One Day I Will Write About This Place (24 page)

South Africa is starting to make something new. In Brenda’s new video, she is pouting, a crown on her head, her fake teeth flashing, her lips lopsided, a mischievous child, a brassy woman, a tomboy, a cartoon, refusing to fall, carried forward by song only. I am sure Wambui—­powerful and unbeatable Wambui—is still in Kenya, still somebody’s maid. Wambuis do not become Brenda Fassies in Kenya.

I am a writer. I am now a published writer. I am going to call Mum, call Baba, and tell them that my story, about us in Uganda, will be online for them to read.

Later, Brenda will say, of this new album,
Memeza
(Shout), “I’d been shouting and shouting and no one wanted to hear me. When I sing this song,
vulindlela,
I want to cry.”

It is 1960, Mum is sixteen, and she is at home. Standing on Grandpa’s balcony, looking down the big hill at the train of cars and trucks and vans crawling in circles up the steep old road, driving toward them, coming from Congo, where my grandmother, Modesta, was born. The cars are piled high with luggage and mattresses and furniture, and boxes and trunks and bags.

It is all over the radio. Congo is shaking. Rebellion is spreading like fire.

Independence is a fever, and it is all over the continent.

Last night a family came to their house, dressed in torn clothes, some in sleeping clothes, pajamas and nighties. They were tired and weak, and Mum found it heartbreaking. She helped feed them and fetched water for them to drink and wash. They parked their cars outside, to rest. In every direction, eighty thousand of them flee as Congo erupts. Some refugees are staying in the cathedral a few hundred meters away. In the 1930s, when my grandfather was baptized, he gave land to the church for the cathedral.

Mum is about to sit her O-levels. She will do well. She is waiting to go and study at Makerere University, in Kampala. Ever the mouse nibbling in people’s cupboards for books, I once found, stole, and read her school autograph book. One of her friends said, “Rosa, I hope you meet your handsome sailor.”

From where Mum sits, this road leads deep into Congo, to Kigali, Rwanda, and the same road will take the refugees who are able to go to Kampala, then Nairobi, then Mombasa—­and to South Africa, Rhodesia, and Belgium. Cars run out of fuel along the way and are abandoned. The famous Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek buys a Rolls-Royce for next to nothing in Kisumu. In the 1960s, V. S. Naipaul wanders down this road and says it will all go back to bush.

In Nairobi, a young man, all of twenty, with a wide smile and big eyes, has a job as a tea broker for Brooke Bond. In a few days, he will buy his first car from one of the refugees. He likes fast cars. He broke his leg on a motorcycle. He loves the English language.

His name is Job Wainaina. His big sister, Rebecca, is already a famous playwright. Rosemary, standing on the hill, does not know that soon she will head down the same road as these refugees, to Nairobi and Kianda College, to do a secretarial course.

She will not go to university.

Sometime in the early 1950s, many years ago, Modesta, my grandmother, and her sister are at home cleaning and cooking and a neighbor comes to the door all fearful and excited and says that a strange white man is on their property.

My grandmother is a shy woman, a stern woman. She is around thirty years old. They find the man walking around, digging at the ground, as if he is looking for something. He is Belgian. Grandmum takes a stick and starts to beat him. She hits him as hard as she can. He is on the ground begging, and she hits him. Those who know her have never seen her so fierce.

Grandad finds out that there is a black stone on their land, that this black stone is very valuable. This stone sends their eldest son, Damian, to university; it sends Rosalie to Switzerland to study, and Christine to France. Christine sends Mum her first pair of shoes from France. Mum is thirteen and has never worn her own shoes. Mum works hard in school and excels in her exams. She is called to Uganda’s top high school, in Buganda, Mt. St. Mary’s Namagunga, where she wears her new shoes. One day she sees the king of Buganda, King Freddie, who shakes her hand. He is handsome in his military royal clothes, hand in pocket like an Englishman. She never stops talking about it.

All the Binyavanga children do very well in school. Many of them go to the top schools, in Buganda. Kamanzi and Henry are always at the top of their class at St. Mary’s Kisubi. Eventually they move to South Africa. They teach at universities there.

