Black Star Nairobi

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  Hassan was arguing about jurisdiction with a short American man who I didn’t know and Paul, the U.S. Embassy spokesperson. Paul looked like the stereotypical Aryan male—tall, blond, and square-jawed. Over the years we had had a few encounters, nothing major or memorable, Fourth of July celebrations at the embassy, someone needing a visa, and so on—but I had never grown to like him for reasons that, if I was honest, would amount to nothing more than the way he looked.

  “Ishmael—I hope they won’t take our body from us,” O said, as we stared at the crater created by the bomb—it appeared to be about a hundred feet wide.

  “The man was killed here—they need locals—they need people like us who know the back roads,” I guessed.

  “You mean the black roads?” O asked.

  As I looked at the devastation, I was getting increasingly angry. There was something about the American dead that made the bombing feel personal. A part of me felt violated. I wanted to help with the bomb investigation and find the motherfuckers who were responsible. But O and I weren’t bomb experts. We would follow the body. It was what we were good at. Eventually all the threads were bound to connect.

  O was cool—like he had seen everything and very little surprised him. And perhaps in this case it was true.

  “It was much worse in 1998,” he was telling me as we worked our way around what could only be called a crime scene, for lack of a better word.

  “In 1998, it was twelve Americans, all of them with names, against about two hundred nameless Kenyans—collateral damage,” he said with a wave of his hand. “You know, when two elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.”

  O rarely used proverbs unless he was high and feeling lazy, and I did a double take to make sure he wasn’t still stoned.

  “Hey! Hey! Look at this,” O said, pointing at something in the rubble. I leaned in. It was a ball bearing. I saw many more strewn around the site, now that we were looking. I compared it with the one that Kamau had found in our guy’s stomach. I didn’t have to be a bomb expert to know they matched.

  We had something we could use. Beyond Kamau’s hypothesis—this was concrete. It was time to go look for Paul and Hassan.

  Just when we were about to make our way past what had been the patio, I heard it. The look on my face stopped O, and we tried to make out a sound underneath the sirens and the bulldozers and the jackhammers tearing into debris. It was a faint tapping. O rushed away to get help and I started to tap back, walking toward the sound carefully so as not to upset the delicately balanced debris. The tapping got louder, louder, and more urgent until I was almost standing over it. I started digging madly with my bare hands.

  A night watchman, a large man in his fifties still dressed in his heavy raincoat and hat in spite of the heat from the morning sun and the flaring fires, waddled over and started tearing away at the debris with me.

  “I am Detective Ishmael. See anything suspicious? Late-night deliveries? Anything out of the ordinary?” I asked him between heaves of heavy debris.

  “No, night like every night—everything goes smoothly—then—boom!” he answered. I really had to learn Kiswahili. I had been saying that for years now, but always working with O had made things easier. I understood everyday conversation—asking for directions, ordering food—just enough to borrow water, O always said. Before long, between us and the sound, we came to a large slab over what seemed to be a foundation wall.

  “Were you the only one working tonight?” I asked him.

  “Nothing happening at night—so, my friends, the other watchmen deciding to go inside—to kitchen to eat,” he tried to answer but he could not continue. I gathered that they were all dead or seriously wounded.

  “This bomb—I do not know how it get inside. We sweep cars—since five years ago, we sweep cars for bomb,” he added. I didn’t take that seriously—this was Kenya, where $200 bought you a murder and $20,000 a small massacre. At the right price and in the right hands a bomb could be placed anywhere.

  The minutes before O rushed back with the firemen seemed like hours. They poured water over the area. I asked someone why—it was to make sure the people trapped below had some water to drink. By now, all work had stopped and, save for the din of the never-ending Nairobi rush hour traffic several blocks away, all was silent.

  I tapped again on the slab. Someone tapped back once after a few seconds and we all cheered before hushing each other. After this day of death, just one life saved would validate our own lives as first responders to all sorts of bad situations. There was an interval of about a second, another tap, and another second before a final tap.

