Gods and Soldiers (31 page)

Then there is the rumble of the Masai—more recent, all feared, and who dominated all the landscape I can see—and whose power now mostly rests in names—most of the towns and rivers and lakes were named by the Masai.

Then, this century, squat and awkward comes the stone and railway lines, the jacarandas and rockeries, the single-room dorm houses for cheap African labour; the red-faced discomforts of large colonial homes with small windows and geometrical gardens—all fading now, but still dominant. The solid matter of this town, beaten and stretched. Rusting and rearranged and built upon.

And now, streaming down the wires the British built their roads, and satellites; and the ones we built in the last forty years, somewhat shoddily, but based on their model.

In the 1970s, America arrives, gum chewing America—a colour, a tone, an attitude, slouching and grinning.

And brewing inside this space are sixty languages and as many micro-nations, angling into this young Nation, twisting and turning and asking to be Kenyan—a thing still unclear, picking here, choosing there; stealing here, and there—disembowelling that which came before, remaking it. Being Kenyan is not yet a commitment, not enough forces have gathered within us to remake the space we occupy.

In January, dry wind would blow into town, a fan shaped blow-torch; and grass would singe; and life claw backwards and backwards and summersault into the horizon, in the escarpment in the distance we could see springs of dust rise.

Reading all those distant English books as a child, the idea of spring made its way into my picture of this place. We have no real spring—we are on the equator. But for me, spring was every morning, dew and soft mists, and the lake still and blue in the distance, sometimes all pink with flamingoes rippling with a breeze, and rising like leaves to whirl against the sky. Summer is midday, the sun above your head, and you have no shadow. Autumn is September, when the jacaranda trees shed all their purple flowers and the short rains began—and the idea of an autumn, of a spring was resident in the imagination of the English Settlers who planned this suburb, and thought of blooms and bees and White highlands made into a new English countryside.

So, in a way, spring has come to be a real thing in Milimani. You read about it in English books, and you experience it with your senses here. But—here is the curse of the Post Colonial: it means nothing here, you can do nothing meaningful with it. All it does is allow you to have false ambitions, to place yourself in a fake middle-class future.

Sometimes you catch a glimpse of what this all was before. On the slopes of this giant caldera, the soil is a flat brown, no red at all in it; and this place was full of light rocks. You can still see them in gardens, piled up into rockeries and stashed away in little forgotten patches. A curse lingers in what was rock and wheat coloured grass and sharp thorny bushes, all now lawn and spring and hedge and red brick homes in two acre plots.

You can see it all laid bare in dry January.

I walk. Small maize, beans and kale plots; and to your left, you stare down at the bowels of State House, Nakuru: sleeping plainclothes policemen—red socks and grey shoes for all to see; scurrying servants, and Mercedes-Benzes—of every kind and length and colour.

When the path levels, there are all manner of ferns and small wild flowers—you step across the stream and cut through the fallen
kei
apple hedge, and into the grand mossy and old buildings of the Medical Training Centre at the War Memorial Hospital—where all the Wainaina children were born.

The hospital has white picket fences, thick lawns and a thick silence that makes me think of silent screams.

I was circumcised here, at thirteen. Became a man.

My father hemmed-hawed at the parking lot at 2 p.m. on a Monday afternoon. Talking about—uh—sexual intercourse—and the, uh—responsibilities of . . . uh . . . man. A bored nurse laughed when I told her that I would not take off my clothes in front of her. The doctor, an Iranian, kept fussing and telling me I should have done the operation when I was a baby. I watched, my cock swelling like a balloon, then fascinated as he cut and I felt nothing.

I bounced out of the room in half an hour ready to tell the world I was pain-free and manly. My mother found me, an hour later, leaning against a jacaranda tree and moaning in pain, after fainting.

