New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  We tried again although it ended suddenly.

  “Do you have a special person in your life?” I asked him. I’d seen it somewhere on Facebook about two years before, during a quiet spell in our correspondence. I’d been bored, he’d been texting me and I’d chosen to ignore him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And a child.”

  “Yes.”

  I’d known, which is why the sadness I felt was curious to me.

  “A girl?”

  “Yes. She’s two and a half.”

  “Lives with her mother?”

  “Yes.”

  Perhaps he saw judgment in my face.

  “Sometimes I take her. For a few days. For a weekend.”

  We were sitting up in bed. I hadn’t offered him breakfast, there was nothing in my fridge. I thought, once we were clean and dressed, I’d take him out to a café nearby.

  “Does she know you sleep with other women? Your girlfriend.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she doesn’t mind.”

  He shrugged. He was boy-man. A slight but long body, a body that I (large as I am) had rested on. He was a boy with heavy adult ideas.

  “She understands.”

  “And she can do the same?”

  “She can do as she pleases.”

  “And you don’t mind?” I wasn’t clear what it was I wanted to fight for, so early in the morning, so doped by the tight caresses, as if an embrace was a drug.

  “How?”

  “I mean. Say for instance you see her. You run into her and her lover. How would that make you feel?”

  He frowned.

  “Won’t you be sad? See, I don’t understand it. I don’t understand this way of living.”

  “Yeah. So we’re conditioned. To think that this is how relationships have to go. We have this one-only model.”

  When he was awake and talking to me like this he was man. With short firm sentences. Clear things he’d decided that no one would ever change.

  “We don’t talk about it. You keep it to yourself,” he said.

  He spoke in such a way. Everything calibrated, no words escaped his lips without first passing through whatever measuring cup he used, whatever scale. I wanted something from him and I hated myself for it. He was not in any way the kind of man I would long for but he was here in my bed and I wanted something without units.

  “Don’t you think about it though? Because you love her.”

  “You know love as possession. I know it different. You know it as attachment. I know it different.”

  I wanted to touch his boy-face, kiss him maybe. I wanted to ask him why, in the night, we hadn’t continued. Why, after three years, after finally being in bed together, why hadn’t we spent the whole night looking at each other’s bodies, inspecting our nudity, enthralled, disgusted, curious, nervous, embarrassed, whatever the feeling but something or all things. I wanted to ask if his spurts of lust were always so short. Did he enjoy it, I wanted to know. Did he like my body, had it been worth the long wait, the teasing, my prolonged reticence and final assent? Why this intricate philosophy for a life of polyamory if the actual love-making would end up so measly. Wasn’t he hungry?

  “Hungry?”

  “Yeah.”

  I had the salad, he asked for a wrap and made a point of requesting fresh juice. The waiter frowned at the word “fresh” and brought something orange with no pulp or pips.

  “It’ll do,” he said and took his first sip.

  I’d once lain down with a man who’d insisted I stand in front of him first. Let me see you, he’d said. And then he’d said, after looking a few seconds at my skin, my naked torso, my hips with striations that I first discovered then learnt the word “cellulite”; he’d said, you’re beautiful. I’d once gone to visit a cousin’s friend whose mother had died. My cousin was unable to visit and I went instead and sat in the grieving man’s living-room from afternoon till evening and he didn’t turn the lights on. He told me he was supposed to go to a sex party the following night, he’d booked it before his mother’s death and now he didn’t know whether to go or not. A party where you leave your clothes in cellophane at the door. It only happens once a year, he said. Exclusive. He’d bought the tickets, he had two. I said no. Are you a prude he wanted to know. And after I denied this he asked, what would you do if I suddenly took all my clothes off. Not a big deal I said. So he took all his clothes off and several hours later we sat naked on his couch, him cradling my breasts. I once jerked a man off and he thanked me, asked me how I’d managed to do that—he’d never had a hand job in his life not even one given by himself; he looked at me as if I owned his life, could squash or pet it, whichever I pleased. One told me to hurry up, another took too long. One asked me if I knew what I was doing, another asked me what precisely was I doing. When I thought my relationship was over and what I ought to do was bring back the spice I spent hours in a lingerie shop, spent money on colourful lace I never found the right moment to wear. I bought expensive oils but when, after much begging, my boyfriend agreed to leave the TV and lay down on the bed, when I started to rub oil on his beautiful skin he sucked his teeth. You don’t know what you’re doing, he said. Lie down. He rubbed me all over, firm like a physiotherapist, then he went back to finish watching the game. I sent a man out at 2 a.m. to find a condom. Another time I ransacked my house mate’s room for hers. I’d experienced intimacy once when my boyfriend cried in my arms, we were lying in bed, I was breaking up with him. I’d experienced intimacy once when, after I reached, I cried in a man’s arms. I was in love with him and he was breaking up with me. What is it I search for that I cannot find.

