One Day I Will Write About This Place (5 page)

Ciru and I are still in Lena Moi Primary School. Jimmy is now in form three in a boarding school called St. Patrick’s Iten. Chiqy is four, and looks a lot like me. I am eleven.

Last night we had a storm, the biggest one anybody can remember. Two windows broke, and this morning we found a giant eucalyptus tree lying flat on the ground, its roots muddy and shivering with dew and earth. There are flat clouds where sky meets earth. Flat and clean and gray, like old suds. The light of the sun falls in soft shafts and everything gleams with God behind it. The air is fresh, and we are all quiet in the car on our way to school: fences, trees, and garbage are piled on every elbow of road and land.

We drive into school but can’t see anybody. My father is irritated with me. He makes me tie my shoelaces. He redoes my tie. For years I will hide from him my inability to tie a tie, to tie my shoelaces, to tell the time, and, later on, my inability to do long multiplication. Friends will tie my tie for me, and I will keep it tied for a whole term.

But today seems special. The soft mouth of God is blowing moist air at us; we run through dots and dashes of shadow into soft peeping light. We run onto the pavements; long bungalows of classrooms stretch. We run zigzag, swing off one pole and vault to the next. We break out to the back, past the drinking-­water tap, past the long line of caterpillar trees, which nobody will stand under for fear that the hairy green caterpillars will fall on their heads, to the field, where everybody is playing. The caterpillars cover the tree, like leaves.

In one week, all of Nakuru will be covered by a million white butterflies with pink nostrils. The grass is still damp, still long from the rain, and we watch for knots. When the grass is long we all like to tie clumps into knots that people can trip on. People are spread out all over the field, and we have no idea what they are doing. It is drizzling softly.

Then we see them. All over the field. Brought down from the sky, by the storm. Furry balls of gray. Other clumps of pink and gray. And just pink. Many of them are dead. Others have been eaten by dogs, others flutter about weakly. There are pink feathers everywhere; entrails and bone and soft, beautiful pink and string and jelly flesh. Feathers every­where. There are clumps of ant sculptures, rolling and reshaping like clouds. Bubbles of blood. Crunched bone. For the whole morning, we pick up the baby flamingos that are still alive, and hand them to Kenya Wildlife Service people.

Lena Moi Primary School used to be Lugard School, a whites-only school until the 1960s. Now it is named after Lena Moi, the abandoned wife of our president, Daniel Toroitich arap Moi. When Moi was vice president, she slapped him during a Madaraka Day dance, in front of President Kenyatta, who laughed at him, and that made him angry and now we hear she cannot leave her farm. She comes from an important Kalenjin family, the Bommets, a big farming family, one of the first in the Rift Valley to become Christians and go to mission school. Some of them go to my school. Many Nakuru people like Lena Moi, because it used to be the white school in Nakuru. There are no whites left. There is one Japanese student.

President Moi doesn’t come from an important family. He was only a primary school teacher before entering politics. He is always being shamed. When Moi was vice president, Kenyatta’s friends treated him like a child. One policemen, a Gikuyu, would stop and search his car whenever he was going home. The policeman’s name is Mr. Mungai, and two of his sons are in our school. He is very short, and he keeps horses. Once Mr. Mungai slapped Moi. Now that Moi is president, Mr. Mungai has left the country. President Moi wants to detain him. The school hedge runs along the road where this happened, the road to Kabarak, his wife’s home, now Moi’s home. Past the road to Eldoret and finally to Uganda. President Moi likes primary school choirs and gives choir­masters big promotions.

One Sunday afternoon we go to town, Mum, Ciru, and I, to buy chicken and chips for supper. Kukuden. The streets of Nakuru are empty. People are at home. Even from here, two miles away, I can hear the Salvation Army band at the bottom of town, near Lake Nakuru. There is a lorry parking lot across the road from Kukuden. And from one of the lorries a cassette tape is playing.

Congo music, with wayward voices as thick as hot honey. This sound is dangerous; it promises to lift you from where you are and drop you into a hot upside-down place twenty thousand leagues under the sea.
Kimay.
Guitar and trumpet, parched like before the rains, dive into the honey and out again. A group of men unload sacks of potatoes, and they are singing to the music. The song bursts out with the odd Kiswahili phrase, then forgets itself and starts on its gibberish again.

