Black Star Nairobi (2 page)

Broadway’s Tavern, located between the slum of Kangemi and rich Mountain View Estate, had become our favorite joint over the last few years. It was an odd bar even on the best of days. Here, thieves, politicians, prostitutes, and cops made peace for the sake of beer and roast goat. It was a place where all those involved in criminal enterprises, be they the good or the bad guys, met. It was an informal trading house for information, where police and robbers exchanged tips—useful transactions, but ultimately self-serving. In matters of life and death, it was good for enemies to keep at least one door open—cops’ lives had been saved, as well as the lives of some criminals.

Civilians were not welcome—and I suppose no one without a connection to the underworld would have wanted to come in anyway. The bar was really just one huge room, with chairs made out of thin bamboo, and wooden tables, a jukebox, and a long counter. If you circled outside to the back of the building, you would find an open-air kitchen that made only
nyama choma
and
ugali
, the latter a dish I ate every now and then to remember grits back home.

There were standards to uphold, though: wife-beaters, rapists, murderers, and petty criminals knew to keep away from Broadway’s. In fact, more than once, someone at the bar had informed on some petty crook who had mistakenly sought sympathy from the classier professional criminals.

The bar made sense in another way, too, because the difference between Kenyan police and Kenyan criminals is that they just happen to be on opposite sides of the law. O, for one, could have just as easily been a criminal as a cop—and the longer I stayed in Kenya, the more I suspected the same of myself. There was no begrudging the others for the road they’d chosen. In the end, Broadway’s was a testament to the fact that we cops had accepted that crime would always exist. And we’d decided to make peace with the kind of criminal that had some professional decorum.

We walked into the bar just as the five o’clock news was coming on. It had taken me months to adjust to how seriously Kenyans take the news hour. All bar TVs change their channels to one of the news stations—regardless of whether there is a replay of a European cup football game on. It was like common prayer, only in this case it provided fodder for beer talk.

As in the U.S., news presenters in Kenya were household names—this evening, Catherine Kasavuli, the Katie Couric of Kenya, was on. MC Hammer immediately yelled that he wanted to marry her. Dressed in the real Hammer’s signature golden yellow pants, and with graying but dyed-red punkish hair, this MC Hammer was the jester in this court of police and robbers. He knew everyone and a bit of everything. MC Hammer was like a clown wearing a mask.

Senator Obama dominated the news, as he had since he declared his candidacy back in February—this time, it was about allegations that he was a Kenyan citizen and not an American. “Like being Kenyan is a crime,” MC Hammer scoffed.

O and I had been driving back to town from somewhere. I turned on the radio and there it was. Barack Hussein Obama had declared his candidacy. We’d gotten back to Nairobi to find everyone honking, some people waving Obama posters, others selling T-shirts and coffee mugs. Much later, an Obama beer called the Senator would be born, though the knowledgeable suggested it was more of the same—regular Tusker in an Obama beer can.

“Eh, Ishmael, how do you feel?” O had asked. “One of your own as the president of the U.S.A.?”

I had always thought of Obama as black like me. Black people in the U.S. had been at the center of it all—the building of the country, inventions, science, sports—yet somehow we had remained on the sidelines. To be in the White House, finally? And yet, there was something else I could not articulate: I didn’t feel like he could truly speak for me. But I guess the moment was bigger than any of us. Bill Clinton as the first black president? It was time to get rid of blackface presidents. I wanted Obama to win.

“How the fuck does racism survive this?” I asked O.

“You’ll be surprised—we have had only black presidents and look at Africa, look at how divided …” he said, turning his head to see my reaction.

“But enjoy it, it is going to be quite something,” O said more kindly, when I didn’t say anything.

As if on cue, the Kenyan president had got on the radio to say that the following day would be a public holiday. That was a good move; the whole country was going to be hungover tomorrow anyway.

For a moment, I had felt homesick. The strong but tired rhythm of small Madison, Wisconsin, where I had grown up; my parents and their pretense to wealth; beautiful Mo, the Pulitzer-winning journalist I had loved, but who saw me only as a black cop; the United States and its racisms of class and color. In that moment, I missed the career I had left behind. I missed my other life, my parallel life, the life I was supposed to live, the one that didn’t involve being in love with a woman like Muddy, or having a partner like O—the life with a pension ahead of me, and if I did not make it that far, at least my own would be taken care of. I even missed the euphemism “died in the line of duty.” Only for a moment, though, because the life I had chosen was here, in this country.

