One Day I Will Write About This Place (32 page)

…

I am home in Kenya in the American summer, when Togo meets South
Korea in their opening World Cup match.

The entire continent watches, almost every man and woman—a
billion of us: in small towns in Germany where day is euros and incontinent
old Germans, and night is neo-Nazis;
in foreign correspondents’
sea-facing
living rooms in Accra, where long sexy limbs are flying
and weave is disheveled and a girl with a long tubular face and pouting
lips is screaming, as the foreign correspondent sips whiskey and types,
“Africans in the heart of Togo’s dark jungle, in the middle of the dead
animals of fetish-markets
today cheered…”

“Africa forgot war and misery today, to celebrate the rare good
news…”

The entire African continent: some living in musty dormitories in
Moscow; dusty and tired and drunk, living among abandoned warehouses
and dead industries of New Jersey; in well-oiled
boardrooms
in Nairobi and Lagos and Johannesburg; in cramped tenements in the
suburbs of Paris; inside the residences of the alumni of the Presidential
School of Lomé; in the markets of Accra and the corrugated iron
bars of Lusaka; in school halls; and social halls in the giant markets of Addis Ababa; in ecstatic churches dancing in Uganda; on wailing
coral balconies in Zanzibar; in a dark rumba-belting,
militia-ridden
bar in Lubumbashi; in rickety video shops in Dakar; in prisons in the
Central African Republic; in miniskirts
on red-lit
street corners in Cape
Town, peering into SuperSport bars; in school halls in Cherengani; in
Parliament cafeterias in Harare.

We all jump up and down, and shout and sing when, in the thirtyfourth
minute, Kader gives Togo the lead over South Korea with a blistering
shot from a very difficult angle.

December 2007. The election is three days away.

I have had enough. Raila’s party is now nakedly saying in rallies
all over Kenya that their campaign is about forty-two tribes versus one
tribe—the
Gikuyu. The Gikuyu have become “blemishes” in some parts
of the Rift Valley. Blemishes that need to be wiped away. They have
gone mad, our politicians. Kibaki has selected his own commissioners
for the electoral commission. He has broken his promise to consult the
opposition. One woman tells me she has volunteered her own money—and
she is not rich—to
help rig the election in Raila’s constituency. She
is Gikuyu.

Almost all the people I know, for the first time in our history, are
nakedly and openly beating their tribal chest.

I tear up my voter’s card. I board a plane to Lamu, as far away from
the poisonous election as I can get and still be in Kenya. The man sitting
next to me on the plane is dressed in an African-print shirt with
short sleeves. It is a good batik. He does not try to be flashy with it—it
is a safe navy color and does not drown his white skin. No fake blond
dreadlocks; his hair is brown and cut short. The man has been chatting
to me for ten minutes now, and he is irritating. Maybe that’s it.
Noo. He is speaking in Kiswahili—but
his Kiswahili is perfect. First he
speaks in Sheng, then he shifts to clean and elaborate coast Kiswahili.
My Kiswahili is not very good. My Sheng is not so good. Maybe I am
jealous. Noo. That’s not it.

It is that he has got it all wrong. His accent is perfect; his tone,
rhythm, everything. His timing is wrong. In this country, with its many
languages, classes, and registers, much is said by what is not said. There
are many understood ways to address someone: sometimes you shift
quickly into English; often you speak in a mock Kiswahili, in an ironical tone, simply to indicate that you are not dogmatic about language, that
you are quite happy to shift around and find the bandwidth of the person
to whom you are speaking.

The man is dogmatic. And his exquisite politeness is rude. He
wants me to thank him for his cultural scrupulousness, and is unwilling
to let me speak English, or not speak at all. I am not an individual.
I am a cultural ambassador. His proper Kiswahili demands that I be
more attentive than I want to be—inattention
is impossible when somebody
speaks in formal Kiswahili. It demands brotherhood and respect.
I must nod, and say, “Ndio, ahaa, eh? Yes. Ohh!” Eyebrows up and eyes
wide in mock interest.

It is going to be a long flight.

Lamu town is the oldest living Swahili town in Kenya.

