One Day I Will Write About This Place (9 page)

Measuring. Networks light up all over the Rift Valley. This is happening! Let’s stand together. Phone calls, small meetings. Quiet lunches. Promises. Soon, Peter and I are in the same school.

I have never heard of Njoro High School. Most state high schools in Kenya are boarding schools. It is eighteen miles away, and I never knew it existed. It is a district school. I never thought I would end up in a third-­rate school, a low, low idea. Ciru has never heard of Kapropita Girls Secondary School, where she has been called. She is told the school has no tap water. Girls fetch water from the river. When people ask which school I am going to, I keep quiet.

There are some new high schools now, with the best facilities, the best teachers taken out of other schools. For Moi’s people. Moi Forces Academy, and Kabarak High School, and Sacho High School. After one term, a stroke of luck. Ciru gets a place in Kenya High School, a posh old national school that Moi wanted to turn into a teachers’ college. He changed his mind, and Mum heard, from the new secret networks, they were doing a recall. Rumor has it Moi has a schoolteacher girlfriend there. He likes to date schoolteachers, we hear. He gives their husbands diplomatic postings.

It is January, 1984. I am thirteen. I was circumcised in December.

I am a man.

The lights are off in my dorm in Njoro High School. I have one huge pimple on my forehead. I have decided to run away from school tonight. I am worried because our head boy is a homosexual. It is broadcast on every toilet wall in the school. I am not sure what a homosexual is.

It is midnight. Before I went to bed, at around eleven, I made tea for our house prefect and collected water for the second former who sleeps in the bunk bed below me. This is the first full day here that I have avoided being beaten.

I usually get a slap every morning when I try to jump from my top bunk to the ground without touching the marked section of floor immediately below me. Johnson’s territory has been marked with white chalk. He is short and looks like a rodent, with sharp pointy teeth and jerky movements. He is stronger than he looks, and his slaps leave an imprint on my face. This morning I woke up before he did, jumped as far as I could, and managed to land past the line of chalk, tearing a bit of flesh from my waist on my metal suitcase, which sits on top of a locker at the side of the bed, well inside his chalk line. To access my suitcase I had to lean in from the back of the locker on tiptoe, and I felt for my towel and soap and toothbrush with my fingers. I told Peter the whole story. I told him I planned to run away from school tonight.

I have set my alarm for 2:00 a.m. I am packed. I am sleeping when my bedding is torn off the bed. They stand around my bed, a group of seniors in blazers, carrying mugs of cocoa and torches. One of them carries a cane. They tell me to get out of bed. Peter is standing with them. He winks at me, to say everything will be fine. I get up, in my pajamas. The grass outside is wet with dew and I am in my rubber
patipatis.
I follow, afraid. It is cold. Njoro is eight thousand feet above sea level.

We are in Mobair and Kibet’s small cubicle. They are our dorm prefects. They have become my protectors. In return, I provide biscuits, jam, and peanut butter, goodies from a home that is richer than most of the students’. I make tea. The room is full of people, some in pajamas like me, and some in full uniform. Those in uniform are all senior prefects. I join the juniors in pajamas. There are seven or eight of us.

All of us sit on one bed, heads hanging. One tiny boy is crying.

George, a third former, is testifying, “He took me to the volleyball court. Every Sunday night.”

“He promised he would make me a prefect.”

“He sexed me.”

“He told me to kneel down and suck his Jomo.”

“After prep. He told me not to wear underwear.”

“Before prep.”

“Inside the food store. He gave me free margarine afterward.”

Jomo
is Njoro High School slang for
cock.
Named after our dearly departed president, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta. For their sexual Jomo efforts, some boys got a special diet in the dining hall, a few extra precious potatoes. An extra slice of bread in the morning. Tea with milk.

Jomo Kenyatta, assisted by Israel, built the tallest building in Kenya, Kenyatta Conference Centre, round and ribbed, like Rough Rider condoms. At the top of the building, where the flared crown sits, there is a revolving restaurant, a podium, where you can sit and spy on the whole city. Two cooperating boys became school prefects. The young guy who was crying was taken to Nakuru town for sausages and marsala chips at Tipsy Restaurant after a long sexing session on the volleyball court one night.

Soon it is my turn to speak.

I met him the first day of school. I wanted to go to my new school by public transport, but Mum would not hear of it. So we stood in the parking lot, she and I, by her smart big town car, and her in lipstick.

