One Day I Will Write About This Place (17 page)

If you click on one of those boxes, any one, a whole giant world tumbles out, a sort of apartheid hypertext of massive worlds hidden inside the boxes, brewing and growing, and emerging from the invisible to pay for Woolworth’s lamb chops. Once a rare 7 Series BMW disappeared into Alexandra, from Sandton, and was found days later in Singapore.

Inside those mine dumps, over a hundred years ago, when Joburg was a rough and ready gold city, a Zulu guy called Nongoloza set up a gang of thugs called the Ninevites. They were highly organized.

“I laid them under what has since become known as Nineveh law,” he said to his white captors when he was arrested. “I read in the Bible about the great state Nineveh which rebelled against the Lord and I selected that name for my gang as rebels against the government’s laws.”

The Ninevites became legends—­it was said that they had occupied disused mine shafts, where they had a Scottish bookkeeper, white women, shops and boutiques. It was said they were immune to bullets. Around 1910, the authorities caught up with him. Nongoloza’s fellow gang leaders infiltrated and organized the prison system in South Africa. To this day, gang members in South Africa’s male prisons trace back their history and ideology and culture to the Ninevites. And Nongoloza remains a cult hero.

We burst through cloud. I pick up my novel and try to be airplane blasé, like Billabong next to me, who has not moved, but I want to fidget and peer down from the window.

I want to pee. We are asked to fasten our seat belts as the plane dives into clouds: they are, to us in this plane, eyes closed, hard rocks battering the fuselage.

I am nervous. Nairobi has burst out of itself, like a rotting fruit, and I don’t think I like it. The taxi drives from the airport into the city center. Around us are
matatus,
those brash, garish public transport vehicles.
Manambas
conduct the movement of the
matatu,
hanging out of the open doors, performing all kinds of gymnastics as they call their routes, announce openings in the traffic, and communicate with the driver through a series of bangs on the roof that manage to be heard above the music. There are bangs for oncoming allies, bangs that warn of traffic jams ahead, bangs announcing an impending traffic policeman. There are also methods to deliver the bribe, without having to stop.

The taxi drops me off near the Stanley Hotel. I look abroad enough for them to let me store my bags in the lobby.

I walk. I don’t know if everything looks drab and dirty because I have been somewhere cleaner, or if it has always been that way.

To look down that tunnel of buildings: lower Moi Avenue; Moi, the president who oversaw the fall of the colonial city and opened up the informal sector for growth by inadvertently breaking the grip of the politically connected Kiambu Gikuyu and Asian business mafias. Moi Avenue, the street that marks the end of Nairobi the international city and begins the undocumented sprawl of an African city.

To look down this tunnel one sees swarms—­people and small stubborn constructions climbing up the skyscrapers like termite mounds on a tree. Secondhand clothes shacks, vegetables, wooden cabinets, behind which whispered watch repairs take place in Dholuo; soft cracking KTN news on a muffled radio; Dubai product exhibitions thrust out of storefronts and into the street. Shoe shiners and shoe fixers telling improbable political tales that later turn out to be true; both solicit work by keeping eyes on feet, and you start guiltily when you are summoned for repair or shine. Gospel books and tapes spread on plastic sheets on the pavement, next to secondhand international magazines—NBA! GQ! FHM! Bright bold Buru Buru
matatus,
trilling like warring species of tropical birds, jerking forward and back, revving forward, purple lights flashing urgently, to try to catch passengers in a hurry to go home, who discover too late that this urgency is fake: the
matatu
will wait until it is full, then overfull, then move only when bodies are hanging outside the door, toes barely in the vehicle,
songasonga mathe, songasonga.
Lunchtime Pentecostal God, unregulated, tax free, as attractive a business as selling on the street, Lunchtime God bludgeons the air around us, from small upstairs rooms, screeching preachers, moaning Christians, lunchtime prayers, shine or repair.