At the main building, I turn back into the main road, a dead straight road that starts at the gates of State House, Nakuru, goes past the hospital and meets the newspaper sellers, the bougainvillea range of mountains, the tarmacked walkway, through the bougainvillea, to the cemetery, some churches, the louder and more chaotic Provincial General Hospital. The path branches, at some point, into town—all this area is a boundary between the leafier sections of town—broken cleanly by the railway; and the old African and Indian sections of the town—now a widely spread and messy city of nearly a million.

I walk down the straight road. When I was in high school, I once saw President Moi driving out on this road on his own in a VW combi. He had a jaunty hat on—and nobody by his side. It did not seem possible.

I cross the road, an old house at the corner, on stilts, the sellers of young plants for gardens, the giant bougainvillea that lines the entrance to town, that borders the railway, which cuts the town in half—leafy suburbs and jacarandas, the Colonial old Nakuru on one side, and on the other the town centre—a mix of many things: old Masailand; pioneer Gikuyuland; Gujarat; Punjaab; the Kalenjin Highlands—now Kenya's power centre; food processing; Norfolk, England; the Provincial Headquarters; zebra-patterned curio shops; paleontologists in town from the hills to buy goods; tourvans and flamingoes; a refuge for orphans from ethnic clashes; hundreds of churches; schools; games; NGO people in huge SUVs; our New Kenya; corrugated iron; farmers coming to buy groceries, feed and seed; traffic from the Port of Mombasa, to Kisumu, Uganda, Rwanda and even Congo.

Fuel for growth, and tinder for conflict. Depends on how you look at it.

NOW EVERYBODY IN the country knew something or other about the Ruler's Birthday because, before it was firmly set in the national calendar, the date of his birth and the manner of its celebration had been the subject of a heated debate in Parliament that went on for seven months, seven days, seven hours, and seven minutes, and even then the honorable members could not arrive at a consensus mainly because nobody knew for sure the actual date of the Ruler's birth and when they failed to break the impasse, the honorable members sent a formal delegation to the very seat of power to seek wise guidance, after which they passed a motion of gratitude to the Ruler for helping the chamber find a solution to a problem that had completely defeated their combined knowledge and experience. The birthday celebrations would always start at the seventh hour of the seventh day of the seventh month, seven being the Ruler's sacred number, and precisely because in Aburīria the Ruler controlled how the months followed each other—January for instance trading places with July—he therefore had the power to declare any month in the year the seventh month, and any day within that seventh month the seventh day and therefore the Ruler's Birthday. The same applied to time, and any hour, depending on the wishes of the Ruler, could be the seventh hour.

The attendance at these annual assemblies always varied, but that particular year the stadium was almost full because the curiosity of the citizens had been aroused by a special announcement, repeated over and over in the media, that there would be a special birthday cake, which the entire country had made for the Ruler and which he might make multiply and feed the multitude the way Jesus Christ once did with just five loaves and two fishes. The prospect of cakes for the multitude may explain the more than usual presence of victims of kwashiorkor.

The celebration started at noon, and late in the afternoon it was still going strong. The sun dried people's throats. The Ruler, his ministers, and the leaders of the Ruler's Party, all under a shade, kept cooling their tongues with cold water. The citizens without shade or water distracted themselves from the hot darts of the sun by observing and commenting on what was happening on the platform: the clothes the dignitaries wore, the way they walked, or even where each sat relative to the seat of might.

Immediately behind the Ruler was a man who held a pen the width of an inch water pipe in his right hand and a huge leather-bound book in his left, and since he was always writing people assumed that he was a member of the press, although there were some who wondered why he was not at the press gallery. Beside him sat the four sons of the Ruler—Kucera, Moya, Soi, and Runyenje—studiously drinking from bottles labeled Diet.

Near the sons sat Dr. Wilfred Kaboca, the Ruler's personal physician, and next to him, the only woman on the platform, who was also conspicuous in her silence. Some assumed that she was one of the Ruler's daughters, but then, they wondered, why was she not speaking to her brothers? Others thought that she was Dr. Kaboca's wife, but then why this silence between them?

