a5hok

The bayaka's brother in law was a preacher.  He went to preacher school in Oklahoma. "Okaa-laa-homa" -- he told me with some reverence, as if it were babylon itself. It was one of those churches where sufferings were miraculously healed and parishioners spoke in tongues.

I was present at one of his well-attended sermons. As an unbeliever, and as a foreigner I was made to sit in the front row -- perhaps in the hope that witnessing the parade of marvels up close might change my mind.

The brother-in-law gave no hint of preparation. No doubt. No motive either. Only smug certitude; a snobbery of assurance and belief.

Outside there were beans for lunch. They tasted of dust. From inside the church, there was the honk of the preacher accompanied by "Yeah..!" "Yes!" of the parishioners.  It sounded like a riot -- the preacher with the voice of the looter.
When the healings began, the tyranny of noise escalated.

I walked back to the solitude of my quarters. 

On the way back I saw the beginning of a killing:

Near the bus station -- where there used to be two buses a day (and now there were none -- where could they go to?), the fig trees had risen -- and their boughs had met over the tin roof of the station-house.  They were being cut down.  One of the trees had lost its arm-like branches to the shriek of a chain saw. Soon there would be nothing.

I wrote this behind a photograph that evening:

“Nothing is worth preserving – not even sentiment; that went with the trees --  and the people who planted them, who had gone before the trees had.”

I have been riding a two wheeler in Nairobi for almost two years without a license. This year I decided to apply for a license.

I report to Karen police station for a driving test. The driving test center is in the junkyard of the police station. Wreckage of smashed cars and trucks. Some have numbers crudely painted on them - later I learn its the scrap price (Interested in a rust colored, rusty Ford Consul ? - 5,000 shilings , Toyota Ceres without any doors and blood stains on the steering wheel ? - 12,000 shillings ). The shell of the old bus isn't for sale - its unofficially a toilet - the back entrance is for women - the front entrance is for men.  I didn't dare to peep inside.

There are 50 other people waiting ahead of me for the driving test. Everyone wants to drive a car, so I am the sole person looking for a motorcycle driving license.

Four hours later, the fat cop, who doubles up as the driving examiner, is exhausted.  It is my turn. He looks at me, then looks at the motorcycle. I grin at him.

'Do you know how to drive a motorcycle ?', he barks.
'Yes'.
'Alright, you are passed'.

I read the newspaper today, apparently it is a day of compelling interest to all.

The back pages had this item, the gist of which is as follows :

The Kenyan government sent an official delegation of 12  (4 cabinet ministers and 8 members of parliament) to the Obama swearing in ceremony. The 12 watched the inauguration live on television in Washington DC - as they did not have invites for the function.

Before reaching Washington DC, the 12 stopped over in Cuba to discuss high-level trade and cooperation between the two nations. As there are no direct flights between Cuba and America - an additional day's transit stopover was done in Mexico - and from thereon to Washington DC.

At this point I lost any further stamina to read the news, and so I began reading the advertisements and notices, when this caught my eye and I could read no more :



There are 2 bus companies in Kenya. One is called Mash Bus and the other is called Smash Bus. Smash Bus was involved in a collision and 30 people perished. Mash Bus put out an advertisement it wasn't Mash Bus but Smash Bus.

I met two acquaintances today, one via the other ---

The first is a woman -- a can of convoluted worms, the kind of woman who believes that every time she strips off her bra -- a world gets destroyed somewhere.

The other is a man -- with whom I share the most woeful of affinities. We have both slept with the same woman. We are strangers -- yet there is an element of recognition in his gaze that asks -- what does that make you and me ?

From an old diary ::

Today I have been set free.

The driver's name is Cosmo, he tells me he has been waiting for a while. I offer him a cigarette, he looks at the pack, its a Benson & Hedges - grunts in approval and takes one, and then on second thought grabs three more.

We pass a village. There is a fair of some sort, a crowd of people yelling, cheering. As the crowd makes way for our pickup, I see the distraction of the evening. It is a dead man. A body clad in fatigues, stained with rust - it is crushed, as if not dead, but about to sprout from the ground.  The face is watchful, haunted eyes turned up, gazing towards the heavens.

"Wolfs...", Cosmo says, letting the cigarette die. He lights it again, deftly with one hand and finishes it, puffing it to  a small butt, a couple of centimeters, and then tweezes it between his thumb-tips letting the ashes catch the wind.
There were many such exotic militias - each crazier than the other : "Wulufs (Wolfs)" , "Ninjas" , "Kushoto (left handed)", "Simbas",  "Mai-Mai" ....

It is hard to know what is right or wrong here. Difficult to know what to say. Cosmo tries making conversation - what is my life ? what do I do here ? His breath has the odor of sweated meat - or perhaps its the lingering smell of the dead body. This is a world parallel to my own life, I do not belong here, and so I don't reveal anything truthful to Cosmo.

Twilight is signaled by the swishing whispers of the monkeys. They are everywhere, invisible among the trees -- occasionally a shadowy figure bounds across the track.
Cosmo feeds the whispers, with whispers of his own. "Listen for bare feet..." he says, "...they come without shoes, so you can't hear them..".

'They' were the 'Wulufs' a rag-tag band of errant, lost children (some no bigger than the monkeys) - who couldn't afford shoes, but carried Kalashnikovs, and usually died wholesale in a hail of bullets.

His whispers make me specially attentive. But in pitch blackness every noise is like the patter of naked feet - a drip of water, a rustle of a leaf, a stone bouncing off the pickup.... 

