And Then Life Happens (6 page)

I do not know the exact arrangement between my parents, but one thing is certain: Financially, my father was doing substantially better than my mother. Attractive professional opportunities really did await an academic educated abroad. He quickly got a job with the oil company Shell and a lavish salary, which enabled him to lead a very comfortable life—much to my mother's chagrin. She must have asked herself why she should be the only one to suffer. If she hadn't dropped out of school to follow my father, she would now at least have had the possibility of finding a job to provide for herself and her children and to obtain a good education for them. In light of this dilemma, my mother decided with a heavy heart to bring Abongo and me to our father. With him we were guaranteed a proper education. And so my brother and I moved in with our father and Ruth in Nairobi.

I no longer recall the journey to the city any more than I do the parting from my mother and the first real encounter with my father. Today, all I know is that for us children a completely new stage began in our lives.

Some time ago, my grandmother gave me a picture that she was given by Sally Humphrey, an old acquaintance of my father's from that period. It shows a young man with a little girl and a boy. Sitting behind the children on a wall and smiling confidently at the camera, the man has his arms protectively around the two children, who are standing between his spread legs. Shyly and a bit anxiously, the girl is holding on to the man's leg. Her face is slightly averted. The boy, on the other hand, is looking fearlessly into the camera. One of the man's hands is on his shoulder. The picture radiates a sense of unity between the three people; for the children, the man seems to be a place of security. On the back of this photo of my father, Abongo, and me, the year it was taken is noted: 1964. That is also the year in which our new life in Nairobi began.

 

5.

W
HEN MY BROTHER
ABONGO
and I moved in with my father, he was living with my stepmother in Roselyn, an affluent neighborhood in Nairobi. A highly modern bungalow built on a slight hill became our new home. The building had two levels: On the upper level were the kitchen, bathrooms, and bedrooms; on the lower level was the living area. One of the living room walls was almost completely made of glass. Large sliding doors led outside into a huge garden, at the end of which was a small wooded area with tall trees. A plantation of coffee shrubs planted neatly in rows abutted the garden on the side. We children loved the ripe coffee berries that hung on the branches, deep red and enticing. Despite all warnings, we often ate the delicious fruits, which regularly gave us bellyaches.

The large garden was on the whole a glorious place for us children. In a number of ways, it reminded me of our grandfather's homestead. There, too, we had a lot of space to play and numerous trees, and there, too, tilled fields abutted the compound. But the property itself was surrounded by a hedge of tall trees and bushes as protection from uninvited visitors. In Nairobi, on the other hand, the property was open on all sides. Without difficulty, anyone could intrude, either from the woods or from the coffee plantation. That marred the wonderful feeling of living in open nature. And there were, in fact, several break-ins; among other things, our television and record player were taken. It was easy for the thieves to escape unhindered through the plantation.

For that reason, my father one day—to our great joy—brought home a dog to guard our property. We would have loved to have him as a playmate, but we were only rarely allowed to run around outside with him. The night watchman, who made his rounds with the dog on the property after dark, frowned on our having contact with the animal. So that the watchdog did not become too playful and did not get too accustomed to us, he was ultimately locked in a doghouse during the day and only let out into the garden at night. From that point on, we saw him so rarely that he didn't even recognize us when we came home from boarding school. I remember that he always had to be restrained when we got out of the car so that he wouldn't attack us. It was much easier for us after all that he had to stay in his doghouse.

*   *   *

Unfortunately, the time in the glorious house in Roselyn did not last long. Perhaps my stepmother no longer felt comfortable in the secluded bungalow after the break-ins. In any case, we moved to Hurlingham, a somewhat more densely developed neighborhood in Nairobi. There, a hedge of thorny Kei apple trees surrounded our property.

I only faintly recall our life in Hurlingham, because I was in boarding school most of the time we lived there. But there is one image I can still see clearly in my mind's eye: I am sitting in our car, frightened and perfectly still, as one of our household workers runs alongside it, pulling at the collar of our fiercely barking dog up on his hind legs.

Kilimani Primary School, which I began attending as a day pupil after my unhappy time at Mary Hill Primary School, was only a few houses down from the Hurlingham house. But by the time I entered the new school, we had once again moved, this time to Woodley, another Nairobi neighborhood, not far from Hurlingham. Woodley had at one time been reserved for midlevel colonial officials, but in the aftermath of independence, the white families, with a few exceptions, had left the area. When we moved to Woodley, our neighborhood consisted mainly of Africans and a few Indian families. My best friend Barbara's parents came from Poland and England. They lived only a few houses down from us, at the end of the street. And my second closest friend, Sharon, and her family, who lived next door, were Kenyan, though originally from Goa, an Indian state. Barbara, Sharon, and their brothers attended Kilimani Primary School, too.

In Woodley, there were almost only young families with children our age, so that we never lacked playmates. Sometimes up to fifteen children met in front of the houses to do things together. For, although all our bungalows were surrounded by gardens, we almost always played in the street, which barely had any traffic during the day and offered us a lot of space. There we could be as loud as we pleased, because the properties had large front gardens and the buildings were situated at some distance from the street.

We could play outside to our hearts' content only on weekends and school breaks. During the week we had to do our homework after school, which left us barely any time for anything else. We made up for that on weekends and vacations, rushing outside right after breakfast. At lunch we all disappeared to our respective homes, because we did not eat in each other's houses without our parents' permission. Since both parents typically worked on weekdays, each family had domestic help, who were available at least six days a week and cooked for the children. After lunch, we would then meet again to continue the interrupted play.

Generally, girls and boys played together without reservations. Only my brother Abongo never wanted me to join in with his friends. He would have been happier if I spent my time only with girls or preferred dolls to soccer. But dolls bored me. I found the athletic activities and competitions we organized with the boys much more exciting. Most of the girls in our neighborhood felt the same way, with the exception of a few who only wanted to watch.