  “Three survivors—what else could it mean? There must be three survivors,” one of the firemen said excitedly. It hadn’t occurred to us that more than one person could be trapped underneath there.

  Nothing else mattered—we had to save them. The fireman tapped back three times in acknowledgment.

  Just then, the night watchman started yelling something and the firemen pushed him back. From out of the crowd that had gathered around, the short white man, followed by Paul, edged closer to us, and signaled that we should listen to what the watchman had to say. The firemen let go of him and he spoke rapidly in Kiswahili.

  “He says … he says that we are standing above an underground parking lot. Down there they have space, but it is dark and dangerous—and standing up here, we are making it even more dangerous. Get light to them and move away—they will let us know where to dig.”

  I was surprised to see that it was Paul who was doing the translating for the short white man, and I once again vowed that I would intensify my efforts to learn Kiswahili.

  There were no disagreements. We left the firemen to figure it out and we followed the watchman to stand at a distance.

  Soon enough, one of the firemen found a crevice through the debris that looked promising. They didn’t have tracking equipment, the kind with thermal and vibration sensors, speakers, and headphones. And their only rescue equipment was a bulldozer. It would require ingenuity and most of all luck. I doubted that the three survivors would make it through this “third worldish” rescue attempt.

  The firemen tried yelling instructions, but their voices couldn’t carry through to the survivors. They debated for a few minutes, and then one of them came over to where we were standing and asked if any of us had an ultra-thin cellphone. Paul happened to have an iPod, so he and one of the firemen taped a message in English and Kiswahili telling the survivors to tap the rescuers to the least debris-filled space in the parking lot.

  Meanwhile another fireman had gone to the fire truck and came back with a snake—the kind used to unclog pipes. They tied the iPod a few feet from the tip, but it wasn’t thin enough to be snaked through the debris and, after a few attempts, they gave up.

  Then the fireman came back and asked Paul for his headphones. From the truck, he unwound a few meters’ worth of wire. They cut the jack end of the headphones and rigged them to the wire, which they then gingerly worked down the crevice.

  After a few minutes, someone tugged on the headphones and we let out hushed yells of relief, shaking hands with whomever we could. One of the firemen waved us into silence and slowly started to follow the tapping sounds, occasionally backtracking and zigzagging until he stopped where he heard three emphatic taps.

  One of the firemen called to the watchman and asked him something in Kiswahili.

  “That is the back end of the parking lot—away from the building. That is a good place to dig,” the watchman answered as Paul translated for us.

  A bulldozer worked its way in slowly from the side of the rescue point. I guessed that a direct approach was more dangerous. Finally, it got to a huge slab of stone. It lifted the slab up but it was too heavy and the dozer threatened to tip forward—something was needed to wedge the slab. There was some debate. Two of the firemen got into two police Land Rovers and, in fits and starts, drove them up the debris to where the dozer was.

  “Jesus—the
se guys are good—you know what they’re doing? Cribbing! Shit, it’s a rescue technique—I’ve only seen it done with crates of wood—never with fucking cars,” Paul exclaimed to the short white man.

  When the dozer lifted the huge slab a second time, they drove the cars underneath it up to the windshields, jumped out, and ran to safety. The dozer now tipped dangerously to the front and dropped the slab down on the cars—flattening the hoods, windshields breaking into pieces, tires deflating—until it was stopped by the heavy engines. The survivors slipped out underneath. There were only two of them.

  The fireman in the dozer waited until they had staggered past him before jumping out and yelling at them to run. They had hardly cleared the debris when the bulldozer tipped over completely. Gas and oil started to leak furiously out of the crashed engines. The two cars exploded into flames and the whole parking lot imploded to become a massive crater.

