Black Star Nairobi (22 page)

We described Sahara, but the Chief said that we could be describing most old white college professors. He entered a few keys into his computer, waved us over to his side, and scrolled down a list of current and retired professors associated with the program.

“Any of these names seem familiar?” he asked. None of them did.

He gave us his card and some brochures and suggested we spend some time online learning about the program—we could come back next week if we had questions before applying.

As we left the office, we saw that Amina was pouring water from the coffee pot onto some Ketepa tea bags. So, to be polite, the four of us sat around her receptionist desk, sipping lukewarm Kenyan tea.

“Hey, what are you guys doing later in the afternoon? It’s African Festival Week. I promise it’s going to be a blast—come, I’ll show you around,” she offered, and gave us a flyer. We were just about to turn her down, when she said, “Hey, you can’t say no—everyone who has ever done anything in Africa, they will all be there. You can leave Africa, but Africa will never leave you.”

“Your professor might even be there,” the Chief said.

The conversation spiraled down to cuisine and culture. When we left, the Chief and Amina were laughing about their last encounter at an Ethiopian restaurant: the hot pepper had been watered down—the food wasn’t
really
African.

“I have an idea. I once asked Jason why he joined the Foreign Service, and he said it was because he went on a study abroad program. We need to look at their study abroad programs—love for the Foreign Service begins with Peace Corps–type programs, a visit to a foreign country …” I said excitedly.

“Where are you going with this?” Muddy asked me.

“Sahara’s men, there was something about them … Someone somewhere must have recruited and trained them, and a campus is as good a place as any. Shit, the army, the CIA, corporations, everyone recruits from the colleges. Why not Sahara? Think of Amina … she would be attracted to a company promising to do some good,” I talked it through to Muddy.

“Well, let’s find out,” she said.

A colorfully dressed maternal woman who had a busy mouth
ran the study abroad office. Muddy told her we were journalists working on a piece for Kenya’s
Daily Nation
about Berkeley’s programs. What we wanted to do was go through a list of their students spanning two or three generations. Specifically, we wanted to write about students who had been to Africa.

“You’re in luck, honey, everything is computerized,” she said to us as she turned on a computer monitor. “What years?”

“When was the Peace Corps founded?” I asked her. “Sixty-two, wasn’t it, by Kennedy?”

“I see you’ve done your research, dear. It was 1961. Let’s see, 1961 to the present … if we narrow the search to Africa,” she said as she typed, “… not many hits in the early 1960s. You know, Africa was not that popular back then …”

“Why is that?” Muddy asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine, honey. All I can tell you is that you’ll find very few alumni for the early days,” she replied.

That was good for us, since our search dates would range from the 1970s to the early ’90s, assuming that Sahara’s men were, give or take a few years, in their late thirties.

“Do you have a flash drive?” she asked. “It’s okay, I know those damn things can be expensive.” She rummaged through her drawer, found several, and picked one. “The students, they forget them here and never come back for them,” she said, looking with pity at the poor African journalists.

She gave us the downloaded data and we thanked her, promising that we would send her the piece as soon as it was published.

Next, we went to the university library and used a computer there to go through the flash drive. A few minutes into it, Muddy
pointed to the screen and I tensed. We had something. In 1985, five students, four of them white and one of them black, had traveled to South Africa. These were the days before the U.S. declared sanctions against the racist government there.

There were a few photos of them marching with black students against apartheid. But it was the last photo, in which they were looking into the camera somberly, their eyes without the luster, smiles, and laughter of the earlier photographs, that suggested something profound had happened to them. My guess was that they had seen more violence than the university newspaper would dare publish—dying and dead schoolchildren still in their uniforms, shot by the security forces. These were our guys.

The write-up concluded with the information that their meeting with the university president led to the University of California becoming the first university to fully divest from apartheid South Africa—to the tune of three billion dollars.

That kindness they had about them that felt so out of place—it made sense. It was hard to believe that these kids would, a few years later, plant a bomb in Kenya, kill one of their own and die in a small apartment in Nairobi after shooting an unarmed woman in the head.

