One Day I Will Write About This Place (11 page)

Take: ten thousand hammers, ten thousand languages all shouting, ten thousand specialists of ten thousand metals arranged into ten thousand loud permutations to fix cars, tractors, plows, pots, pans, woks, mills, chairs.

Sell: sunglasses, pirated cassette tapes, Swiss knives, spanners, boiled eggs in blue bowls, sausages in sweaty glass-­and-­wood cases strapped to a thin torso, key chains, plastic ducks or bunnies wound and yapping frenziedly in MadeinTaiwanish.

It is hot and yellow and dry in 1984. Many of these people have certificates. Marketing. Carpentry. Power mechanics. Electrical technology. This is the dump site for certificates that did not send you anywhere.

I am standing and nodding, and huddled men confer around my father.

“Sokasoba?”

“Nooo. The shock absorbers are okay.”

“These old pinjots are very good. Three-oh-five. Ni injection?”

I nod.

I know nothing about old Peugeots. There are things men are supposed to know, and I do not want to know those things, but I want to belong and the members need to know about crankshafts and points and frogs and holy manly grails and puppy dog tails. Secular things to hang on to.

At the edge of the field of fixers, there is an old gentleman with a fresh old school haircut, complete with a trimmed line above his left temple, what white people call a part, an appropriately biblical word for African hair engineered with great will to separate in this way. He is wearing a tweed jacket, a hat and feather, and his old leather shoes are gleaming with all the dust. He is selling old tins and cans and drums and all other manner of containers.

One guy is cutting tubes from tires and selling the strips: those strips, called
blada
—­for children’s catapults; to tie your goods to your bicycle or on the roof of a
matatu
; to make a hosepipe fit a tap and not leak at the point of contact. For intricate toy wire-­cars, for the boot of your car in case of any one of thirty thousand things that can go wrong that a
blada
can sort out. Who does not have a use for
blada
?

There are piles and piles of corrugated iron sheets.
Mabati.
For re­cycled roofing, for millions of one-­room Nairobi people. I rub my hand along my jacket’s shoulder pads, thrilled at its padded promises in this clanging world. I am different. I am different.

I am bored with Baba’s mechanics and walk around. It is lunchtime, and women are gathered around huge pots cut out of old oil drums; beans and maize are boiling, men queuing for a two-­shilling lunch. Screaming, shouting, ladles clashing hard onto enamel plates. Now it is the smell of boiling suds of beans.

The grass has been beaten down to nothing by feet over many years in this large patch of ground of banging. Somewhere, not far from here, an open-­air church service is taking place: loudspeaker and shouts and screams.

You would not believe that not five hundred meters from here are roads and shops, and skyscrapers and cool restaurants that are playing the music of noiseless elevators, and serving the food of quiet electric mixers and plastic fridge containers. Burgers and Coke. Pizza.

I love the music of noiseless elevators: the whoosh of hydraulics, a promise of soft landings. I love easy pop, Michael Jackson, and the Gap Band. People are standing next to big, cheap speakers from Taiwan, which I am sure are bouncing up and down on the cheap wood mounts, making their own drumming sound to add to their cheap crackle.

Thin men, with corrugated brown teeth from
miraa,
and muscular jaw muscles, and glazed, wild eyes, focused on one repetitive task. And from them, from their speakers comes the sound of Congo—­and this sound is exactly the sound of all the clang, the rang-­tang-­tang, tinny clamor of agitated building, selling, and the multilingual clash of mouth cymbals, lifting up and down, jaws working, eating, trading, laughing. And people singing are the sound of melting metal. In that urban Congolese music that sounds like it clangs: Lingala, that jangling language of Kinshasa. But around them, electric guitars twang hard, things bang.

Why don’t we listen to crooning and soft drums and strumming pools of water and acoustic guitar meadows? Why not listen to plaintive old folk songs, leather string and goatskin box? The wooden sounds of long ago?

Wood rots. Wood will not bend in heat. Wood burns and crumbles. Early this century. The searing heat of Belgium’s lust in the Congo insists on new metallic people. We, in Kenya, don’t understand the lyrics—­we don’t speak Lingala—­but this music, this style, this metallic sound has become the sound of our times.

