Imagine Africa
en motors luier die afstand
while cars idle across the intervals
tussen robotte af, verby
between traffic lights, past
die skrams skuilte, die bushalte, die afdak
the scant shelter, the bus stop, the lean-to
waaronder die kinders bondelsit
under which, bunched up, the children sit
en kyk die wind, die gedagtes, die bome, die strate
and look: the wind, the thoughts, the trees, the streets
die plastiekbottel gom die aangee
the plastic bottle of glue passed round
die snuif, die losraak van lyne kleur, die losraak van vorm
and sniffed, unravelling of lines of colour, of form
die ritme van water deur gedroomde vensters
the rhythm of water through dream-imagined windows
die leë hande
the empty hands
om die bottelnek dagga, die spel op die museum
round the bottleneck crammed with dagga, the game on the steps
se trappe: Simson weereens tussen sy pilare
of the museum: Samson once more between his pillars
weereens die leeu as karkas
the carcass of a lion
in die stegies, die raaisel van soet
in the alleyways, the riddle of sweetness
en in ’n agterkamer iewers die matras op die vloer
in a back room somewhere the mattress on the floor
die meisie met haar oë eenkant toe
the young girl with her eyes averted
weggelê
spread-eagled
die skraal lyf van begeerte, die tepeltjie bors
the scrawny body of desire, nipple-studded chest
die donkerder vermoede van hare
the darker intimation of hair
die spleet waarop gebukkend die man
the slit over which a man is stooping
hom met ’n paaiwoord rig
with a word of comfort
die reën, die reën, die reën
the rain, the rain, the rain
die stoomgeur van teer
the steamy smell of tar
en die reën slaan asem weg, die asem van wind
the rain sweeps breath away, the breath of wind
en gedagtes aan bome in die strate
and thoughts of trees alongside the streets
gedagtes aan die vlinder
thoughts of the butterfly’s
se blinde vlug deur die roesoë
blind flight through the rust-flecked eyes
van kinders
of children
BILLY KAHORA
Treadmill Love
BILLY KAHORA is the managing editor of Kwani? He received an MA in Creative Writing with distinction at the University of Edinburgh as a Chevening Scholar in 2007. He recently edited Kenya Burning, a visual narrative of Kenya’s post-elections crisis published by the GoDown Arts Centre and Kwani Trust in March 2009.
ONE LATE Limuru afternoon, exactly six months before Maxwell Kungu Kamande fell in love with the girl in the mirrors, he stirred from months of long sleep and decided he never wanted to see his immediate relations ever again. It was during the failed long rains of 2005, and he had spent months lying in bed, drinking soup made of large bones, mouthing different farm animal sounds and masturbating to distraction. Wobbling toward the slit of light at the window, he slipped on the hundreds of newspaper pages on the floor, teeming with headlines, obituaries and other disquieting information that he had spent many hours meaninglessly poring over. Hundreds of large green pills, fat yellow capsules, and bright orange saucers raced across the wooden floor as he walked. A fine grey powder rose, making him sneeze.
Kungu reached the open window with his hands still at his sides, his face parting the slips of curtain. He observed the obsessive hand of his mother in the neatly tended purpley-blue bougainvillea hedge. Flowers from childhood, in their wild African colors, brought back her cloying sweetish smell. For a brief moment this drowned the heavy pall of old news, drug-induced sweat and semen in the room. His eyes travelled over the sharply-cut edge of the Kikuyu grass lawn, lush and arsenic-green with life. Just looking at their prickly blades made him shudder and itch all over, and he scratched at the back of his neck and upper back with force, his face curling into a rictus of delight. There were several pangas lying on the lawn, left by the day workers. A dog appeared on the lawn, swinging with an aimless gait. It licked one of the pangas and idly wagged its tail when it sensed his presence at the window. Reaching for the window with its forelegs and failing, it hung there, miles short, its little pink penis flitting in and out of skin near its belly.