Lamu was founded around the twelfth century, and there is evidence
that international trade had been taking place there for at least a millennium
before then. There were larger and more powerful city-states
than Lamu in East Africa’s past: Siyu and Pate, for example. These cities
are now mostly ruins. What makes Lamu interesting is that the basic
architecture remains mostly intact. There are no cars on the island. The
narrow streets and the thick-walled
stone and mangrove homes remain
close to what they were three hundred years ago. The same and yet very
different. For in those days, Lamu was much more than a museum.
These days it is a world heritage site, acting out its past for its own fond
memories, and for the curiosity of others. The town of poetry and trade
with India and Persia and China is diminished and poor.

We walk out of the plane and collect our luggage. Patrick, a young
beach boy I befriended the last time I was in Lamu, is standing a few feet
away, holding a posy of frangipani flowers and looking sheepish in his
stubby dreadlocks and baggy jeans. He winks at me. An elderly white
woman—she must be at least sixty—rushes past me; they hug, kiss, she
oohs and aahs at the flowers.

They walk away looking all aloha.

Young men have come across from the island with carts to take the
luggage to the boats. Every hotel has its own cart; most have their own boats. I ask one of the porters about the election. He shrugs. “We will
vote for whoever gives us a banquet,” he says.

We walk toward the mainland jetty on a dusty red path that is lined
with stubbly bush. It is hot, and I am stuffy and irritable. There are sporadic
groans and mumbles of sleepy blue water between the bushes, and
people are yelling in lyrical Kiswahili, pushing carts, luggage bouncing
in discomfort. The sea yawns and stretches, a lazy, prostrate, undulating
blue, like a morning. And a few hundred meters across the water,
I can see daytime standing up: to the right a longish strip of gleaming
white buildings, the shining white tower of a mosque. Lamu Island.

“Boss!”

The man is old enough to be my father. My face immediately becomes
solemn and I greet him in as good and respectful Kiswahili as I
can manage. It sounds all wrong and stilted. He hoists my bags onto his
shoulders from the cart, smiling and bowing. I am not sure what to do. I
continue to speak respectfully. My respect is instinctive; his very accent
demands it. This is not even a class thing, or guilt. Kiswahili is just a tool
for me, as it is for most Kenyans. An inherited language that a hundred
million Africans mutilate. Lamu, this small island, is the home of the
original dialect of Kiswahili, and of the Swahili civilization.

We walk down the jetty toward the boat. He has all my bags on
his back, and I am stupid. Anywhere else in Kenya, we can pretend we
are equals if we speak in Kiswahili; it is the national language and invites
a feeling of brotherhood that does not really exist. But Kiswahili
is Muhammed’s mother tongue; he does not know how to play national
games with it. Lamu is too far away from Kenya proper—and
Kiswahili
is old and deep here. He is not reading my signals, and I am resentful.
I dig out crumpled notes and place them awkwardly into his hands as I
board the boat, turning away from his gratitude.

The main jetty area is covered in orange: flags, posters, T-shirts,
campaign banners. People are huddled in groups listening to the radio.

Mr. America in Kiswahili is salamu alaikuming all over the place—and
it occurs to me that I am now, to the people of this island, what he
was to me when we boarded the plane.

It is evening, and people are dressed up, men in long white
kanzus
,
women in black
buibuis
, henna designs on their hands and fingers and
feet. A lean blond couple strolls by, both dressed in linen—probably
from Shela, the village next to Lamu where jet set celebrities have holiday
homes. A group of shirtless teenagers are surrounded by a cheering
crowd as they dance a stick fight; there is a donkey race for young
boys. Young Bajuni women in green and gold
buibuis
move in giggling
huddles, eyes ringed in kohl, gold everywhere. I catch one eye, which
bats, moves down shyly, and then covers itself with a flick of fingers and
whoosh of fine green cloth. She turns into the fragrant huddle, which
swells with speculation.

The town slopes upward gently, and all the narrow twisted paths
lead to the seafront. The town is cleaned by rain and water heading
downhill. There is a lot of donkey shit. I walk past the long, sea-facing
avenue and turn into a thin alley, into the bowels of the town. Buildings
lean into each other, scrape each other; walls loom over narrow
twisted paths.

Lamu has always had a reputation as a libertarian town. People spend
most of their time indoors, and even individual houses are built with
the idea of public and private, with increasing layers of intimate space
the farther away from the door you are. The doors are thick, tall, and
elaborately carved from wood; just outside are benches built into the
wings of the main door. It is here that guests are received. There is a
heavy metal knocker near the bottom of the door. You knock and sit and
wait. Most people don’t get to enter the home.