  “I’d—”

  “Pardon?”

  We’d finished our meals and his juice was half drunk.

  “No, I was trying to say. I’d wanted something.”

  “What?”

  “Last night. I mean. How do I put this? I’m glad you came through. Drove down to see me. And—”

  “Oh. Yeah, me too.”

  “—I’d wanted something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know,” I shrugged.

  He gulped down the rest of the juice. He offered to pay but needed to draw cash from an ATM and there were none about. Later I would wonder why I didn’t just suggest he pay with his bank card but at the time I told him not to worry. He asked if he could borrow my train card, he assured me he would return it. I dropped him at the station and he must have lost my number, he didn’t call and it seemed we would never see each other again.

  For many days after his visit I felt an odd mix of emotions. Some parts of my body ached from where I’d exerted myself, a sign not of how vigorous we’d been but rather how unfit I was, how unused those muscles were to working. Pleasant aches. I felt strangely revived. I went back to the recent memories of lying in bed with another warm body beside me. I’d so enjoyed that. The weight of his boy body, his smooth long arms gripping me. As the days passed and his silence filled them I felt duped. Not because I loved him, not even because I longed for him, wanted to call him myself or would even agree to see him again. I didn’t necessarily feel duped by him, although in some moments I did. Rather I felt duped by something bigger than us both. I didn’t regret seeing him but I regretted the pattern of my life, the incessant longing for something closer. The compromises for something lesser. I remembered long comfortable phone calls with lovers I no longer spoke to. I remembered the parabola love can make when it turns into hate, the burn of resentment, long nights awake, my heart loud in complaint and upset. I remembered feelings, what it is to weep for a human being that has forgotten you, what it feels like to be done with someone. I remembered pain. I remembered that I was alone, that I was mostly alone, had spent most of my adult life alone, even when I’d been together I was alone and I knew this like a truth and sometimes lived it like a blessing other times a curse. I didn’t cry but when my phone rang my heart was several kilograms heavier with all the thinking
, all the memories of all the people I no longer spoke to and all the dreams I’d disavowed.

  “Hey, Beautiful. I have your train card. I’m still in town. Can I come over? I really need to see you.”

  Makena Onjerika

  Born in Meru, on the windward side of Mount Kenya, she was the 2018 winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. She is a graduate of the New York University MFA in Creative Writing program. Her work has previously appeared in Urban Confustions, Wasafiri, the Caine Prize Anthology and the Storymoja website. She is working on a fantasy novel and a short story collection, both inspired in part by Nairobi.

  The Man Watching Our House

  I

  The night Maami first spoke of the death of her own mother, we were sitting in the dark, waiting out a power blackout. The hurricane lamp on the table magnified Maami’s head tenfold on the wall. The night was full of cricket song, croaking frogs and a choir of dogs barking at each other, back and forth.

  Maami said, “The day after we buried Marisera, we were in the farm, me and your Aunt Batha. We were digging and then we saw a man walking across our fields, coming from the river, where there were no roads or paths.”