Kungu sighed and clambered back into bed. Looking at the ceiling brought on an involuntary sob. Somewhere in his chest, he also felt a burst of uncontrollable laughter coming on. Yes, leaving here would be easier than living everyday with the thought of killing Mother and the others, the very things Mother had possessed with such greed all these years – his older banker-brother Morris, lawyer-sister Lois, and fat Damaris whose kid, Kiki, was the only person Kungu still loved in his family, although she had taken over his last-born privileges. Kungu was 37.
When he stepped out of the room at one far end of the large house, the corridor was cool and quiet. There was a pile of plates with old food that looked like mildewed droppings, which Mumbi the maid had forgotten to collect. Kungu listened for noises from childhood, but the floorboards lay uncreaking and the wind in the roof dead to his ear. Mother called the sea of depression that had washed over Kungu these past months his second childhood. She had laughed off many doctors’ diagnoses as indulgences. His melancholy, in her eyes, was a weakness. She faulted herself for not nipping it in the bud when Kungu had started tugging at her skirts as a child.
The house had been slowly dying. Years ago, in the 60s, it had been a shiny gleam in Nairobi’s social magnifying glass. The Kamande house is one of the proud vestiges of this country’s new independence. Delicately balanced like our fledging democracy, its North Wing looks out into the finest Limuru coffee estates in this country. Mixing leisure and commerce, the South Wing gazes across lush meadow and fresh sedge. A small river runs through it. When I jokingly asked Edith Kamande whether they had ever considered opening a small golf course, hubby Augustine Kiereini Kamande looked up with interest …
When Kungu’s father had shrunk to a brittle death from bone marrow cancer eighteen months ago, Mother had boarded up the North Wing, leaving only the upper South Wing, leeward to the sun, open. It held the kitchen, dining hall and three small bedrooms that Mother, Kiki and Damaris occupied.
After his stint at Mathare Mental Hospital, Kungu came home, sawed a large hole through the board Mother had used to cut off the North Wing, and went into his old room without a word. It was there that he had been living and dying in turns, cut off from the other four inhabitants of the house, Mother, Damaris, old Mumbi, and Kiki – when she came home for holidays.
Beyond the hole, he soon reached the dining hall, the most socially active room of the house, sat down heavily and looked around. There was nothing idle about the room, just four hardwood chairs and the large dining table, that once seated up to fifteen people, and looked out into a lush Limuru countryside full of the testament of newness. Heavy glass pitchers of colored water stood everywhere, on top and inside the cabinet, on the dining table and even on the large European-style window-sills. Mother used the water to ward away evil spirits sent by her enemies. There were also several bottles of vodka on the dirty shelves at various stages of depletion. The large clock, one of the remaining pieces of furniture not boarded up in the rooms upstairs, falsely claimed it was 10 p.m. Next to it was a large photo of a forbidding-looking man standing next to a young woman with a determined chin. It said, Augustine Obidiah and Edith Kiereini Kamande London. 1951. Mumbi the maid was nowhere to be seen.
Opening the back kitchen door, Kungu squinted at th
e large sky, recently visible after more than thirty years. The back of the south wing had suffered under the shadows of a copse of impressive blue gum trees. A year ago, during one of his pre-Mathare impulses, Kungu went into a nearby slum and came back with a gang of men. It took three days for them to bring down the trees. In an overgenerous exchange for their labor, Kungu paid the men in firewood. He had no idea that blue gum was to furniture-making what Arabian was to coffee. The exhilarating crash of trees had also prompted Kungu to slaughter one of Mother’s prize-winning goats. One of the men brewed muratina to usher in this new revolution. After sawing away at the trees with abandon all day, the men sang, ate, and drank as the sun went down. A few electronics went missing in the house. Half the huge pile of blue gum logs the men stacked in the driveway disappeared within a week, and the rest Kungu sold for a pittance. When Mother found out, she promptly called her friends from the Muthaiga Police and asked them to ‘discipline’ Kungu. He spent one week inside, after which he ‘cracked’ and had to be taken off to Mathare, catatonic and still, like the Limuru evenings of his childhood.