  Just as we started to panic about the missing third person, we realized that the survivors were a young black couple, and the woman was holding an infant. Everyone was safe. The two or so blocks around the Norfolk once again exploded, but this time into applause, as it dawned on us that the dead were all dead and the last of the living, this beautiful family of three, were alive. We needed this small victory in these two blocks of uncertainty, of death and hell. The couple and the firemen were hugging and crying by the time we had rushed to them.

  The watchman and the firemen had brought the ingenuity; the rest of it was pure luck.

  I had never seen anything like it.

  The terror the survivors must have felt was gone and in its place was elation. They kept touching each other as if to make sure they were alive.

  We pieced their story together. Their Kenya Airways flight from South Africa had been delayed. Shortly before midnight, they had pulled into the second level of the garage in their car rental. They almost certainly would have died had they been fast getting out of the car because they would have been either directly above the bomb a level below them or in an elevator. But the five extra minutes it took to get the baby out of the infant seat and gather her toys and feeding bottle found them still at the farthest corner of the second level of the garage when the bomb went off. Those five or so minutes had saved their lives.

  “Who was I talking to? Who heard us?” the man asked, looking around.

  “I enjoyed our conversation,” I said as I walked up to him. I thought he was going to cry, but his wife leaned into him and they both looked at their sleeping infant.

  I introduced myself.

  “And I am Jack Mpande—and this is my wife, Nomsa,” he said.

  “His name?” I asked, gesturing at the baby in her arms.

  “Her name is Nothando—it’s a South African name,” his wife gently corrected me.

  “She has been asleep this whole time?” It struck me that we were having a normal conversation at the most abnormal of times.

  “Eleven hours a night—the blast, you should have seen her—she woke up, let out one cry, and then went back to sleep. Travel, exhaustion,” Nomsa explained, looking down proudly at her baby.

  Everyone around us started laughing.

  “Quiet,” O whispered. “You might wake up the baby.”

  There was more laughter—a heavy chorus from a rough motley of men wiping away tears. This was a once-in-a-lifetime feeling—to be surrounded by chaos and death, and at the same time, to be looking at a sleeping baby, her father and mother safe and sound, standing in front of us. This laughter, I thought, it was what the Devil and God would sound like if they ever shared a joke—terrifying and uplifting.

  “Nothando—what does the word … say?” the night watchman asked as he wiped away happy tears.

  “The man to thank,” I said to Mpande, gesturing to the watchman. “He figured out how to get you out.”

  “It means Love,” Nomsa answered.

  “And hers, my wife’s name means Faith—I am surrounded by Faith and Love,” Mpande said as he hugged the watchman.

  “The small one—in my language—her name is Nyawendo,” the watchman said.

  This man, and his wife, and his sleeping daughter—I wanted what they had, without even knowing I had been missing it. In their terror, a terror I could not imagine, they were still a family—I wanted to know that feeling. I wanted to have that much at stake in this life—for terror and love to have meaning beyond myself. Amid all this death, and this little glimmer of hope, I knew there and then that I was going to propose to Muddy.

  But Muddy, would she want the same thing? I thought back to the first night I had seen her on stage, performing a piece about her grandmother to the expatriates and tourists at Club 680.

  I thought of a photo of her holding an AK-47 in Rwanda, trying to stem a genocide, the horror stories of being gang-raped and left to die, the madness that came with revenge killings, with being surrounded by so much death and anger and hatred that she became as cold and numb as her AK-47, and finally, how words had found her and through poetry she had found life again. These thoughts were more of an emotion coursing through me in waves than something that came with words.

  “I save love and faith,” the watchman yelled to the crowd, to more laughter.

  The three firemen were taking turns holding the sleeping baby, rubbing her cheeks with their rough gloves until finally, with a resounding yell, she woke up.

  We didn’t want the family to leave and we hovered around them until it became a little bit awkward. They needed to get to a hospital and to find a place to sleep—and the rest of us needed to get back to the hell around us.