  She sliced through the sharp smell of kerosene hanging over our heads and transported us back home to Meru, to a green, wet morning, pregnant with the medicinal smell of the eucalyptus trees. Black and white Friesian cows whipped their tails at pestilent flies and dropped healthy, warm blobs of dung. Smoke rose in cottony billows out of the metal-pipe chimney of my step-grandmother’s kitchen.

  Grandmother Marisera lies in an unweeded grave at the corner of my grandfather’s homestead. Every June and December, coffee trees laden with red berries stretch their branches over a barbed-wire fence as if to greet her who weeded, pruned and harvested them for many years.

  “He was a tall man with a thin face,” said Maami. “In that sun his clothes seemed to be burning. We greeted him. ‘Muugaa,’ we said. But he went on walking across our land to the main road, without saying anything to us.”

  She widened her eyes at the man, standing tall and thin, right there in our sitting-room. “Who was this man walking on our fields the day after we put Marisera in the soil?” she asked.

  “I ran home and asked your grandfather if the man had come to our homestead. I ran to the main road and asked everyone I met, ‘Have you seen this man?’ In that village with only one road, no one had seen him.”

  Her eyes become wet and glittery as she spoke. My brother was too young to see this. When he asked who the man was, she held herself as though she felt a wind we could not.

  “Someone bewitched your grandmother. Someone sent that man to come see that the job was finished.”

  Her head grew larger on the wall as she moved forward to catch a mosquito buzzing close to my face. My blood was dark red on her palm.

  Grandmother Marisera had died of breast cancer.

  II

  A story is told of a young man who lost his way in the forest as he returned from raiding a beehive. Instead of emerging at the edge of his village, he found himself at the field of the dead. He had not been there before, but recognised it immediately, the open ground in the forest where grass did not grow. This is where his father had brought what had once been his mother—the cold, wide-eyed but unseeing rukuu he found on her sleeping mat, one morning.

  When he whimpered, his father spoke harshly. “Be quiet. She was good and has gone to sleep where it rains.”

  His father’s father spoke with even more anger, addressing all who stood outside his mother’s hut. “Are you waiting for the rukuu to poison us? Tie its feet and drag it to the mbiti. And burn that hut.”

  The young man had never seen the mbiti, only heard them laughing in the forest in the deep of night. Laughing, he imagined, as they tore apart rukuu and crashed their bones. It still pained him to think of his mother, and he was about to turn away when he heard a cry. Looking through the trees he saw a man squatting at one end of the field.

  The young man could not see the stranger’s face but guessed that he was a very old man; the top of his head was bald and his remaining hair all white. His people must have brought him out to die, so that the uncleanliness of his rukuu would not touch them. The young man pitied the stranger, but it was what had to be done.

  The stranger cried again, this time as though he were a wounded animal. Pity affected the young man so greatly that he crept through the trees towards the stranger, intending to get close enough to comfort him while remaining hidden in the shadows.

  “You are a good man; you will sleep where it rains,” the young man intended to say.

  But when he looked into the old man’s face, he saw only himself, squatting there in the field of the dead. The calf-skin pouch in which he carried the honey fell from his hand. His people found it later, swarming with ants.

  III

  A devil entered my uncle, Maami’s youngest brother, and caused him to burn down his house, one Sunday afternoon.

  “Batha, is this not the devil?” said Maami into her mobile phone. “How is it that every time our brother harvests his wheat, every time he has money in his pocket, he goes mad?”

  A few days later, she drove to Nanyuki for a fundraiser to help my uncle rebuild. It rained heavily all that morning and afternoon. The water roared and cut gulleys in the murram roads. When it was sunny again, I sat on the concrete steps outside our house—red ants buzzing electrically as they marched by—and tried to bring my uncle’s face to mind. I had only met him once, at my grandfather’s. During school holidays, Maami took us to visit our aunties in Meru and Isiolo, but never our uncles.

  “They found witchcraft in his farm,” whispered Aunt Batha’s daughter, Gakiri, under the darkness of our shared blanket. I could still hear Maami and Aunt Batha gossiping in the kitchen about the past and the present, as they always did when Maami brought us to visit.