News about the upcoming Kenyan presidential elections followed—the usual name-calling—so-and-so was corrupt, a tribalist, and worst of all, it seemed, a politician. There was one piece of news that piqued our interest: large caches of machetes—made in China, like everything else everywhere—had been found at the port in Mombasa. It was not clear for whom they were intended, or for what purposes—the customs police were investigating.

“I have something to say,” MC Hammer said, standing up and fanning his bright gold pants as soon as the news went to commercials. “Kenyans taking over the world. Machetes from China. To those who might have bad intentions—just remember. You can’t touch this,” he said and started dancing. The whole bar shook with laughter.

“Nothing to worry about,” a man holding on to a Tusker bottle drunkenly chimed in. “We like to kill a little during election time—but we don’t have the stomach for Rwanda. This will pass. A little bloodletting to bless the democracy … A Chinese machete? My noggin is like a fortress—impenetrable.” Encouraged by the laughter, he stood up, chugged the rest of the beer, and broke the Tusker bottle on his head.

“I wonder where our guy fits into all this mess,” O said to himself.

“Which mess, O?” I asked.

“All this shit—he is somehow connected with everything—elections, U.S., Kenya,” he explained his gut feeling.

O called Hammer to us and he glided over.

“What time is it?” he asked us.

“Hammer Time,” I answered. He laughed and sat down.

“Have you heard any ghost stories about Ngong Forest lately?” O asked him.

Hammer paused.

“My throat is very dusty, full of cobwebs—the only cure is nectar from the gods,” he said finally.

O ordered a Tusker for him. Hammer waited without saying another word until it came and he took a sip.

“This particular ghost was manufactured with a shot to the head and the heart—very clean,” O explained.

“We don’t do clean—a foreigner killed him … haven’t heard
anything, but it sounds like the kind of business Hammer does not want here—when it comes to crime, I am a nationalist. Let Kenyans do other Kenyans.” He took his beer and glided off. If he found out something, he would let us know—maybe.

“Our guy fits nowhere until we know more. We find out who he is, and we break this case open. For now, we don’t know shit,” I said to O.

“I need some fresh air,” he said, and stepped outside to smoke a joint. This was a strictly no smoking bar, cigarettes, weed, or anything else.

I was tired. I needed to go home. I wasn’t worried about leaving O here, high and drunk; someone, friend or foe, would make sure he got into his Land Rover okay. I took a cab home to Limuru and asked the driver to drop me off a few wooden gates from home. It was a useless precaution because in this small town, all someone had to do was ask where the American lived. Still, I thought it was better than leading someone who wished me ill straight home.

I woke up the following morning to find Muddy at her desk, writing, a joint and coffee in hand. I stared at her for a few moments, mesmerized by her dead-serious beautiful face appearing through the ebb and flow of smoke as she puffed and typed. At times like these, I fantasized about getting old with her—the world remaining this still beauty of streaming sunlight, the only change being Muddy and I getting older and older.

She was wearing a red, green, and black wrap, long beaded earrings, and, unlike during performances, she had her dreads up, so that they seemed to shower around her face. All things being equal, she should have died in Rwanda. Often she wished she
had—surviving the death of everyone she loved in a body that no longer felt like hers, joining the resistance and killing over and over again; it was hard to make a life out of those memories.

Older now, her face had lost that innocence I had never known but imagined, and the hardness I had come to know now changed easily into a smile. She cared more about life, hers and the lives of those around her. When I’d first met her, she was trying to figure some things out and hence was more sure; now that she had figured them out she was less sure, like me and everyone else.

There was a knock on the door. It was O, who, after a few puffs from Muddy’s joint, offered to make breakfast. We groaned, knowing it was going to be an omelette, the same one he had been making for years now, adjusting the ingredients to a degree only he knew. For years, he had been trying to perfect it. Still, it was food, and the seriousness with which he prepared his omelet made me feel better about my life.