Work your metal to the frenzy of your plan and let the heat around grow and grow and soon something gives, your future—­on the softer side of town, in the soft melt and grass of your new square stone house in the village. After a day beating metal, you go home and sleep under your galvanized metal roof, and it rains, and no sleep in the world is better than the sleep under the roar of rain on a naked
mabati
roof. Something gives: of the body and its limits, and you’re in a zone, a stream of molten creative metal. Your labor can beat, bend, melt, harden, shape, aggregate, galvanize. Labor that can defeat tiredness, because dance and song is labor that leaves you exhilarated. This is rumba.
Mabati
music. Metal music.

Baba is done. “Let’s go,” he says.

“Baba…”

“Hmm…”

“Can we go to Wimpy?”

“Sure.” He smiles.

Forty Kenya shillings at Ndirangu’s.

Opposite Matatu Stage, Thika (near Josphat Bar and Butchery). Al­ways in stock: Mills and Boon, Silhouette Romance, Robert Ludlum, Robert Ruark, Frederick Forsyth, Danielle Steel, Wilbur Smith, and James Hadley Chase.

All form four and six textbooks available.

Ask for Malkiat Singh notes and form four marking schemes.

Ndirangu provides an endless supply of books to middle-­class Thika girls, working secretaries, bank clerks, schoolgirls on holiday, and housewives every day. I sneak out of my new school to trade with him. Each new book I read has to be more, bigger, more melodramatic to keep me interested. I gobble them like candy. I read two or three of them a day. I can write one, I am sure, a big saga and make lots of money, and eat pizza every day.

Will he kiss her? The Argentinean polo player has melting eyes and thick eyelashes. One moment they are glowering like a demonic Inquisition chimney, the next they are looking at her and saying caara, cara mia. Or the Argentinean version—­something caramia-­rish, and then because of her beauty they heat up blacker and shinier, blacker and velvetier, blacker and blacker, until they can’t heat up any more and black Latin tenderness drips from his eyeballs like hot oil, it purses itself up like a kiss, and grabs her and… and…

…

Mangu, originally Kabaa High School, is the second-oldest school for Africans in the country. Because it is in Gikuyuland, in Central Province, it was easier to get me a place here. Mang’u was founded by the Holy Ghost brothers in 1939. In the 1960s they decided to offer aviation as a subject for Mang'u students. They bought a glider, were given land by President Kenyatta in this dry, snake-­ridden bush, and, together with the government, started to build a new school.

But the money ran out, and only the first phase of the school was completed. When it rains we are overwhelmed with mud. Our toilets block and spill over every week. The showers have collapsed. There are strange animals breeding in unfinished dorms. Many classrooms have no windows.

All those shining alumni, like Vice President Kibaki, do not come back here. Their money supports schools like St. Mary’s, private Nairobi schools where their children now go to do British GCEs and international baccalaureate. Mangu is a national school, and it attracts the brightest students from all corners of the country. Some rich, some very poor. Some come having never seen a faucet.

There is a guy in my class from one of the villages in Taveta, where the Kenyatta family owns land as big as a whole district. Many of the Taveta people there are casual workers for the Kenyatta plantation. He works as a casual laborer on farms during the holidays to earn money for fees. He walks from Thika town and arrives with his uniform torn and faded. He is all giant forearms and huge digging calves, and he sits through the night, every night, with his books.

He rarely talks, is always in a good mood, always dazed from books.

Mangu High School, every year, supplies a third of the students to Kenya’s medical school. We top every science subject in the country. We hover near the top of everything else.

We are believers. More than any other school in this country, we believe in raw and bloody hard work, in impossible academic standards. No teacher sets the bar—­the old culture of our school does.

Food is boiled. Boiled maize and beans with thick chunks of soupy cabbage. Boiled in giant steel steamers. Our school caterer tells us a growing boy needs one piece of meat the size of a matchbox a week for good health. Boiled beans are good. She says. Sometimes fights break out over potatoes.

On Thursday nights, it is rice and beans—­top layer that dark brown cap of liquid beans dripping down a hard fist of rice. Top layer,
topi,
is our favorite. We queue up at the dining hall half an hour before the supper bell, plates and spoons in hand, salivating. Topi. Topi. Topi. If the bell is ten minutes late, there are scuffles and fights for the door.