In the old days, traders would come in from India and from the
Middle and Far East. As soon as you enter most traders’ homes, you
will see a small staircase that leads you to the room where foreign traders
were hosted sumptuously, but still distant from family. Guests were
treated well. They were sprinkled with rose water. Orchards in courtyards
had lemon, lime, and banana trees and rose apples. When Ibn
Batutta spent time among the Swahili in Mogadishu and Kilwa, he was
fed with stews of chicken, meat, fish, and vegetables served on beds of rice and cooked with ghee. He ate green bananas in fresh milk, pickled
lemon, ginger, and mangoes.

Lamu became a place of pilgrimage for hippies and gay men in the
1970s. Outside the thick walls, and mostly in the evening, people put on
their dutiful appearances: mother, elder, imam, tourist.

…

Patrick makes his way to my hotel at night. We have a beer; he is happy
to see me, he says. “Why didn’t you call me? I called and you never
called back.”

“I was busy,” I say.

He does not look impressed by my answer. “Are you following the
election?”

He laughs. “Me? No. Am just a beach boy.”

…

The election rages on the radio. There are pocket radios on everywhere,
and people gathered in small groups around them. Yesterday I told off
Patrick. He had disappeared with my money for a whole day while I
stewed without mobile phone credit. I was furious. There are rumors
going around that militias are gathering in the Rift Valley. He was
partying somewhere. He shrugged, as if to say, why do you upcountry
people and white people, who to us are really the same people, move so
aggressively against the tide of things?

While we were talking, a young Kenyan woman, a doctor, joined us
for a beer, and we started talking politics. When she left, he asked me if
the woman was a Gikuyu. I said no. He said, “Yeye ni mjanja sana.”

I told him she was probably Luo. He was confused for a second. Then
he nodded, and said, “Ni mjanja kama mzungu.”

What he was saying was, she is very cunning, or clever, like a white
person. He did not say, or mean, wise, or educated, or even intelligent.

I drink with a banker. He is excited. Kenya has changed already, he
says. The old middle-class
banks are over. Banking for the masses has
arrived; anybody can get credit, open an account. There are hundreds of new good schools, colleges, many new private universities. The biggest
new depositors do not live in middle-class
Nairobi. They provide
services to the masses—food,
construction, mobile phone credit, small
loans, hardware. The most organized union in Kenya is the primary
school teachers’ union. They have their own banks—with
billions, they
are building their own homes. Growth is arriving from below, not from
the money of political patronage. Those new moneymakers can force
policy. The banker is a big Kibaki supporter. “Raila is dangerous,” he
says, his face grim. “He can’t win, whatever it takes.”

“What about the constitution, a new constitution?”

He sniffs. “Ha. We need to stabilize things first.” He means let the
Kibaki clique consolidate power.

I spend the night walking up and down the jetty and chatting with
people. There are radios everywhere, and we follow the results. I hear
people say they cannot pay their bills; the cost of food is now impossible.
In the morning, I try to draw money from the only ATM in town. It
has run out of cash. The count has begun, and it is clear there is rigging.
Gangs of angry young men are making roadblocks in Kibera.

The flight out of Lamu is delayed. Nairobi is dangerous.

Why this time? Five years ago we had a near-perfect election. Who
knows? Could be the price of oil; the beef in China; paranoia about
Gikuyu entitlement; paranoia about Kalenjin entitlement; Luo betrayed
again; if they win won’t there be reprisals?

Moi; Kibaki; Raila; Ruto; December circumcision ceremonies;
trickle-down
economics not trickling down enough; instant text messages;
xenophobic Texas-, New Jersey-, and London-based
Kenyans
insulting each other like mad people on the Internet, having discovered
xenophobia in chat rooms; high panga sales in our supermarkets; colonialism;
Kenyatta’s land grab; Moi’s land grab; trickle-up
corruption;
the Federalists; the Centralists; spontaneous combustion; neoliberalism;
preplanned combustion; slush money for violence from politicians;
slush money for violence from wealthy athletes; Kibaki messing with
our electoral commission. Raila will rig! Angry young men; hungry young men; too much democracy too quickly; old men who refuse to
cede power; young men who want power too much; too little democracy
way too slowly; misplaced grievances; our president, a terrible politician.