To the Ruler's right sat the Minister of Foreign Affairs in a dark striped suit and a red tie with a picture of the Ruler, the emblem of the Ruler's Party.

The story goes that Markus used to be an ordinary member of Parliament. Then one day he flew to England, where under the glare of publicity he entered a major London hospital not because he was ill but because he wanted to have his eyes enlarged, to make them ferociously sharp, or as he put it in Kiswahili,
Yawe Macho Kali,
so that they would be able to spot the enemies of the Ruler no matter how far their hiding places. Enlarged to the size of electric bulbs, his eyes were now the most prominent feature of his face, dwarfing his nose, cheeks, and forehead. The Ruler was so touched by his devotion and public expression of loyalty that even before the MP returned home from England the Ruler had given him the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an important Cabinet post, so that Machokali would be his representative eye wherever, in whatever corner of the globe lay the Ruler's interests. And so Machokali he became, and later he even forgot the name given at his birth.

To the left of the Ruler sat another Cabinet minister, the Minister of State in the Ruler's office, dressed in a white silk suit, a red handkerchief in his breast pocket, and of course the Party tie. He too had started as a not particularly distinguished member of Parliament, and he probably would have remained thus, except that when he heard of the good fortune that had befallen Machokali he decided to follow suit. He did not have much money, so he secretly sold his father's plot and borrowed the rest to buy himself a flight to France and a hospital bed in Paris, where he had his ears enlarged so that, as he also put it in a press statement, he would be able to hear better and therefore be privy to the most private of conversations between husband and wife, children and their parents, students and teachers, priests and their flock, psychiatrists and their patients—all in the service of the Ruler. His ears were larger than a rabbit's and always primed to detect danger at any time and from any direction. His devotion did not go unnoticed, and he was made Minister of State in charge of spying on the citizenry. The secret police machine known as M5 was now under his direction. And so Silver Sikiokuu he became, jettisoning his earlier names.

The success of the two erstwhile members of Parliament was, ironically, the beginning of their rivalry: one considered himself the Ruler's Eye and the other his Ear. People at the stadium kept comparing their different expressions, particularly the movements of their eyes and ears, for it had long been known that the two were always in a mortal struggle to establish which organ was more powerful: the Eye or the Ear of the Ruler. Machokali always swore by his eyes: May these turn against me if I am not telling the truth. Sikiokuu invoked his ears: May these be my witness that what I am saying is true—and in mentioning them, he would tug at the earlobes. The gesture, rehearsed and perfected over time, gave him a slight edge in their rivalry for attention, because Machokali could never match it by tugging at his eyelids and he was reduced to doing the second best thing, pointing at his eyes for emphasis.

Other members of Parliament would have followed suit and had their bodies altered depending on what services they wanted to render the Ruler except for what befell Benjamin Mambo. As a young man Mambo had failed to get into the army because he was small, but the fire for a military life never died, and now, with the new avenues of power opened by Machokali and Sikiokuu, he thought this his best chance to realize his dream, and he agonized over the best bodily change to land him the Defense Minister portfolio. He chose to have his tongue elongated so that in echoing the Ruler's command his words would reach every soldier in the country and his threats to his enemies before they could reach the Aburīrian borders. He first emulated Sikiokuu and went to Paris, but there was some misunderstanding about the required size, and the tongue, like a dog's, now hung out way beyond his lips, rendering speech impossible. Machokali came to his aid by arranging for him to go to a clinic in Berlin, where the lips were pulled and elongated to cover the tongue, but even then not completely and the tongue protruded now just a little. But the Ruler misread the signified and gave him the Ministry of Information. This was not bad, and Mambo marked his elevation to a Cabinet post by changing his forenames and called himself Big Ben, inspired by the clock at the British Houses of Parliament. His full name was now Big Ben Mambo. He did not forget the help that Machokali had rendered him, and in the political struggle between Markus and Silver, he often took Machokali's side.