(I) Portents
Pre-election December, 2007. Little Donkey
I am jolted out of a doze when the bus driver slams on the breaks. All these things happen in slow motion: I try to prevent my nose mashing on the seat in front of me; I see a donkey splayed across the windscreen; I watch mesmerised as its kicking hind hoof initiates a single sharp crack.
Donkey prances off as if all it has been given is a hefty slap on its rump.
The crack spreads slowly across the windscreen, linear at first, almost controlled, then exponentially, uncontrollably and frighteningly fragments into a million such cracks before shattering.
Pre-election December, 2007. Crickets
It’s twilight. The sounds of millions of sms’s, like crickets in the evening breeze, rise to a deafening, unbearable screech.
February, 2008. Sacrifice
Israel (“that’s my Christian name”) leans on his long stick under a bit of shade. We’re chatting generally about stuff. I mention earth tremors I’d been feeling over the week. He tells us how folks in his place are so worried that they’d sent a group of women and children dressed in ceremonial black to Ol Doinyo Lengai, with a black goat for a ritual to appease Eng’ai.
I think about this the next day when the mountain, still pissed off, spits and roars and causes the earth to shake again.
February, 2008. Towers of Dust
Unnatural wind. As if patterns are fundamentally shifting. As if fate itself would change its course. As if the Harmattan crossed to clash with the Monsoon to create these towering whirling columns of dust. Fingers, in between the two great mountains, pointing towards the heavens.
(II) Safari Junction
February, 2008. “Where’s that Joe Buck?”
A small town in Tanzania. “Safari Junction”, they nickname it, this sprawling place, obviously geared to service the safari industry: car washes and dodgy fuel stations, greasy cafes offering chips mayai and plenty of bars lit by dim fluorescent tubes, counters behind iron grilles. Driver guides with money to burn. Husslers with flies to catch.
Two young guys in the internet café, fake lion teeth around their necks, in trendy gear. Wannabe Husslers. Looking for an opening to chat me up. Invariably it starts this way. “Hey lady, where you from?” “Kenya” I say, “yes, but where are you really from?” “Kenya” I repeat. “Yes, but originally you are from where?” “Kenya”. Then I explain in Kiswahili. “Dude, if you were born in the US, and your parents were born in the US, and their parents too, then how do you answer the question “where are you from”?” One of the youths puts out his fist to me. “I say!” he says, then adds “I get you. Respect!” as my fist meets his. “Hey, you know, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai? It is totally boom! Do you know it? Us we even have it mixed in a Bongo Flava song!”
They continue to flirt. Meanwhile the internet lady grumbles that if they learned to read with as much application as they try to chat up “foreigners”, they wouldn’t have to ask her to help them read, understand and respond to their emails.
(III) “Dare to be a Daniel”
December, 2007. Immigration.
He takes a look at the passport. “So you’re born in Kenya but you decided to get a different passport. You Muhindis.” He stamps the passport. I take it and walk away.
A blindingly hot afternoon in a squashy queue in a stuffy hall in Nyayo House, over twenty years ago. As a nervous fourteen year old, seeking an official endorsement of converting shillings into pounds, sterling, during the era of exchange controls. The official took one look at my passport, at my birth right to Kenyan citizenship, written right there on page 3. Without even looking at me, he chops it “cancelled” in a red reminder that showed up every time I opened the damned thing until ten years later when I finally managed to change it. He then stamped my foreign exchange endorsement and wordlessly handed the document to me. I tried to hold back my tears, but through my swimming eyes I clearly recognised the looked of triumph in his. “Muhindi” they told me, “bugger off. You don’t belong here. This is not your country”. I meekly take my passport back, stumble out into the street, and diving into the nearby GPO corridor where our post office box used to be, I burst into angry tears.
January, 2008. The Next Best Thing.
I am at Katie and Si’s place, grateful for a bit of company, even if the mood is subdued. I’m chatting with some band members of Yunasi, who a couple of months ago, won the BBC’s Next Big Thing award for their song “Ndi Ndi Ndi”. “We won it” says Eric, “I just knew we would. Imagine! We beat over two thousand bands from around the globe, we impressed people like William Orbit and Nile Rodgers…these guys…I mean these guys are so so massive. They’ve even produced Madonna!”