The write-up didn’t mention where they were from—but we had their names. Neil Jackson, Harrison Bush, Ronald William, and John Rhodes. And our dead man—Amos Apara. There was no Sahara, but now I knew if we looked hard enough, we would find him. We could work with this.

I stepped outside the library and called Helen. She was still working on getting past the security on Sahara’s laptop. In the meantime, she would hack into the school database and get us the listed addresses for where the men had lived.

I went back inside and we continued going through the flash
drive, sure we wouldn’t find Sahara. But if we followed the dead black man—Amos Apara—I had to get used to the fact that we now had a name—he would eventually lead us to Sahara. We left the library feeling much lighter.

The African Festival Week was unlike anything I had ever seen. It was half celebration and half mourning; Kenya, up in flames, was still fresh in my mind. But slowly I relaxed and forgot that we were here to look for Sahara or anything that might help us with the case.

At the festival, Muddy and I could eat, drink, and hold hands and just be an engaged couple in love. We could dance to the Malian musician on stage, playing his
ngoni
, which made beautiful muted thin and stringy sounds that were well complemented by a blues guitarist’s lazy electrified notes, the congas, and the drums. I had seen Muddy happy, but I had never seen her carefree—without a worry in the world, so in the moment that every now and then she’d even skip about when pointing something out.

I was dressed in a flowing blue African shirt and blue jeans, while O was wearing a white shirt over black corduroys. Muddy had set her dreadlocks free and she was wearing a long hippie-looking African dress. You could say we were disguised as ourselves. The outfits had another advantage: they concealed our weapons and bulletproof vests.

Julio and the teacher were wearing modern Mexican out-fits; at least that’s what they told us, as Julio made us repeat the names of everything—guayabera shirts, which looked African to me, and sombreros, jeans, and sandals. It was Muddy’s idea to play up the ethnic dress.

We divided up, O taking the teacher and Muddy taking Julio, and went in search of Sahara. After two hours of walking around, peering into every face, we converged at a makeshift bar that was selling Tusker beer. In true Kenyan form, we ordered two each and some beef kebabs and found a place under the tent to sit down, watching people walk by. This had been a long shot, but there was no harm in hanging around in case Sahara came to the festival later.

“Mr. Mwangi, you are not asking,” O said to me, reverting to our cover names.

“What question?” I asked him.

“I thought by now you would have asked what I thought of America, your country,” O said.

“Well?” I said.

“I knew we were many but I did not know there was a place where we could be … all together, black people from all over. And walking together with Asians and Europeans—you know what I mean? I like that. Makes me think of what’s happening back home,” he answered pensively.

Amina walked by, dressed every bit the part, looking more African even than Muddy, who had forsaken a head-wrap so that, as she had explained, her dreads could soak in the American sun. I caught up with her and we walked back to the tent together. She had a quick beer with us—she was meeting friends—but she was having a party later and she invited us along.

At Amina’s, Muddy and O were smoking up a storm while I was getting deeper and deeper into the blues. The teacher and Julio had left with the rest of Amina’s guests, a motley crew of graduate students interested in one or another aspect of Africa.

“Hey, Mwangi!” O called out, high and very drunk. “Do you know what it’s like to wake up one morning, kiss the woman you love goodbye, go to a hospital to see your sick mother, and come back to find your wife dead? Do you know anything about that kind of … of … suddeneity?” he asked me as he got up to dance, or rather sway back and forth.

“Suddeneity is not a fucking word,” Muddy corrected him, and she took a deeper hit from her joint.

“No, I can’t say I do,” I answered, already hating where the conversation was going.

“Heeeeey, Bwana,” Amina said, raising her hands up in the air. “My father … my father died in a car accident in fucking Kampala, one day we were talking over the phone, the next day he was dead and we were trying to get him back home. Some people hit giraffes, and some die in war. We’re here, aren’t we?” she said as she blew smoke into the air and coughed.