  “Listen—if you hadn’t heard us …” Mpande said, and gave me his business card. “If you ever need anything …”

  “A cold Tusker will do,” I said. He didn’t need to thank me. It was me, O, and the rest of the men working the graveyard shift, literally, that needed to thank him, his wife, and his daughter—they had given us a reason to carry on.

  The three firemen guided them away from the crowd and into the waiting ambulance, and as they got in, the Norfolk once again resounded with life as we clapped and hugged each other.

  O pulled me away from the crowd. We walked over to what had been a hedge and was now a smoldering skeleton.

  “The Norfolk was bombed in the early 1980s—I don’t remember the year but it was on New Year’s Eve. The Palestinians or friends of theirs claimed responsibility,” O said.

  “The same people?” I asked.

  “That’s not what I am thinking. The eighties? Shit, that might as well be another century. You know what I mean? What I am thinking is this—our guy was killed recently. We need records from the hotel, security, repair and guest logs—there has to be a trail of some sort. Whatever can be salvaged, whatever might lead us to the bomb, so we can find his killers,” O said.

  This was O, so many things happening around us, yet he was still thinking about our case.

  “Time to put on my American hat, then,” I said, gesturing at Paul and the short white man, and we started walking toward them. On seeing us approaching, they hurried over.

  “Jason Lauer, the head of Africa Bureau—CIA. Ishmael Fofona. The legend. You, Detective Odhiambo. O, I should say. I’m glad we finally get to meet. In the right circumstances too—you are needed here. You have already saved some lives,” he said as he enthusiastically handed us his business cards.

  “Luck—we merely happened to be walking by, coming to look for you guys before heading out for a Tusker …” I said. He laughed and looked over at Paul, who was just smiling.

  “You mean for a Tusker breakfast? Wait, wait, I’ll do you one better, brewskyfast,” he said, and broke into giggles, before looking around, realizing where he was, and trying to stop himself. Finally he pulled himself together enough to introduce Paul.

  “I’m pretty sure you two know each other,” he said, nodding at Paul. We shook hands.

  “Good call with the watchman,” I said. Paul, he had done good work today—I
had to give him that. The group of firemen and policemen wouldn’t have listened to the night watchman if Paul had not asked them to. This was one of the things I had yet to reconcile myself to about Kenya—white skin still trumped black skin. However, Paul hadn’t kept quiet so that he wouldn’t be seen as an interfering white man. In a weird roundabout way, I could respect that.

  I explained what we had found, giving them the ball bearings. Paul and Jason didn’t seem surprised. But then again, after the bombing of a major tourist hotel, there wasn’t much room for surprises.

  “We aren’t bomb experts, we understand that—but a man was killed in Ngong Forest—that is the case we are going to work,” I concluded, stating the obvious.

  “If the man is an American, then we would like to have an American involved—that’s you. I have learned to listen to the people who know the lay of the land. You two are our best chance. But make no mistake, this is ours, we’re calling the shots,” Paul said, using the kind of tone that comes with training.

  “Come on, Paul—let’s give it to them straight—shall we? White guys in Kenya will stick out like … I don’t want to say a sore thumb … like a broken white piano key,” Jason said, looking at us expectantly. I smiled.

  “Ah, Ishmael gets it—black and white piano keys—Booker T. who?” he said, raising his voice, and he high-fived Paul.

  “We will help you in any way we can,” Paul cut him short.

  “Your theory?” O asked curtly.

  “Before you came along, we were pretty sure it was Al Qaeda—probably with the help of their friends in Somalia. But with your guy in the picture, it suggests that they had some help from black American Muslims. It was just a matter of time before they joined the party, I guess,” Paul said.

  “Wait a minute, we didn’t say he was a black Muslim, or that he was a perpetrator and not a victim,” I interjected.

  “I don’t see Al Shabaab in this, there are too many Kenyan Somalis—they cannot afford to lose their support in Kenya … You know what I mean? You don’t want your support base to be afraid of you—seems kinda logical to me,” O said.