It bothered Abongo not only that I didn't stay away from his friends, but also, on a quite general level, that I participated fearlessly in everything they did. He would make that particularly clear to me whenever there were scuffles for some reason. If, for example, I got into a fight with a girl who had provoked me, he kept out of it as much as possible. While the other girls usually received support from their older or even younger brothers, Abongo only watched aloofly as we went at each other. Even when I was really in a tight spot or was getting clobbered by several children at once, he did not abandon his observation post. Often one of the other children would get our cook, Obanda, for help. Or Obanda would find out about the fights when I returned home with my clothing stained from a nosebleed. Then he would always get angry with Abongo.

“Why don't you help your sister?” he would ask him furiously.

“It's her own fault,” Abongo would grumble. “She's the one who's always asking for trouble.”

“What did you say?” Obanda would ask in a threatening voice.

“She can never keep her mouth shut. I'm not responsible for her!”

At that point, Obanda would raise his voice.

“Are you crazy?” he would scold. “You are responsible for her! You're her older brother, aren't you? Who else is going to look out for her?”

Abongo would shrug and look down at the floor. Both of us were afraid of Obanda. He had worked in our house for a long time and, besides the cooking, dealt with many other matters of importance to my father. As a result, the two men were very close. We children always feared that Obanda would tell our father—who was a great, awe-inspiring mystery to us—about our misbehavior, and then we would get in a lot of trouble. On top of that, Obanda would not have shied away from raising his hand against us, if need be. For that, he had our father's blessing. In our culture, it is not only the parents who bring up the children; in their absence, it is completely natural for someone like Obanda to slip into their role. Although the cook was very strict and we were quite afraid of him, he nonetheless mercifully overlooked a lot and thus ultimately spared us from our parents' reprimands many times.

I relished it when my brother was scolded. Now Abongo would get what was coming to him, I thought, that idiot, who never stood up for me. While I felt in all my bones the painful effects of the skirmishes with the other children, I waited intently for my brother to get his justly deserved beating. That was the only way he would finally realize that it was his job to defend me. Especially since I myself always jumped into the fray when he got into fights with other children, and often walked away with bruises. More often than not, however, Abongo got off with only a scolding.

At the time, I didn't understand why my brother never helped me and why he was so often standoffish or angry with me. Only years later, when we were grown up and I began to grasp the intricacies of our complicated family life, could I divine what was going on with him in those days. At the age of six, he was separated from his biological mother and transplanted from his familiar rural surroundings into the city and, on top of that, into a strange family. The head of that family, his own father, was a stranger to him, and the woman he was now supposed to call “mother” even more so: She was a white woman. Up to that point, we children had scarcely had any contact with white people, at least never consciously. And like many children from the countryside, we were probably at first afraid of the woman with the pale complexion.

Abongo, who was two years older than I was and already grasped to some extent what was happening to him, must have really struggled with this new situation. He must have missed our mother terribly, and at the same time he had to watch as I, a clueless four-year-old, adapted quickly to the new circumstances. No wonder that my “betrayal” seemed to provoke great anger in him. And because I later sometimes received preferential treatment from our parents, for I remained the only girl, that anger intensified. Thus, for better or worse, I had to learn not to rely on my brother or anyone else to help me out of a jam.

*   *   *

We children from Woodley loved to model our games on current sporting events, such as the Safari Rally (better known as the East African Safari Rally), which started every year around Easter in Nairobi and was then continued in other parts of the country. Parallel to that exciting event, we organized with great seriousness our own mini Safari Rally in our neighborhood. On the basis of the rally schedule that could be consulted in the newspaper, we prepared for our own race with colorfully painted Dinky racecars (the competitor to Matchbox cars). We carefully planned the course of the racetrack and marked it on the ground. Then we tied a long string to the front of each little car and checked the condition of the wheels to make sure that they turned properly and evenly. And off we went.

As soon as the starting whistle sounded, each racing pilot pulled his racecar by the string over the bumpy ground, through puddles and small hollows. Now
we
were Joginder Singh, Shekhar Mehta, Hannu Mikkola, or Bert Shankland, the famous drivers who raced their cars through the land. And like those professionals, we too, their doubles, raced toward the finish line. As chance would have it, the racetrack of the true heroes ran along Ngong Road, of all places, which was only a few hundred yards from our house. Of course, we excitedly stopped our mini-rally to see them hurtle past. We then returned to our parallel event with heightened enthusiasm.

Our other games, too, usually revolved around who did something fastest, best, or most skillfully. I will never forget the day when I tried to prove to myself that I could climb higher than anyone else—and almost broke my neck in the process. At the time, there was a fir tree in our garden, which was over thirty feet tall and which I had already climbed many times. That day, I swiftly and easily climbed the tree and didn't stop at the usual spot, but instead kept going higher. Having almost reached the top, I didn't even notice how the thin branches were bending. Suddenly, a branch broke under my foot, depriving me of support. I began to slip and tried in vain to cling to the branches. They broke off in my hands, and I fell farther and farther down.

Luckily for me, the lower and thicker branches broke my fall. Frozen in shock, I stayed where I was, half-lying, half-sitting. Everything had happened incredibly fast. After a few minutes, I pulled myself together, looked down, and realized with alarm that it was only a few yards to the ground. If I had fallen farther, I definitely would have broken my neck.

After that plunge, it hurt everywhere on my body where the branches had jabbed and scratched me. I felt like crying. But I clenched my teeth and swallowed my tears. I had undertaken that adventure on my own initiative, and no one would find out about my fall, which fortunately had ended well. It was a long time before I climbed that tree again.