We make it to the airport. The barrier before the airport is manned by a soldier, a boy - a small head, a skinny neck, ill fitting pants and mismatched boots. He is trying so hard not to look scared, that he moves stiffly, like a marionette.

The aircraft is an old Hawker Siddeley turbo prop. I see Cosmo on the runway lighting up another cigarette. He is talking to the big woman who doubles up as the ticket checker and the airline steward. She counts the bundle of notes I have paid her with. Satisfied, she stuffs them into her shirt where it makes another bulge.

No one knows me on the plane. I am free again.

I recently saw a film called "Darwin's Nightmare" (imdb link). It is a documentary about the circumstances surrounding the environmental collapse facing Lake Victoria.

This is a subject matter that deserves some coverage, but the director cannot help but veer into the territory of fabrication and fiction to make his case.  There is one scene meant to evoke horror among the viewers, and in fact one of the persons I watched the film with (a lady unfamiliar with Africa) burst into tears during this particular scene and rushed home, unable to watch the proceedings any more.

The scene is setup nicely - a large fish processing factory which exports fillets of Nile Perch to Europe. The owners appear wealthy and callous. The CEO, a middle-aged indian demonstrates a ridiculous mechanical fish in his office - there is implied laughter and mirth.

The scene changes. The head of the fish is discarded during the filleting process and sent to a dump of fish waste. This is where the hungry Africans appear, scrounging for fish heads - there is even a child wearing a T-Shirt with a painted skeleton ! The horror is evident - the mother scrounging for fish heads, and the child wearing a skeleton t-shirt, in a bleak wasteland of dead fish.

Among the tribes of the Lake region - the head is the prized part of the fish. It isn't unusual that the head of the fish is eaten and the rest thrown away. This is never mentioned in the course of the film.

Then there is a scene where the director prompts a conversation with a watchman - the idea is to evoke a connection between illegal arms smuggling and violence (The documentary suggests that some of the planes being used for exporting fish are also used for arms trafficking). If you had a gun what would you do.. is the repeated line of questioning, until the director gets the answer he desires from the oafish watchman : 'I might shoot someone...'.

The director arrived with a concept in mind. The rest of the direction was about fitting reality into this concept.

Latest to jump on the Obama bandwagon is the AppleBees night club in nairobi. They have 2 performers now from Obama's step-grandmother's village. As the advert states, the performances are not always hot. Sometimes after the stroke of midnight a stripper usually makes an appearance. The owner, a dark man in a glistening suit claims to run a rehabilitation service for prostitutes.

November 6th :: Today was a national holiday in Kenya. The president appeared on television, and read out a speech in a slow voice punctuated by heavy pauses. "...Obama won the elections, and so .....it is a historic moment to celebrate...". And so, today was declared a national holiday.

This is not a country without heroes, but is a country that denies its heroes. The biggest museum in Nairobi has space for stuffed birds, tribal and colonial artifacts - but none for its freedom fighters. 

Recently there were elections in Kenya, a winner was declared, and the same President subsequently declared a state of National emergency. Perhaps this is how history is made here - an unwillingness to look at the past, and an appropriation of achievements to fit within a rosy future.

This is one of those typical tiny Italian towns. A main street. A cemetry lined with cypress. A church and a bell tower - the church is home to the patron saint of the town - a miraculous madonna with a bambino gesu.  Sometime in the 17th century a rich Venetian duke presented a set of oversized crowns to the church; one of these crowns was placed on a lifesized wooden doll of the bambino gesu. It was reportedly a doll possessing magical healing powers.  But a second world war British bombing raid, destroyed a part of the church and the wooden doll. The disproportionate ornaments survived and decorate the madonna to this day.

The town also has the usual bar, called Bar Centrale, where the senior citizens meet. The best way to strike up  conversation here is to occupy one of the few tables at ten in the morning, and order an obscure glass of wine from the bar (a pignolo always seem to attract  conversation, but with a tocai people leave you alone).

On the way back from Bar Centrale is this abandoned house. It used to be the house of the old farmer's uncle. When the new highway to the sea was built, it passed right in front of the house. For the first time traffic lights were installed. The uncle did not know or care about traffic lights, it had always been his road ("I was here before the lights were installed"). 

One morning, on a routine trip to Bar Centrale, he ran a red-light on his bicycle, and was run over by a milk truck. The uncle's widow, a woman from the superstitious South, immediately changed the position of the door - as the original door had brought bad luck.

Everyone is gone now. The new door has planks nailed across, the old door is still visible through the fractured plaster.

It is that uncertain time of the day, when the sun has just set and the ground fog rolls in. The way is lit by the wavering reflection of the pale sky. I can't see my feet as I jog. I stop and drink coffee from the old aluminium flask. Soon everything will be black. There is a smudge of yellow in the grass - an early winter flower, its colors refracted by the fog.

The change of season, the shedding of leaves, the sudden heaviness in people, all of these were new to me.  In the tropics there are just two apparent seasons warm, and sometimes cool, and the foliage remains evergreen.

In the old farmer's garden, I found an apple tree, in its autumn season. The farmer told me that the tree had lived its life, and it was going to die before winter. I tasted an apple from a leafless branch, and it was dry but filled with the sweetness of life.

In the evening we had apple strudel, made by the farmer's daughter. She was past forty, an aging beauty and still lived in a small room in the house of the farmer. Later just as we started dinner, the daughter excused herself and retired to her room.

The farmer's wife, a bent woman with sparkling green eyes which ached for a grandchild apologized for the daughter's absence.

Later that night when I listened at my bedroom door,  I heard the whisper of the daughter - in a wasted conversation with a cat.