Modesta is very close to her daughter Rosemary, who, at sixteen, is already dangerously beautiful. Rosemary is quiet and dreamy and can be stern, like Modesta. Among the children, it is Rosemary who helps enforce Modesta’s rules. She does all her work, on time. She helps take care of the babies—­Bernadine and Gerald and Innocent. She is almost another mother to them.

Like her mother, she can be strict and gets into no mischief. She is not confused like her son will be. She is very stubborn; when she believes something, nobody can sway her. When she was young, she used to have fits; when she cried she would faint sometimes.

If you ask her now, she will say that she will marry somebody in Kampala, after university. They will build a home near her parents. She is the good daughter who stays behind and helps her parents. Standing here on the hill and watching Belgian Congo fall, and Lumumba’s Congo rise, she does not know that Uganda too will fall and break, long after she has left.

The black stone’s value on the world market has fallen. There is not enough money to send Mum to university. She agrees to wait for a couple of years. She goes to Nairobi, to do a secretarial course at Kianda College, which is famous all over East Africa. She lives with her cousin Barnabas, who is a friend of the deposed king of Rwanda. The king, who is very tall, is always flirting with Rosemary. Rosemary is not interested. There is another friend of Barnabas. His name is Job. He has a wide smile. A car. She is not her father’s favorite child. It is her sister Rosalie who is close to her father. But she loves her father terribly. She will speak of him all the time to her childen. Job, like her father, is warm around people, makes them laugh. Takes her quietness out of her. Sometimes Job drives past Kianda College in his car and finds her at the bus stop. He looks surprised to see her. Oh! It’s you? Do you want a lift?

They marry, in the district commissioner’s office. She wears a simple suit. His family is very Protestant. Her family is very Catholic. She is the first of the sisters to marry. Her sister Christine will say, “I was so worried. Rosemary was so in love with Job, we were worried about her. I had never seen her like that.”

Standing here, on the hill, she does not know that she and her husband will take in her own younger sister and three brothers, support some through school, college, and university when Uganda is bleeding. She will start a hair salon to help to raise money for family. She will be known for her willingness to put her own dreams behind and serve her family. She will drive a tractor one day, pregnant with baby Chiqy, to deliver diesel to the farm. She will grow wheat and barley with her husband for extra money when Kenya starts to stumble.

Her son Kenneth, named after her father, Binyavanga, is a strange one. She defends him, more than she should. He lives inside his dreams, and is always stumbling. He never accepted God, and sometimes it looks as if he can disappear inside chaos. He has a sweetness that disarms her; in a way they are friends. He never made it difficult; even when he was lost in his world, he would never say so. He shrugs and smiles and tries to please, following people.

He cannot say no. He has her dreaminess, her absent­minded­ness. Her stubbornness. He does not have her will, her spine, or her refusal to accept uncertainties, to transcend them. He stands and falls into the tangle of his doubts. Always stands and falls and dreams. She too wanted to make beautiful things and maybe that is why she let him go, when sometimes she could have been sterner with him.

She is not there, when her son’s Cape Town phone rings. It is Uncle Henry, who has not spoken to her son in years. Uncle Henry, now a professor of business management at the University of the Witwatersrand, says, “Hello, Kenneth.”

“Yes,” says Kenneth.

“Are you… how are you? Kenneth… are you sitting down? I am sorry to tell you, your mother, Rosemary… she passed away today, in Kenyatta Hospital.”

Rosemary Kankindi is the third daughter of Cosma Binyavanga. She married Job Muigai Wainaina, of Kenya, and they have four children:

James Muigai Wainaina

Binyavanga Wainaina

June Wanjiru Wainaina

Melissa Kamanzi Wainaina

She has two grandchildren.

From both her daughters. Paul Muigai, and William Wainaina.

Nairobi in 2001 is one big bar.

It’s been a year since Mum died. I came for the funeral and found I could not leave. To leave means changing my name, getting a new passport. It means not being sure I will get a visa. It means witnessing change in a place that will never let me be part of it. South Africans are infatuated with their own new trajectory. Like Americans, they see the whole world in their country, and seem perpetually surprised that other people are in their country. I will always be a foreigner. Even after ten years. I am tired of moving around. I want to be home. Just to be home. I don’t want people being born, people dying with me away. My baby sister is all grown up and I do not know her.