Even now the treeless back of the house remained dark and cold. As he looked up into the sky, smelling the rain, Mother appeared in the driveway. She was a big firm block of flesh. Her face had turned grey-black over the years, like the aging bark of a Mugumo tree. She walked up the kokoto driveway, crunching stones with her black gumboots. She wore a large military sweater and long heavy skirt. A young sapling growing near the wall of the house caught her eye and she strode up to it, and quickly and efficiently stripped its slender stem of growth-hindering sprouts. Kungu moved away from the doorway when she approached and trooped inside without a word, dropping the pangas and flower cuttings from the lawn at his feet. He heard her rummaging inside for a while and then she reappeared. She held a pitcher of black-colored water in her hand. He flinched when she grabbed him by the chin to examine his soft, light-deprived face. Her rough and gnarly hands felt like a vice. Her eyes filled with an ancient mischief when she recognized a new force in him. ‘Eh, my boy Maxwell. I see you woken up.’ She gurgled softly, sprinkling the black water all over his face with muddy thick fingers. ‘Unnnh … so soft and white.’ She peered at his stomach, still uncovered, and poked a thick fingernail in it till he doubled over. The sudden intake of stomach almost dropped his pajama pants. ‘Mzee, god bless that fool. He would be happy to see you wake up. We eat soon.’
‘You can pray in English, Swahili or whatever tongues you been speaking day and night and day in that room,’ Mother announced when they sat at different ends of the dining table. Kungu ignored her. In between them sat a huge pot. Mother muttered a brief prayer and pulled the pot toward herself. She ladled a thick stream of boiled whole carrots, complete with green tops, half-sized cabbage chunks and different kinds of seeds, peas, beans, maize, cowpeas, and lentils onto her plate. Then she peered inside the pot and pulled something out and onto her plate with a huge clunk – an unpeeled nduma. She furiously spooned everything into her mouth without a word, spitting out, twisting and pulling at her food. A small pile of carrot leaves, outer-cabbage remains and husks grew at her side. Now and then she huffed with pleasure and wiped her forehead. Kungu sat there till she had finished. When she made to get up he said: ‘I want my money. I want my money and that’s all I want.’ She sat back and gave him a measured look, released an elemental sound from the depths of her largeness, stood up and trumped off, switching off the lights behind her.
Kungu sat there all night. Fog drifted from outside into the house, swirling around his still figure. The next morning, Mother came in dressed in an old cotton sack of a dress. She dipped her finger in the cold pot from last night, put it in her mouth and looked at him mildly. ‘Yes I guess you have woken up.’ She cleared the pot and the plates from the table and went into the kitchen. There she started singing a song about women clearing the forest. He heard her turn on the gas to heat the tea in the birika. She came back into the dining room with a loaf of bread, which she tore in huge impatient chunks. ‘Your brother and sister will come this weekend and we decide.’
‘I want my money.’
‘Weekend. Boy, you can sleep one year. You can go mad. You can have sold my blue gums. You can have been a parking man in Tanzania. Ati you can have had depression. I don’t even know depression for what. Your own mother. Think … does she even look happy? You can wait till this weekend.’
‘I also want the Buru Buru house and one of the cars, even if it’s the Mazda.’
‘This new government. It has changed things. Now anyone thinks they can have what they want. Away from the land. Nobody wants this any anymore. Moree or ka Lois don’t. Maybe Damaris because she is lazy with that barman boyfriend of hers.’
She scooped up the pile of peelings from last night and left him there.
‘Back to the river these go. Manure for next year’s ndumas.’
Kungu sighed and went back to bed.
Morris the banker-brother arrived first. He loudly slammed his car door, ignored the house and went down to the farm. His top-heavy figure, on the less-sunny side of fifty, was dressed in a striped shirt and suspenders. Workers stopped what they were doing when he approached. They praised Mother to his face, talked of recent calfings, the size of the coffee berries that year and how so-and-so’s Mungiki son had been shot by the police. Morris would make the right noises, remove his non-prescription spectacles and rub his eyes. He refused their offerings of sour milk, black plastic bags full of rotting plums and bananas the size of his forearm. Halfway through his tour, he was summoned back to the house. Lois had arrived.