“How is your long-lost wife? After the show we should all go out, no?” Muddy asked. She had a performance coming up at the Carnivore Hotel for the Kenyan elite and the tourists who liked to go there to sample Kenya’s wildlife—crocodile, zebra, and, for the right price, a protected animal.

Why did Muddy and Mary get along? I had asked myself that question many times. Mary had done everything right, except for marrying O, Muddy and I joked. There was some truth to that. But eventually I had come to understand that O was just the man she happened to fall in love with—and she had less control over that than over the choice to go a teachers’ college and dedicate her life to saving one pupil out of a hundred each year at Kangemi Primary School. I suppose, like Mary, I didn’t have much choice either—Muddy was the woman I loved.

“Yeah, she’s almost done teaching … I can see the Promised Land—and Ishmael, we are going to paint it red,” O said, and laughed between puffs.

“And Janet? Is she coming?” Muddy followed up. Janet was Mary’s unofficially adopted daughter, now a first-year at Nairobi University. Her real parents still lived in Mathare, still drank copious amounts of the illegal
changaa
. Rwandan refugees, they had found their salvation in self-destruction. Years ago, O and I had rescued Janet from a rapist and a life that would have spiraled down to hell. Muddy had given her hope, but it was Mary who became her surrogate mother.

“She can’t make it, exams … so she says. I suspect she has other plans—your performance or having fun with her friends?” O answered.

“My piece, I want it to carry some righteous anger and hope. What do you think, O? Can hope and anger co-exist?” Muddy asked. Now I knew they were both high. This was what they enjoyed the most—philosophizing over a joint—and O stopped chopping the red onions.

“Yeah, they can. Hope in a time like this,” he waved his hands around, “hope alone has nothing to hold it to the ground … it has no anchor, and it has no action. You need some anger in there to keep hope burning. To give it some oomph …” He forgot about the onion and starting chopping some garlic.

“This piece—I am angry that motherfuckers can’t see that Chinese machetes are not for farming—and the rhetoric, I know it too well,” Muddy was saying.

“Muddy, you see Rwanda in fucking everything. This is Kenya. We know violence—remember, when other Africans were begging for independence, we were out in the forests fighting,” O responded.

“Well, Castro Mao Guevara, I know the rhetoric—people were saying similar things in Rwanda—‘a little blood-letting,’ you Kenyans call it? There is no such thing as a little bloodletting,” she said, managing not to sound bitter.

O started to say something but Muddy raised her arms to interrupt him.

“Wait, wait … Each drop of blood is a flood,” she yelled, clapping her hands together in delight and jotting the line down.

O was now cutting a tomato, the garlic left half-chopped.

“What is missing from my motherfucking omelette?” he asked.

I pointed to the mushrooms and the green and red peppers—all from Muddy’s garden—that he had yet to chop up. His phone rang.

It was the pathologist on the line. He had something for us. We weren’t expecting anything useful. In the U.S., we used to say, “no body, no conviction,” but in Kenya finding a body in Ngong Forest meant that you had just another piece of evidence that was as important as the powerful wanted it to be.

“To be continued … We gotta go,” O said to Muddy. When high he liked to sound cool, like a rapper. It no longer irritated me. After all, pop black America was everywhere in Kenya, from the hip-hop Kiswahili rappers to teenagers in the streets of Nairobi looking like poor gangsters straight from Camden, New Jersey.

I kissed Muddy goodbye and followed O out.

Peter Kamau reminded me a lot of Bill Quella, the Madison Police Department’s coroner back home. BQ was Southern, from the eye of the South, he liked to say, and he loved Southern
expressions—he had once described a victim as being as full of blood as a tick. Peter Kamau used a lot of proverbs and riddles and wise sayings that invariably made sense only in his workplace. “Better dead than never” was his favorite.

Kamau and BQ were both tall and thin, and they smoked noisily, smacking their lips as they moved cigarettes from one end of their mouths to the other. It was my guess that this line of work called for certain personality traits, one of them being a love for expressions. Kamau, though, unlike BQ, was a hardcore Christian who prayed for each body that found its way to his table.