I live in a small room in a private student hostel called Beverly Hills, in Eastlands, next to one of Nairobi’s largest slums.

Hostels like these are popular with college students and the newly employed. They are cheap and secure. Water is rationed. That first night I left the dry taps open, and I woke up to see my laptop floating in four inches of water. The screen died. I bought a cheap second­hand PC screen in the city, and now it is working.

I spend my day indoors, writing, and leave my room when I smell the first onions and Royco Mchuzi Mix frying for people’s supper. I walk into Mlango Kubwa to buy something cheap to eat. To meet and chat with people.

Congo rumba music squeals out of a rusty corrugated-­iron shack; it seesaws up and down my stomach, wrapped around beer-­fueled laughter, the squeals of barmaids. Early-evening light makes beasts of faces. Eyes and teeth gleam; gums and tongues rejoice, as paraffin light laps at the cooling air, and the tentative scuttle out of their holes to feed. A group of three Somali women walk, like mice, huddled together, heading for the mosque in Eastleigh. I follow.

Two Congolese men are standing outside the bar, their pants hiked up to their chests, short and stocky in designer fur coats, skin bleached a flat and dead yellow, lips black and smoky. There is a Kenyan joke about the Congo man whose trousers are so high that he can access his wallet only by reaching over his shoulder. The men are laughing and talking to each other in Lingala, in a closed world of two, a sound that jangles like the music in my head.

I am writing a lot, and getting commissions here and there. I have started writing fiction, which I love the most. My only regular source of income is the one hundred dollars a week that Rod Amis, the editor of an online magazine, g21.net, pays me for contributions. I have abandoned my bad speculative fiction novel. I am trying to build skill by writing short stories.

The elections are in a year, and we are all wondering whether we will survive that long. Many people have filled the streets many times to campaign for political change. Finally the constitution is amended, so an elected official can only serve two terms. This is Moi’s second term. He has promised to retire. We don’t really believe it.

I make my way through the zigzag paths of Mlango Kubwa’s main ave­nue, Biashara Street. The soapy, gagging smell of an open drain rises up and catches me by surprise. I walk, in a hurry, breathing with my mouth, a childhood habit designed to bewilder ambitious microbes. The gaudy hand-­painted colors of small-­scale marketing wriggle; they splash to woozy life in the muddy puddles that line the path.

Tens of thousands of people—­on foot and bicycles, unloading from thumping
matatus
—­are swarming past us down Mlango Kubwa, through Eastleigh, the frontier of formal Nairobi, on paths made spongy from years of fresh produce and litter, to Mathare, in a thick downhill flow.

Dark is thick now, and I walk more lightly. I take this route most days, to catch the flickering streams of people. There is something beautiful about the moments when people are removed from themselves by the imminent: the rush to do small forgotten things; the unpacking of mobile shops; children shrieking, cut loose from routine; the flood of black China-­made bicycles, hurling warning bells and threats at children; the sharp clicks of roofs contracting in the cooling air. I come out every evening at this time to buy some supper; to buy some dope, sometimes to buy a beer.

I spent the past few weeks polishing a short story for the Caine Prize for African Writing. It is about a young girl (Girl Child, Gender!) who is questioning the world, and her mother’s values (Empowerment).

I mine every sexy African theme I can think of. The Caine Prize, based in England, is worth fifteen thousand dollars, and you get an agent and fame and lots of commissioned work.

Whenever I walk here, I always look out for Joga’s murals.

I stumbled on his work a few weeks after moving here; after my eyes adjusted to the flow of things, I could set aside the hundreds of small dramas unfolding before me, and I was able to focus on the particular. Joga’s older works were smoky, sometimes difficult to see clearly. In one bar, I found a large mural painted on chipboard, mounted on the wall. The bar was full of old Gikuyu men and women: waistcoats and plastic eyeglasses and headscarves, the odd walking stick. Sluggish traditional accordion music from the Kenyatta-­era 1970s scratched its way out of old speakers. There were murals everywhere. Friesian fields; over­large udders; lush countrywomen trampolining on soft kikuyu grass; gnarled old trees gathered in a semicircle of wisdom.