Our headmaster, Karaba, whom we love, has bought pigs. He wants to improve our diet. He tells us every week. Ohhhh, one day we will have a proper pork-­o mearo. We dream about pork-­o.

Roasting porko, frying porko.

Porko Mi-­ro.

Two plump pink and yellow students land in Mangu one day. Brothers. Their plump and pink parents have a fat old Mercedes. Their mother is plump and pink and yellow. Their father is plump and yellow. They look like an American sitcom about rich Kenyans. They come to Old Boys dorm, carrying boxes and boxes of food and big sweaty smiles. Roast chickens arrive from their driver every Sunday. Fresh bakery breads. Pizza.

We call our two new benefactors Pig and Piglet.

At assembly one morning, Karaba announces that by December we will have our first Pork-­o Miro.

Our stomachs growl.

A proper porko meal-­o.

My thumbnails have healed and have character. They are bumpy and black. I still use a razor blade, gently now, to try to shape them to my will. I have a callus at the base of my right thumb, from licking my thumb and forefinger and rubbing them together to maintain that perfect friction for turning pages. Reading is a fever these days. These two fingers remain perpetually ready. I lick them and rub them together every few minutes. Each time I chew the callus off it grows back, not to its original thinness.

It is 1984, and there are strange things happening.

The drought is the worst since 1870, some say, when the Maasai were broken by rinderpest and civil war. No. The famine is the worst since 1930, when thousands starved after the British had “consolidated” the diversified lands of Gikuyu families.

Breakdance: The Movie
breaks every record; people queue for hours for morning shows, cut class, and spin and robot. They are screaming all over campus. There is also a new season of demons. This we are told by the God people, who are growing louder every day. They are everywhere. The posher parts of Nairobi are flooded with cattle as nomads descend on watered lawns from the plains, wearing blankets and being chased about by police. In the news we see the acres of dead cattle carcasses. Some Maasai land at people’s gates half starving and offer to be security guards for food.

Teenage Nairobi girls decide that Maasai braids are the new fashion, and we see venerable warriors in red
shukas,
sitting in suburban gates. Teenage girls are sitting on the grass in front of their stools, heads leaning back and singing the latest Lionel Richie, as the Maasai warriors delicately braid hair for food money. Maasai braids are cool. Ndirangu, my bookstall guy in Thika town, tells me that people in Muranga no longer go out at night.

They fear ghosts.

Karaba, our much-­loved headmaster, is gone. Moi transferred him. Our new headmaster, Jos (very very) fat Kimani, is a caricature of greed, with thin legs and a massive belly. Some strange-­looking creatures arrive a few months after he comes. Some are long and thin and wiry and they chew gum and play basketball. Headmaster JosFat swaggers at parade, swinging his belly from side to side, his jowls shaking as he says we will make this the best sports school in the country, and we watch these long students bouncing basketballs, all of them looking quite quite old. Bathroom sinks are now covered with stubble and discarded razor blades. In class they sit, all lanky, looking confused about prefixes and suffixes, division and multiplication. Ati nini?

Soon JosFat is in the papers. He is now part of the country’s Olympic Committee.

He is Jos fatter than ever.

…

One day we gather in a small smelly study in Old Boys. The school video player sits in the cramped room—­and Fat Freddie, who has contacts in America, produces a new videotape.

For a year and more, there has been no rain in Kenya. Lush temperate forests are glowing red. The skin has peeled off all of eastern Africa, and the earth is naked and burns the feet. From under the earth dark melting things creep up through the cracks of the soil.

All over Kenya, there are stories about packs of rabid wild dogs. We call them T9. Some say their eyes glow in the dark. Some say they are bionic and can leap over thorny hedges. They like to sneak up on drunks at night and bite off their ankles. Everybody returns from the holidays with T9 stories. We hear rumors about a place called Nyati House. In Nairobi. There is a giant bronze buffalo head in front of Nyati House, and it is there that people are taken after disappearing from homes at night, to spend days being beaten on the testicles by Special Branch people.

There are ten of us in the room. It smells of socks and bread and cheap margarine and cocoa.