“The trouble is, no one truly wants to encourage us, encourage the arts. You know, it’s things like this that we were voting against. Not old men in suits, who don’t care and don’t have a clue who we are or what we are singing about. So out of touch with the ordinary person. I mean, we want the chance to flourish as a band, as artists.”
“If even our votes don’t count, then just what can we do? What’s the point? I’ll never vote again. Our democratic rights have been stolen, democracy is dead. I am so frustrated.”
Yes, but since when did we ever really have it? I think to myself. Elections have been won by cheating for as long as I ever understood what an election was supposed to mean. Injustices, especially those committed by the powerful, have gone unpunished as long as I can remember. The political elite have stolen and stolen and stolen and stolen until it just became normal: at least, this is what I grew up with, a feeling that really citizens were pretty much powerless, and that our sirikari existed to plunder.
I am far too wary about how there is such a wide disconnect between peoples’ expectations and a Government, any Government’s, ability to fulfil them as rapidly as people have been mis-led into believing. So, feeling rather like an aunt, I launch into a discourse with my new friends but trying to be positive, an antidote to their dampened spirits. Apparently with some passion in my voice, because later, I get this in response:
“My God. You really love your country, don’t you?”
February, 2008. Addressing Bugs
Sitting in solitude. I’m the only one at this grimy hotel. My room’s gloomy and so am I.
This thought runs through my head: by knowing injustices, no matter how large or small, by staring them in the face all my life and then just choosing to live with rather than challenge them, I reduced myself to complicity.
Democracy is not dead! I feel like telling whoever I can grab to listen, but I am only talking to various insects making night noises inside and outside my room. We never truly had it! I speechify to the bugs. What we are seeing is its slow and terribly, terribly painful birth! The difference is that we have the responsibility for its delivery so much more than those who assume to negotiate it on our behalf! We need to muster enough strength and courage to find the ways to tell them, resounding much louder than the deafening crickets on the night, that we will not, we will not, we will absolutely not let it be still borne!
And then I deflate. Because it’s all too big. I’m not brave. I don’t know how. And I’m posturing to insects that I’m half scared of. I’m terrified for what portends if mediated talks fail. To encourage myself I re-read something by a British politician, Old Labour, who’s father often told him that at such moments you have to: “Dare to be a Daniel, Dare to stand alone, Dare to have a purpose firm, Dare to let it be known."
February, 2008. Immigration Again
Same guy. He can’t remember me, I am sure, but I remember him.
“Ah” he says “heading home?” “Yes,” I respond, “I just want to see how things are. I’ve been away a while.” “It’s so bad” he sighs “but we are all Kenyans. It will take a long time for things to get better.”
February, 2008. Normal Things
Peter Mwangi walks in with a furrowed look on his face, his usual look when he has an important matter to discuss. “Dad” he says, addressing my father, “I think you need to get a driver because you shouldn’t drive in the dark as your eyes are so bad. There’s a fellow next door who’s doing only part time and really needs extra work to support his family. If you need him sometimes in the evenings, he can drive you instead of you getting a cab. He is welcome to share my room if it gets too late for him to go home.” The fellow who works next door is called Simon Otieno.
February, 2008. Bastardising "The Hollow Men”
“Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.”
At Kilaguni in Tsavo, before coffee and delicate Serena pastries.
Whilst we negotiate
Whilst our cronies in Nairobi issue hard line statements.
Whilst our other cronies, but we shan’t admit to them, arm their militias.
And our diplaced cannot get their anti-retrovirals.
Save your expensive bullets on those ones. Don’t fire those arrows.
They’re dead already.
You fuckers, can’t you see?
“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
-------------------------------
“Where’s that Joe Buck?” Opening line from Midnight Cowboy, dir. John Schlesinger, 1969
“Kuch Kuch Hota Hai” dir. Karan Johar, 1998
“Ndi Ndi Ndi” from Yunasi’s Album “Nairobi Sound of Sesube” www.yunasi.com
“Dare to be a Daniel” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Benn
“The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Men
February, 2008
Pre-election December, 2007. Little Donkey
I am jolted out of a doze when the bus driver slams on the breaks. All these things happen in slow motion: I try to prevent my nose mashing on the seat in front of me; I see a donkey splayed across the windscreen; I watch mesmerised as its kicking hind hoof initiates a single sharp crack.