In the distance, the sheets of iron and slum, stretching beyond Machakos bus station. A
matatu
swerves past my feet, almost crashing into me. The driver winks, hoots, reverses back, a short funky beep beep; the conductor slaps the side, throws his eyebrows about in my direction, swinging his head to the door. I shake my head and laugh. The car swings past me again, teasing, nearly hits me, and zooms away, its fat buttocks bouncing suggestively on the potholes, Oriental back lights blinking suggestively, words flashing—Just Do It—above a painted snarl. Another one swerves past—­this one candy-floss pink, with speed-blown wings of metallic blue on each hip. It blinks, lights cartwheel around the roof like dominoes, and a ghostly purple light shines inside.

One guy is hanging on to the roof by his fingernails, one toe in the open door, inches away from death, letting both hands go and clapping and whistling at a woman dressed in tight jeans who is walking by the side of the road.

This is Nairobi.

This is what you do to get ahead: make yourself boneless, and treat your straitjacket as if it were a game, a challenge. The city is now all on the streets, sweet talk and hustle. Our worst recession ever has just produced brighter, more creative
matatus.

It is good to be home. There are potholes everywhere. Even the city center, once slick and international looking, is full of grime. People avoid each other’s eyes. River Road is part of the main artery of movement to and from the main bus ranks. It is ruled by
manambas,
and their image is cynical, every laugh a sneer, the city a war or a game. It is a useful face to carry, here where humanity invades all the space you do not claim with conviction.

In this squeeze, people move fast and frenziedly. And behind all the frenzy there is weariness—­nothing is coming. After the strikes and battles in South Africa, which involved everybody, this defeated place is hard to take. Some people look at my budding dreadlocks and hurry away. I spell trouble: too loud looking and visible. A street kid gives me a rasta salute, and I grin back at him as he disappears between people’s legs, a bottle of glue in his mouth, his feet bare and bleeding.

Urban Kenya is a split personality: authority, trajectory, inter­national citizen in English; national brother in Kiswahili; and content villager or nostalgic urbanite in our mother tongues. It seems so clear to me here and now, after South Africa, which is so different. There, there is a political battle to resolve embattled selves. Every language fights for space in all politics. In this part of town, all three Kenyas live: city people who work in English making their way home; the village and its produce and languages on the streets; and the crowds and crowds of people being gentle to each other in Kiswahili. Kiswahili is where we meet each other with brotherhood.

It is an aspect of Kenya I am always acutely aware of—­and crave, because I don’t have it all. My third language, Gikuyu, is nearly non­existent; I can’t speak it. It is a phantom limb,
kimay
—­and this only increases my desire to observe and belong to this intelligence and its patterns. All city people inhabit several worlds in many langauges. There are people who speak six or seven languages.

So many times, you hear about somebody who was living another life in another language, and when he died, whole families came crawling out of the woodwork. Widows fighting next to the lowering coffin. Before I left, I thought of these things as exceptions, things that happened sometimes, to some people. That is not true.

Something twitches at the back of my neck, then there is a silence, for a moment a feeling of time suspended. Then I see the trucks roll in. Khaki legs jump out. A group of women street traders, grandmothers, some great-­grandmothers, stand and scatter, as
askaris
with big clubs unload from a city council truck and bear down on them. For selling. Illegally. On the street. The same city council collects tax from them every month.

I run. We all run. Dust rises; tomatoes scoot onto the road and bleed as
matatu
wheels smash them. There are plastic shopping bags everywhere, floating and flapping, Taiwan Tigritude. There is hooting, screams, and laughter, and the dull, wet thump of heavy sticks on soft bodies.

I have ducked into the doorway of a shop, and stand and watch as an old Gujarati woman looks at me suspiciously. Her eyes follow my body. I am sure she is about to scream for the police, but she will have to pay them too. I reach into my pocket, and a handful of notes comes out. I buy a
khanga,
which sits on the wall. She starts to chat as soon as I have paid.

“So, you come from America? My daughter is there.”

“Doing what?” I ask.

“Computer science,” she says.

I walk out. Nairobi blinks, and people slowly make their way back and set up shop, as the truck roars away. I have some dirt in my eye, and I am rattled. A man walks past me, carrying key chains for sale, bellowing in Gikuyu. He has one of those rare reddish faces that occur in some people, always with freckles, always with hair the color of Krest bitter lemon, with thick hillocks of cheekbone, and his eyes catch mine. They are pale brown and squinty, with dirty gray eyelashes. He winks. I swing my head to the side and smile. I am rattled, and there is dirt in my eye.