He made a beeline for us. He had an Afro, strange for 1984. Big and shiny. He was tall, well ironed, and wore a blazer.

“George Sigalla,” he said. “I am the head boy.”

Soon Mum and I waved good-bye to each other. George’s arm was around my shoulder. He got me a reasonably new mattress, got me registered, and accompanied me to the dorm, which fell silent when he entered. He helped make my bed. Told me to come to his study before prep for some cocoa. Within five minutes of his leaving, my bunkmate Johnson had slapped me and dared me to go and report him to the head boy. Lionel Richie was crooning some love thing on his radio when I knocked.

“Do you want coffee? Or are you afraid of stimulants?” He giggled. He was sweaty and awkward and I was not comfortable. He showed me his certificates, from the National Music Festival. On the table was a bottle of Limara perfume and a jar of Hair-Glo (Africa, it’s good to know, with great new Hair-Glo, you gat style).

He leaned in and sat next to me on the bed. He started to reach up my thigh. I froze. The hand moved higher. I gulped down the coffee and stood to leave. He caught me at the door. “Don’t tell anybody. If you tell anybody… !”

…

I find out, from Peter, that the Boy Scouts are going to Nairobi Inter­national Agricultural Show. He helps me bribe my way into Boy Scout–hood. It costs me three loaves of bread. I was a Scout years ago, but lapsed for cooler things. This is cooler. We are going to take the train to Nairobi. Mobair and Kibet are Scout leaders.

We are at the train station and it is 2:00 a.m. The train reels in and is packed. Packed. The windows are portraits of tangled beasts—­mashed mouths wrapped in glass and steam, and snarls and noses and bits of clothing, limbs—­steam in, steam out.

This is funny. Until we discover that we are traveling third class; later we find out our teacher was cutting corners with our money. So we squeeze into this train from Kisumu. For an hour I can’t find a place to put one foot down. As this train is from Kisumu, the land of freshwater fish, everybody is carrying dried or smoked fish to the city. It is hot.

People sing and pray and sing and pray.

We spill out of the train seven hours later and march, legs wobbly, uniforms crumpled, in a Boy Scout line to Rowallan camp.

The camp is beautiful, rich red Nairobi soil and giant trees and parkland and cool and forest. But there are not enough tents for everybody; some of us have to find somewhere else to sleep. The rest set up tents and tramp around happily. We end up with our teacher, booking a small room in a long row of one-­room tin-­roofed houses that face each other, dripping thick green tears of age and smelling of old drains. We set our sleeping bags down.

Later, we sleep. And then we are woken. First it is a rattle, then a din. Screaming. Clanging. Banging. Shouting. Singing. Churching. God. Strange languages. The whole night, they dance and sing and scream and bang.

In the morning, people are whistling happily and gently and heading to work, secular people in uniforms. Some women are washing clothes at the tap between the line of houses, singing softly and chatting. Children frolic.

…

George Sigalla, the head boy, is demoted. The prefects all went to the headmaster. He spends the rest of the year alone. People spit at him when he walks past. I often want to wave, say something. I never do. I try hard to stay close to the line, keep myself inside myself, and be some public person who fits in. Sigalla is always among the top students in his year. The school falls silent when his name is read out at assembly after exams. He stands straight, never bowed, walks through crowds and queues without looking sideways, always immaculate, his face contemptuous and fearless.

It’s hard not to be impressed.

The whole school whispers about the new headmaster—­suspiciously young, visibly Kalenjin. Mr. Kipsang. We mimic his accent and laugh at him when he is not looking. The previous headmaster, a Gikuyu, is gone. I wonder if they found out about me and Peter and our Gikuyu conspiracy to get here.

School is closed for Christmas and Ray Parker Junior is the coolest man in the world. “Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters.”

We all want his hair. Ray Miaw Miaw, we call it.

Mum has driven to Eldoret with Chiqy to pick up Jimmy. Ciru arrives tomorrow. I am already at home. I take a long bath.

I let my body sink into the water, to let myself see the thick colors of things outside. Soon my eyes are numb, and hot snails of thick feeling climb up from my stomach to my chest. I marvel at the beauty of limbs moving under the water, and soon I am lost and I panic.