The voices plead in a strange jangling language, Lingala, which sounds familiar—­it has Kiswahili patterns and words—­but I can’t understand it. It stirs something green and creamy in my belly, and I am nauseous. Men are sending their voices higher than voices should travel, letting their voices flow, slow and thick. The song’s structure is… different, not like the easy melodies of school, the tamed do-­re-­mi-­fa Kiswahili songs we sing for choir.

I am starting to read storybooks. If words, in English, arranged on the page have the power to control my body in the world, this sound and language can close its folds, like a fan, and I will slide into its world, where things are arranged differently, where people like Jonas, the Pokot guard, live, and in that place anything can happen to you.

I like choir. The school lets choir members off class twice a week in the afternoons to meet kids from other schools and practice for a giant group called Massed Choir that has kids from all twenty-two municipal schools. We go to the stadium and practice, over a thousand of us, to sing praise songs composed by our teachers for the president on Madaraka Day on June 1. It is fun. The music teachers of several schools compose the praise songs, and the best ones get to become headmasters or even go to work at the Presidential Music Commission near State House in Nairobi.

English is Kenya’s official language. All documents that are legal and official must be in English. Kiswahili is not compulsory in school; it is our national language. That is what our constitution says. So, we have news in English and Kiswahili. Most Kenyans speak some Kiswahili. Our constitution does not name our other languages. I think it is because we want to eradicate tribalism. We are not allowed to speak “mother tongue” in school. In school, Mrs. Gichiri, our headmistress, reacts strongly to girls who are prrr-­oud, who show vanity, who prrr-een themselves. Naughty boys get four on the buttocks; proud girls get four on their palm.

Prrr, said the whistle. A warning not to exceed yourself. The world in English has sharp edges.
Pr
words in English promise good futures to people who stick to brittle boundaries;
prrr
words promise breaking to those who dare to dance to
kimay.
Kenyan English places have stainless steel whistles, which tell you to march this way; they shrill sharply when you cross a line. There are bells and parades and posted rules and glasses and cups, which are all breakable. People who do not speak Kiswahili use enamel cups.

Prrr-­oud. I like those sharp shrill controlling words that sound like they come from an officer’s whistle. Prim. Prude. Proper. Price. Probe. Prance. Preen. Prrr-een. Baba says the pound is growing rich against the shilling. More white people are leaving Kenya, more Indians. The shops that supplied us with books and toys and British comics like
Beezer, Beano,
and
Topper
are becoming expensive.

If I visit you in your home and your mother starts to speak to you in your language while I am there, you will roll your eyes at me, and reply to her in English or in Kiswahili, because we have agreed that parents are ridiculous that way. More than anything, we laugh at and dislike those kids who seem unable to escape their tribe.

Sometimes we practice traditional songs for the interschool music festival. We try to make sure we do not shake our bodies too much so that we step out of the lines and lose our place. It is important that we move our limbs together, and keep in tune, and follow the conductor. At practice, the conductor, our music teacher Mr. Dondo, keeps us in do-re-mi-fa key with his mouth organ before we start. Don’t move like a villager, he likes to say. We often do not know the meaning of the traditional song we are singing, but we learn the words well. Mr. Dondo has been promoted. He is now the deputy headmaster.

When two boys come to school one day sunburned and smelling of the village, where they had gone for a funeral, their hair was gone, shaved clear with a razor blade, scalps shining from animal fat.

They are toxic. They do not turn up for choir practice.

As money gets tighter, middle-­class parents prefer to have their kids walking to school, and don’t mind the shortcuts. Soon kids are buying lunch in little illegal kiosks outside the school. Soon we cross into the other world, to buy handmade wire cars and trade homing pigeons from kids who speak strange languages, who laugh if you speak English to them—they understand it, but find it pretentious; kids who wear no shoes, kids who miss school a lot, and have babies very early and smell of smoke from charcoal cooking, who go hunting with dogs and catapults for antelopes and rabbits and pigeons, in the forest above our home, for fun.