The family met at the table. Mother sat at the head, with Morris and Lois on each side. Kungu sat at the far end. Damaris, whose consequence had flitted away after she got pregnant at seventeen from fucking one of the workers, had not been informed of the family meeting. Morris cleared his throat as if to start the meeting but was ignored. Mother began with her accusations. ‘Remeba that Lou garl you brought home Maxwell. Skinny, like I don’t know what. Thin, thin, thin. The kind that white men like to go with in cheap Nairobi hotels and do all sorts of things. What was that? Tell me what was that?’ She breathed heavy and deeply. ‘But now I wish you ad settled with her. Anything wouldah been better than this.’ Lois, the sister-lawyer and the kind of woman who thought that she had to look as ugly as possible for the judiciary of Kenya to take her seriously, and for that matter was not taken seriously, said earnestly: ‘It is good to see you like this. Kungu we’ve missed you. Wanting things after a long time. It’s a good sign.’ Kungu glowered.
‘Remember Dad used to say wanting without taking is nonsense. Well, I’ve always wanted things but you have always refused me. I’m taking what I want. One of the cars and the Buru Buru Phase 2 house. I also want my money that Dad left me. I’m well and I leave Wednesday.’
‘Have you been taking your medication?’ That was Morris. Kungu stood up and walked away from the table. Mother turned to Morris: ‘Go see those Baluhyas in the Buru Buru house. Tell them we need it back. We can offer them something else, maybe the house in that place, Doonholm. Also, go to the bank – the boy will need some money for now. And furniture and things. I’m also giving him the old Land Rover. He looks well enough to me …’
‘Edith! I mean, Mother, I am totally against the idea. Imagine Maxwell back in the world.’ Morris said.
Mother swiveled slowly to face him like a huge Caterpillar truck and stared at his face, so similar to hers. She wondered at his stupidity.
‘Moree, keep to your numbers or whatever you do at the bank and leave understanding people to me. I know the boy. The Buru Buru house, a car is nothing. That he’ll settle for. His ability to mess up outside there will be our saving grace. Talk to your friends, those boys in State House – they might get him something in PR. Ten years in advertising should count for something …’
‘Mum, I think those people in the Buru Buru house are Kisiis, not Luhyas. Or maybe they are Maragolis. Why w
ould Maxie want to live there?’ Lois said.
When Kungu made the exodus from Kiambu to Buru Buru, he felt the air around him change and thicken in degrees. He found the Buru Buru house cleaned and laid out simply and comfortably. When he got upstairs, he ignored the main bedroom. He found an old crumpled waterbed in the store, filled it up with cold water and dragged it into one of the spare rooms. He hurled himself onto it and slept for a week. When he woke up he was happy that the windows looked out onto the blank colorless face of another building. It was close enough to stretch out and touch.
He had fallen in love with Buru Buru when he had visited his best friend Rick in high school. Its informality, and the girls who gave it up when they heard he was Kamande from Red Hill, had for the first time made him aware of the possibilities of class in Kenya. He had spent many a weekend driving around in an old pickup with Rick, partying it up. That was twenty years ago. Buru Buru, the middle-class project, had become an industrial slum over the years – illegal structures had sprung up all over the place like crooked teeth. But it was exactly what Kungu needed. There were no coffee bushes or so-and-so high-profile neighbours. There were no fresh smells, or distracting butterflies and flowers. Outside of the Ministry of Housing’s plans, nothing had ever been written about Buru Buru in Kenya’s official history. It had none of the baggage of Limuru or Kiambu, no haughty assumptions, country club accusations or land grievances. All Kungu had to do in Buru Buru was float on the waterbed and listen to its strange moorings and urgings.
In the evenings, he went for walks between the boxlike structures with their orange brick rooftops, ugly and faded in the day but quite beautiful in the falling sun. Hundreds of antennae reached for the sky. Children cried and mothers laughed. Every now and then there were gunshots. Apart from one night when a security helicopter bathed him in light, nobody noticed him. Contact was realized at a distance though people crisscrossed each other every second. Nobody acknowledged his presence in the small lanes that traversed the estates and confused him to no end. But they could all tell he was new and watched him from behind their curtains.