I am always afraid of being hijacked by patterns. I rise and turn the page of my novel. Then I spend an hour with sugar and soap and a hard brush trying to push back my hair into a Ray Miaw Miaw. I keep getting it perfect, but then when it dries a little, it starts to crack. Black America has a lot to account for. First it was bloody Afros. What East African can grow a bloody Afro? It would take forty years.

In the 1970s Mum made a good living selling Afro wigs. For the natural look. I find I can maintain the style if I keep my neck still and make sure I don’t frown or grin too widely.

In August Mum announced that she has abandoned our polite middle-­class Catholic church, fifty minutes of kneel, stand, kneel, stand, then go swimming.

She has joined a church we have never heard of, Deliverance Church. She says she is cured of diabetes. She was driving from Nairobi, a trip to see her doctor, and she found she could not stop crying. She stopped by the side of the road, and finally gave in to what had been calling her, she said.

She told God to heal her. I put on pleated maroon pants and my maroon moccasins with white socks. Deliverance Church is three hours of guttural noises in Nakuru Town Hall. Screams and tongues, bad microphones and bad American accents. Hell or sweaty ecstasy. Bible study three times a week. Conventions and crusades, bad English, parallel translations of every shouted sweaty sentence, from English to Kiswahili, sometimes from Kiswahili to Gikuyu too. People carry giant zippered King James Bibles. Attention necessary, no dreaming, no escape. No R&B. No Ray Miaw Miaw. It is rapture or dread.

Jimmy is the head boy at St. Patrick’s Iten, which is a very famous school. Mum says he also got saved. Ciru seems to be teetering. Her new school is posh. Kenya High School. But even there the fever of God is spreading. Last term girls went hysterical when one girl was possessed by demons. A very handsome preacher, who had a Ray Miaw Miaw and looks like Jermaine Jackson, came and cast them out. Much of the school got saved. Chiqy, my baby sister, is too young to be threatened by all this. All over Kenya, as politics sour, there is a fever of rapture-­seeking.

When I hear Mum’s car at the gate, I get dressed quickly. I walk to the kitchen. Mum’s Peugeot is parked outside. Jimmy is carrying a giant metal suitcase.

There is somebody else in the car. The first crutch peeps out of the car door and an arm knocks against the frame. Jimmy grunts hello; his eyes catch mine and swing toward the car, a quiet command. I look away, trying to resist. But I have none of that where Jim is concerned. I move to help.

The legs are not straight; they are thin twisted sticks. There is a sharp smell of sweat, and the crutches are cheap wooden things. These four muscle­less limbs seem unbearably brittle, as if they are about to break. I catch the eye of the cripple. His school uniform shirt is soaked. His face is square and dark and full of naked agitations, hot rivulets of veins; cars are hooting and traders are shouting outside the market on a hot day, and his jaw is that guy, that uncomfortable village guy, stranded in urban panic, his jaw muscles clenching. You cannot moon-­glide out of the fate of that face. You cannot smooth your hand over your head and feel the hard transforming Ray Miaw Miaw. He is my age, but he has the immobility of an adult. I mumble hello. His eyes are large and fearful when they catch mine. The door yawns and swings, the crutches bang against metal, and he lifts his legs with his big hands and throws them out. They wobble, and he tumbles to the ground, and I help him up, my stomach accordioning.

…

After tea, we all drive down the hill. Here, where we live, used to be Europeans-­only Nakuru. We drive past the town center, heading down, past the old Indian and Goan areas, down toward the lake, where tens of thousands are crammed in one-­room homes, the former colonial labor lines, where “Africans lived.”

We park at a primary school, which smells of urine. Jim and I help the cripple out. People are staring at our car. Sometimes Mum is just a Ugandan. A woman of cooked bananas and old kings and queens and hills far away, good education, and a language that makes us giggle when she is on the phone. Sometimes she is an elegant woman of no easy placing, who allows us to think we are different in a small provincial town. Glamour. Here, she seems… wrong, and I know we will spend this Bible study being stared at.

The pastor comes forward to give her a special greeting as we stand behind, shuffling, hands politely behind our backs. We move into the classroom, which is just rows of broken benches. All the windows, from the colonial days, are broken. We sit. The pastor is tall, and has rheumy eyes. Even here, in Deliverance Church, he is considered over­enthusiastic. The dead shall rise, the sick shall be healed here; his voice comes from the belly, harsh and hoarse, and blood rushes to his eyes.