Outside the once neat school hedge, through its holes, zigzag paths make their way through every part of town. Andazi, the school gardener, is getting old; he has been in this school since white people were here, and he says we have spoiled it.

I grew two inches this term, and my voice just broke, and I got kicked out of the choir because I squeak a lot. There are informal kiosks sprouting everywhere, selling everything from batteries to fresh vegetables, between the thorny hedges that are starting to grow wild in English-­speaking Nakuru. There are a lot of things coming from Tawian, and fewer things coming from Britain. Baba says the British make good things but never learned how to market them, because the colonials had to buy what they made. There are hawkers now, walking the streets selling Tawian things, and more shops are closing.

Look! Look at Michael Jackson move, as if he cannot break. We try to dance like him.

Baba wakes us up this morning and tells us that there has been a coup d’état led by junior soldiers in the air force. There is shooting all over Kenya. We stay home the whole day. The government was taken over by an air force private. There is shooting in Nairobi all day, and rumors that the streets are piled high with bodies. Indian shops are looted. Many women are raped. There are curfews, for months, and arrests. Some of the Gujarati-­speaking kids from school have left for London and Toronto. Nobody really can keep the holes in the hedges sealed.

Kenya is not Uganda. Kenya has big roads and railways and tall buildings, science and technology, research and big planes and thousands of troops and machine guns and missiles. With only a few guns and some ragtag soldiers, air force Private Ochuka is, for six hours, the president of Kenya. In the afternoon, the coup is put down, and thousands are killed. Nairobi has corpses everywhere.

Cleophas works at home for us, as a gardener and cook. He used to be a caddy and dreams of becoming a pro golfer. He is cool and has a big Afro. Once he took me to watch
ABBA: The Movie.
During Kenyatta’s time, he was always getting arrested because he looks like a Ugandan. He comes from Kakamega, in Western Province.

One day, after school, I am bored and do not have anything to read. I am twelve. Mum won’t let me go to the library because they found out that I had managed to spend the whole year avoiding math homework and reading novels in class. We are writing national exams this year, Ciru and I, and Mum and Baba are being strict. Ciru is getting all girly girly lately and does not like to play or talk. She locks her room a lot and says things like “But Michael Jackson is so sensitive.”

I go to visit Cleophas in the servants’ quarters, hoping he has time to talk, or play music, or maybe he will take me to the kiosk to buy sweets. The door is only partly closed. There is somebody else in his room. A woman.

Their voices are floating on wet parachutes. Sometimes a sharp squeal or a groan breaks out of the breath-­coated chat. She giggles, and he says something gruffly back. My neck is hot. Their laughter steams, puffs. She cries out. The metal safari bed keeps banging against the wall. I can’t move. This room was once a stable for horses, during colonial days. It is dark and hot and has a green wooden window. They put in a cement floor after it was converted into rooms for servants in the sixties, before we moved here. I want to leave but can’t. The lumps wriggle under the blankets. Cleophas moans, loudly; his head leans up and back. I jump up and shout something incoherent. She screams and sits up, her face ripe and wild. “Get out,” he shouts. “Out!” Cleophas leaps out of the bed, covers his crotch with a thin gray blanket, still shouting, and slams the door.

One day Mum fires Cleophas. She refuses to say why.

Jimmy is home on half term, and I have found science. It is round and perfect, like a circle. One day I am reading Erich von Däniken in our bedroom. Jimmy lies on his bed next to me.

“Jim,” I say, “if Atlantis was in the Mediterranean?”

“Hmmm…” says Jim.

“And the Mediterranean is where there are dolphins?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“And dolphins are the most intelligent animals?”

“Yes,” he says.

“And they like people, they are the only wild animals that like people?”

“Yeah,” says Jim. He is not really listening.

“And… and Atlantis drowned in the sea? And the people dis­appeared, and there are no skeletons to be found?”

“A-­huh? So?”

“So I know what happened! They evolved! The dolphins are the people from Atlantis!”

He looks across lazily at me. He is listening to
Top of the Pops
on BBC shortwave. Boomtown Grunts and Stray Cats. “That is silly,” he says.