Donkey prances off as if all it has been given is a hefty slap on its rump.
The crack spreads slowly across the windscreen, linear at first, almost controlled, then exponentially, uncontrollably and frighteningly fragments into a million such cracks before shattering.
Pre-election December, 2007. Crickets
It’s twilight. The sounds of millions of sms’s, like crickets in the evening breeze, rise to a deafening, unbearable screech.
February, 2008. Sacrifice
Israel (“that’s my Christian name”) leans on his long stick under a bit of shade. We’re chatting generally about stuff. I mention earth tremors I’d been feeling over the week. He tells us how folks in his place are so worried that they’d sent a group of women and children dressed in ceremonial black to Ol Doinyo Lengai, with a black goat for a ritual to appease Eng’ai.
I think about this the next day when the mountain, still pissed off, spits and roars and causes the earth to shake again.
February, 2008. Towers of Dust
Unnatural wind. As if patterns are fundamentally shifting. As if fate itself would change its course. As if the Harmattan crossed to clash with the Monsoon to create these towering whirling columns of dust. Fingers, in between the two great mountains, pointing towards the heavens.
(II) Safari Junction
February, 2008. “Where’s that Joe Buck?”
A small town in Tanzania. “Safari Junction”, they nickname it, this sprawling place, obviously geared to service the safari industry: car washes and dodgy fuel stations, greasy cafes offering chips mayai and plenty of bars lit by dim fluorescent tubes, counters behind iron grilles. Driver guides with money to burn. Husslers with flies to catch.
Two young guys in the internet café, fake lion teeth around their necks, in trendy gear. Wannabe Husslers. Looking for an opening to chat me up. Invariably it starts this way. “Hey lady, where you from?” “Kenya” I say, “yes, but where are you really from?” “Kenya” I repeat. “Yes, but originally you are from where?” “Kenya”. Then I explain in Kiswahili. “Dude, if you were born in the US, and your parents were born in the US, and their parents too, then how do you answer the question “where are you from”?” One of the youths puts out his fist to me. “I say!” he says, then adds “I get you. Respect!” as my fist meets his. “Hey, you know, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai? It is totally boom! Do you know it? Us we even have it mixed in a Bongo Flava song!”
They continue to flirt. Meanwhile the internet lady grumbles that if they learned to read with as much application as they try to chat up “foreigners”, they wouldn’t have to ask her to help them read, understand and respond to their emails.
(III) “Dare to be a Daniel”
December, 2007. Immigration.
He takes a look at the passport. “So you’re born in Kenya but you decided to get a different passport. You Muhindis.” He stamps the passport. I take it and walk away.
A blindingly hot afternoon in a squashy queue in a stuffy hall in Nyayo House, over twenty years ago. As a nervous fourteen year old, seeking an official endorsement of converting shillings into pounds, sterling, during the era of exchange controls. The official took one look at my passport, at my birth right to Kenyan citizenship, written right there on page 3. Without even looking at me, he chops it “cancelled” in a red reminder that showed up every time I opened the damned thing until ten years later when I finally managed to change it. He then stamped my foreign exchange endorsement and wordlessly handed the document to me. I tried to hold back my tears, but through my swimming eyes I clearly recognised the looked of triumph in his. “Muhindi” they told me, “bugger off. You don’t belong here. This is not your country”. I meekly take my passport back, stumble out into the street, and diving into the nearby GPO corridor where our post office box used to be, I burst into angry tears.
January, 2008. The Next Best Thing.
I am at Katie and Si’s place, grateful for a bit of company, even if the mood is subdued. I’m chatting with some band members of Yunasi, who a couple of months ago, won the BBC’s Next Big Thing award for their song “Ndi Ndi Ndi”. “We won it” says Eric, “I just knew we would. Imagine! We beat over two thousand bands from around the globe, we impressed people like William Orbit and Nile Rodgers…these guys…I mean these guys are so so massive. They’ve even produced Madonna!”