  While Gakiri told me about the fundraiser, the wind howled violently outside, as if intent on ripping the corrugated sheets off the roof of Auntie and Uncle’s house. I felt that we were sinning, talking about these grown-up affairs.

  Gakiri said, “They brought a pastor who went round Uncle’s farm praying, shouting verses from the Bible and commanding devils in the name of Jesus Christ. Everywhere he paused, he made the grown-ups dig. They found things buried in the soil. Bones tied together in bundles and pots full of rotten liquids and even clumps of human hair.”

  You see, there is a curse in my family; no one knows where it came from, but it has eaten all the men. “Eaten”, that’s how Maami says it.

  “You tell me, Batha. None of our father’s sons have succeeded. They got education same as us and the farms on top, but look?”

  Years later, when I was already in university in America, Maami told me of the last time she saw her brother. Her voice came through Skype in pieces and screeches.

  “I saw that he was running around in his head, looking for himself, but what could I do? I told them to go to church; I told them to pray; I told them to seek God. No one listened. Look what happened?”

  My uncle drank a concoction of pesticides a few months after the fire and died howling.

  IV

  A young woman in a foreign country allowed her faith to slip out of her hands. She was at the Good Shepherd Church, watching Pastor John Wesley glide across the pulpit. He was sweating visibly from the effort of delivering his sermon. Big-hatted women, who referred to the young woman as “sister from the motherland”, shouted halleluias, amens and “preach, preacher”.

  “We must be booolllld. We must rise up! Say it with me, rise up and lay claim to our inheritance.” Pastor John Welsey was going hoarse.

  Amen! The shouts clapped the young woman’s ears, but the words did not sink in. She was already full of words. She was tired. She could take no more. She wanted to be light, to care less, to fear less, to be unencumbered. She asked to be excused and slipped out of the pew. Her church friend gave her a look, asking why she was
leaving.

  As she walked towards the door of the church and the light of summer, she began taking off her spiritual clothes. For many years, they had protected her, from demons, from temptations, from the world, from herself. And for all those years, she had been running around in her mind, trying to find herself. She stood spiritually stark-naked at the door of the church. The sun burned her thin exposed skin, but she was no longer afraid of fire.

  V

  “Kendi, what day is it today?” asked Maami, as she dug into her purse for church offering, squinting.

  My first Sunday back in Kenya from America. A rainy day—the chalky smell of wet soil made me thirsty. My pyjamas were still warm from bed. Maami slapped her Bible on the table, said she wouldn’t have an atheist in her house, broke a cup. My brother didn’t make a sound in the adjoining room, his bedroom.

  She asked, “Do you at least pray?”

  Perhaps if I had said I prayed, she wouldn’t have told me about the man. She said, “I knew it. From six months ago, I knew it, Kendi. Do you remember my cousin Boronica?”

  She described this Boronica, her plumpness, her dark skin, her many children, the trickle of blood that connected us, but I refused to recall the woman. Outside, the various denominations within a kilometre radius of our house were shouting sermons at each other over mega-loudspeakers.

  My mother pinched her brow with concentration: “Boronica called me six months ago. She said she met a man on the village road. A man she does not know. He addressed her by her name, and asked: ‘Do you know Kareti of M’Mukindia?’ Boronica did not know him, but he knew her and he knew me and your grandfather and he also knew you. He said, ‘Tell Kareti I have a message for her, about Kendi.’”

  I should have said, “Shindwe!” I should have quoted Psalms 23, but instead I sipped my tea and pretended calmness as I asked, “What was the message?”

  Her keys clunked against each other as she went out the door and let it bang shut. The silence she left that day is still here, sitting beside me.

  VI

  In dreams I shout, “In the name of Jesus. In the name of Jesus. In the name of Jesus.” But the demon chasing me through the darkest recesses of my subconscious pays no heed. I do not know what it wants or why it comes for me. It has neither face nor body, all I feel is its thick, shapeless malice, holding my legs even as I run, screaming soundlessly.