies. Maybe her grandmother, born in a Maasai home, married in the mixed-­up Rift Valley, was a feared Gikuyu general during the Mau Mau. It could have been different. Blink.

My fiction Wambui will upend the fate of her mother; she has no fear of starting new, in a new place. All of her clothes glint with sequins and disco, in black and white, on television. They all became Gikuyu after Independence, for the president was Gikuyu, and so the river of independence gold spoke Gikuyu and wore pith helmets on podiums. Wambui is hoisting up a naked leg like the Solid Gold Dancers with Andy Gibb and Dionne Warwick. Her brown tooth gleams wickedly. Pubaf!

But she is mproud. And those with more than her can impede.

Twin military trumpets tear the track open. Charonye ni Wasi. Maroon Commandos is a jazz rumba band originally from the army. Kenyan Olympic distance runners, in blue Kenya blazers, flowing out into bell-­bottom trousers, like mermen, waiting for the Independence Day medal ceremony. If they stand upside down next to the president, the trousers sink to their ankles. Tall, lean, shiny legs and polished thighs, thin where they meet the mpresident’s fattening cheeks. President leans back, and blows hard, para raraa rara rara rara raa ra, his cheeks swollen with national fat. They swell, his cheeks, rising Kalenjin balloons, now floating above Kenya, a new tribe, lifted over frail Kenya like helium. Their tall, burly president rules, and rows and columns of pressed khaki protect him. He is no longer awkward.

If there is a Nandi Wambui, a Kalenjin hidden inside Wambui’s bloodstream, it is not strong enough to break away, pure and clean, and jump on the podium. She could have become a Luo, if they stayed there long enough, and she married there; she is dark skinned enough to get away with it.

Below the heroes of Kenya are rows and columns of citizens, in clear straight lines, in crisp uniforms, Boy Scouts and policemen, the navy, the army, and ten thousand schoolchildren in new uniforms. Then there are the tribes—each one in a costume, here to tell the president we sing and dance for you.

Strumpet Wambui stands to attention and lifts her leg Hollywood high, then puts it down. The disco ball turns. Little droplets of disco light are spinning gently around Wambui as she turns. Her buttocks wiggle. The song gentles. Enter the chorus of men’s voices singing, “People of Taita eeeeh, people of Taita we greet you. How are you? We are here, we are fine, we don’t know about you back home…”

These short lyrics are a call home that I don’t know, that Ciru does not know. We do not know how to be from two nations: home home (home squared, we call it, your clan, your home, the nation of your origin), and the home away from home—­the home of the future, a not­yet place called Kenya. We are Milimani kids, speaking English and Kiswahili.

Trumpet carries the first part of the song, sharp and spread outward. Standing trumpets bracket the song with controlled rhythm beats, the loudest part of the song.
Mprrahh.
No drums. No traditional drums. This is national music, taken from folk songs, and brought into rows and columns, by Imperial British Biscuit podiums, marching crews of barefoot porters, dutiful missionary boys, soldiers in Burma, colonial village headmen with military whistles, guitar and military trumpet and other sounds from labor lines and colonial ghettos, English universities and their local satellites, and the promises of the grandsons and granddaughters of the first ones to be so violently formatted.

Us. Me.

The sound stampedes out of its rows,
mpah,
and is never cutouts and offcuts; the song is a whole new full thing. When they soften, the Taita lyrics come again, a magnetic missive from the faraway city. Loneliness. Wambui’s hips spin softly as she mouths the lyrics, looking sad.

The song comes to a full stop. A full three seconds of silence as rumba momentum builds. The choral voices are now a sheet of frenzied rubber, Kenya streeeetches and bleats, held together by the military trumpets and cash crop exports, the future, only the future, laboring bodies, a railway, a mpresident.

The song has very few words. Five or six sentences repeated over and over. What is… more, are all the speaking mouth organs, the things you have no words for, the groaning sax, the military trumpets, the low growl of a clarinet, speaking home to your ear, a new kind of home, Cuban sounds that came from radio broadcasts from the Congo in the 1940s; Taita poems; Congo sounds; marching soldiers in Burma, high plaintive male voices—­men sound girly in industrial metal lives. Music makes whole worlds, out of unwhole lives. Like crying and pissing and laughter, it promises to carry all of you, even the parts of you that cannot work together.

I open my eyes. Juma is still whining. Wambui is sweating and panting and laughing. I close my eyes. My new word
bureaucrat
is running around my mind in a panic, stamping and coding and reminding me to never forget that one day, one day I will arrange the words right for this strange night.

Last year, before the coup, this same Madaraka Day, I am in the stadium with the school when the crowd attacks the mountains of crates of bread and Fanta surrounded by military
mprrs.

Police chase people around the stadium. Schoolkids from the richer schools, us, are hit and pickpocketed by the poorer barefoot kids in torn uniforms. Parents parked outside the stadium are crying from the tear gas. The main gate is shut. We are stuck inside Afraha Stadium.