“The trouble is, no one truly wants to encourage us, encourage the arts. You know, it’s things like this that we were voting against. Not old men in suits, who don’t care and don’t have a clue who we are or what we are singing about. So out of touch with the ordinary person. I mean, we want the chance to flourish as a band, as artists.”
“If even our votes don’t count, then just what can we do? What’s the point? I’ll never vote again. Our democratic rights have been stolen, democracy is dead. I am so frustrated.”
Yes, but since when did we ever really have it? I think to myself. Elections have been won by cheating for as long as I ever understood what an election was supposed to mean. Injustices, especially those committed by the powerful, have gone unpunished as long as I can remember. The political elite have stolen and stolen and stolen and stolen until it just became normal: at least, this is what I grew up with, a feeling that really citizens were pretty much powerless, and that our sirikari existed to plunder.
I am far too wary about how there is such a wide disconnect between peoples’ expectations and a Government, any Government’s, ability to fulfil them as rapidly as people have been mis-led into believing. So, feeling rather like an aunt, I launch into a discourse with my new friends but trying to be positive, an antidote to their dampened spirits. Apparently with some passion in my voice, because later, I get this in response:
“My God. You really love your country, don’t you?”
February, 2008. Addressing Bugs
Sitting in solitude. I’m the only one at this grimy hotel. My room’s gloomy and so am I.
This thought runs through my head: by knowing injustices, no matter how large or small, by staring them in the face all my life and then just choosing to live with rather than challenge them, I reduced myself to complicity.
Democracy is not dead! I feel like telling whoever I can grab to listen, but I am only talking to various insects making night noises inside and outside my room. We never truly had it! I speechify to the bugs. What we are seeing is its slow and terribly, terribly painful birth! The difference is that we have the responsibility for its delivery so much more than those who assume to negotiate it on our behalf! We need to muster enough strength and courage to find the ways to tell them, resounding much louder than the deafening crickets on the night, that we will not, we will not, we will absolutely not let it be still borne!
And then I deflate. Because it’s all too big. I’m not brave. I don’t know how. And I’m posturing to insects that I’m half scared of. I’m terrified for what portends if mediated talks fail. To encourage myself I re-read something by a British politician, Old Labour, who’s father often told him that at such moments you have to: “Dare to be a Daniel, Dare to stand alone, Dare to have a purpose firm, Dare to let it be known."
February, 2008. Immigration Again
Same guy. He can’t remember me, I am sure, but I remember him.
“Ah” he says “heading home?” “Yes,” I respond, “I just want to see how things are. I’ve been away a while.” “It’s so bad” he sighs “but we are all Kenyans. It will take a long time for things to get better.”
February, 2008. Normal Things
Peter Mwangi walks in with a furrowed look on his face, his usual look when he has an important matter to discuss. “Dad” he says, addressing my father, “I think you need to get a driver because you shouldn’t drive in the dark as your eyes are so bad. There’s a fellow next door who’s doing only part time and really needs extra work to support his family. If you need him sometimes in the evenings, he can drive you instead of you getting a cab. He is welcome to share my room if it gets too late for him to go home.” The fellow who works next door is called Simon Otieno.
February, 2008. Bastardising "The Hollow Men”
“Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.”
At Kilaguni in Tsavo, before coffee and delicate Serena pastries.
Whilst we negotiate
Whilst our cronies in Nairobi issue hard line statements.
Whilst our other cronies, but we shan’t admit to them, arm their militias.
And our diplaced cannot get their anti-retrovirals.
Save your expensive bullets on those ones. Don’t fire those arrows.
They’re dead already.
You fuckers, can’t you see?
“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
-------------------------------
“Where’s that Joe Buck?” Opening line from Midnight Cowboy, dir. John Schlesinger, 1969
“Kuch Kuch Hota Hai” dir. Karan Johar, 1998
“Ndi Ndi Ndi” from Yunasi’s Album “Nairobi Sound of Sesube” www.yunasi.com
“Dare to be a Daniel” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Benn
“The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Men
February, 2008