“Don’t stand in my way,” O said to me, ignoring Amina’s comment but reaching for her hand.

“Hey, fuck off,” Amina said, and slapped his hand away.

“I’m sorry—that came out the wrong way. Okay?” he said to Amina before continuing. “What I mean is that the closest you can get to knowing yourself is when you’re looking for the motherfucker that tried to kill you—that’s it. And you wanna know why?” he asked drunkenly.

“Why?” we chorused back, some of us lagging behind like we were preschoolers.

“Because you have to ask yourself—why does that motherfucker want to kill me? And why did he miss me and kill my wife?” he said, pointing at an imaginary enemy.

“And then you have to ask—how the fuck do I kill him?” O said. “Do you know that you have to get to know his soul? I
mean you have to know his soul. That is how we get Sahara.” He slapped his hand on his knee emphatically.

“What do you guys do? I thought you were looking to enroll … PhD program and all,” Amina said, trying not to sound nervous.

“Do you really care?” Muddy asked her. Amina thought for a minute or so.

“Shit, I don’t care … I don’t know why I thought I cared,” she said, which led to another high philosophical debate about why we need to know things or people and what it means to truly know.

Perhaps the idea that you could really get to know someone’s soul was an overstatement, but, thinking of Muddy, I thought, I hoped, that you could get at least part of the way there. I guess this what Helen the Hacker meant—you hack the person, not the computer. We still didn’t know Sahara that well. In fact, we hardly knew him at all.

It was time for Muddy and me to leave. O and Amina both looked at us as if to ask what had taken us so long. By the time we made it to the door they were kissing. Two wounded people had found each other. I wanted to say something about it to Muddy but it occurred to me that whether O woke up missing his wife less, or even more, it would not change the bottom line—she was gone. That was his life now—a constant longing for what he had lost.

Muddy and I took a cab back to Michael’s. Julio and the teacher had started on a bottle of tequila. Still high from the festival, they decided we should walk to the Mexican neighborhood that was just few blocks from Michael’s house, in search of bar to call
mi casa
, as Julio put it.

This was something I had forgotten about the United
States—in Kenya each ethnic group had a territory that they claimed as theirs; in the United States, the territories were neighborhoods. We didn’t have far to go before we made it to the Bajo Tierra. The bar was more like a dugout; from the street you went down a few stairs that led you through a short, brightly colored tunnel.

The bar itself was old-fashioned, none of those flashy digital jukeboxes and fancy lights. The only concession to modernity was a small ATM in the corner.

We had a beer, took the keys to the Ninja Cleaners van, and left Julio and the teacher having a good time. I guess they were becoming friends. Back in the van, we turned on the AC and made love like we were teenagers, our flowing African clothes getting in the way, with Mexican pop music playing in the background.

There was still one more day of the festival left and I was hoping it would count for something.

He wouldn’t have recognized me. He wouldn’t have been expecting me to be in the U.S., let alone at an African Festival in Oakland; and in my outfit, to him I was anyone other than myself.

Nor would I have seen him, except that on this second and last day of the festival I’d stopped giving in to the seductive music and food and I had gone back to work. Even then it took me several passes to realize that the surfer dude sitting at a table drinking Tusker beer and chatting away with friends at the makeshift bar we’d been at just a day before was the man I had let go in Nairobi, who, naked, had still somehow managed to get a motorcycle and rescue Sahara.

Convinced it was him, I called Muddy and O. Julio and the teacher hadn’t joined us, they had some business to take care of. I didn’t ask what kind of business. I went over to the bar and ordered a Tusker, watching him, ready to move. Muddy and O soon joined me and I discreetly pointed out the man.

We needed him to come with us quietly, so we could talk without urgency and fear of interruption. In Kenya we would have just grabbed him, right there where he was. Now we were completely at a loss about what to do—being on the right side of Kenya’s blurry law had spoiled us. Were it not for the seriousness of it all, it would have been comical. Like pickpockets, we had to wait until an opportunity presented itself.