I make my way back to the softer city, shoulders jostling me. City buildings sway, giant baby giraffes with shaky knees, sandpaper tongues licking my dusty itching face. Everybody is rushing. A rather serious-looking man in a suit is begging an
askari
in English, and when a whip is raised, he crouches and begins to plead in Kiswahili, and the whip comes down on his neck and he is bleeding, bwana, oh, bwana, his head shaking side to side as he sidles back smiling nervously, then screams as the thump registers. If they were of the same tribe, he would probably have muttered something, in one of fortysomething first languages, mother tongues, and the
askari
would have looked from side to side quickly, and frowned in pretend annoyance, wagging a finger, go now, and don’t do it again!

Three forked tongues! See how they split and twist and merge.

Light bounces off cars and glass windows, and I can see Tom Mboya Street, swollen and pushed back by batons, hooting and smelling of burning carbon, burst toilets, layers of sweat, mashed fruit, and teargas—­and all of this is nothing under the weight of the rivers of surging people. It has been years since I saw my parents, my brother Jim, and my sister Chiqy. Even in Nairobi’s chaos, I am strong, there is a thread, thin and as certain as silk that makes my legs move forward without doubt. If I am not certain about anything else, I am certain that the world of my family is as solid as fiction, and I can relax and move toward them without panic.

Nakuru.

I am home.

Mum looks tired and her eyes are sleepier than usual. She has never seemed frail, but does now. I decide that I have changed, and my attempts at maturity make her seem more human.

We sit, in the dining room, and talk from breakfast to lunch. Every so often she will grab my hand and check my nails. She will lick a spot off my forehead and smooth my eyebrows. She stands to clear the table. She is swiveling her radar, like she used to when we were children, half-asleep, shuffling softly in her caftan, and walking around, after feeling disturbed by something intangible. We wander and chat, and things gather to some invisible assessment inside her, and she turns, sharp and certain, and says, “You smoke.”

I nod, eyes tap-­dancing awkwardly, waiting for it to come, the full blow of power. It does not come: there is restraint.

They are worried about me and, for the first time in my life, worried enough not to bring it up. I have not spoken to them about my stalled degree in a long time. They know. I know.

After supper—
ugali!
—I make my way around the house. Mum’s voice talking to my dad echoes in the corridor. None of us has her voice: it tingles. If crystal were water made solid, her voice would be the last splash of water before it set.

Light from the kitchen brings the Nandi woman to life. A painting.

I was terrified of her when I was a child. Her eyes seemed so alive and the red bits growled at me. Her broad face announced an immobility that really scared me; I was stuck there, fenced into a tribal reserve by her features. With rings on her ankles and bells on her nose, she will make music wherever she goes.

There are two sorts of people. Those on one side of the line will wear third­hand clothing till it rots. They will eat dirt, but school fees will be paid. On the other side of the line live people we see in coffee-­table books, we see in weekend trips to the village to visit family, on market days in small towns, and on television, translated back to us by a foreign man with a deep voice that has come to represent timeless days and bygone ways.

These people are like an old and lush jungle that continues to flourish its leaves and unfurl extravagant blooms, refusing to realize that somebody cut off the water.

To us, it seems that everything is mapped out and defined for them, and everybody is fluent in those definitions.

The old ones are not much impressed with our society, or manners—­what catches their attention is our tools: the cars and medicines and telephones and wind­up dolls and guns and anthropologists and funding and international indigenous peoples’ networks.

In my teens, set alight by the poems of Senghor and Okot p’Bitek, the Nandi woman became my Tigritude. I pronounced her beautiful, marveled at her cheekbones, and mourned the lost wisdom in her eyes, but I still would have preferred to sleep with Pam Ewing or Iman.

It was a source of terrible fear for me that I could never love her. I covered that betrayal with a complicated imagery that had no connection to my gut: O Nubian Princess, and other bad poetry. She moved to my bedroom for a while, next to the faux-­kente wall hanging, but my mother took her back to her pulpit.