Black Star Nairobi

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  “We go back the way we came,” Muddy said calmly.

  “You must be crazy. We go back there and we are all dead,” Ngatia whispered, expressing what I was thinking.

  “Surprise—they will not be expecting that,” Muddy said.

  “She is right … it makes the most sense. Football … switch to the least defended part of the field,” O agreed, using his own brand of logic.

  “Look!” Muddy pointed to the growing flashlights on both sides of us. “Their rear guard is now weak. We can smash right through that.”

  “What makes you think they will not come after us?” Ngatia asked.

  “You do the unexpected. We break their rear and we break their will to fight—at least for today. We got to do it now,” Muddy said.

  “I have to bury my daughter—I am not dying today. We shall do as you say,” Mumbi said to Muddy.

  “Make a single file, harder to see us or bump into us. We get close—we fan out—semi-circle—protect the flanks,” she instructed. “Mumbi, you stay with me. O, on the right, Ishmael, the left. Ngatia, you take our rear.”

  “One last thing, it’s going to be close, it’s going to be nasty and bloody. You will be afraid. If you run, you die. You have to be cold, methodical, and decisive. Take your time—they won’t—they will rush and try to overwhelm—that is their power—the numbers—capitalize on their mistakes. Make them fear you,” she said in a whisper. “Listen for my signal.” She tapped her AK-47. “And then let them know we are here to work.”

  “My daughter, yes, let us bury her here with her people—instead of in a strange land where she is not wanted,” Ngatia said urgently. One would have thought he was talking about burying a Kikuyu woman at the North Pole. Ethnic pride, or the realization that he could die any second now, had changed his mind.

  “I cannot fight, but I can pray,” Mumbi said. My mind flashed back to my own mother, safely tucked away in Madison. That was exactly the kind of thing she would say, and it would sound right.

  “Pray for them too—they need your prayers more than we do,” Muddy said. I could detect a smile in her voice, the kind O wore when contemplating violence.

  With that, we turned around, with all my training screaming against Muddy’s call.

  Flashlights and paraffin torches getting closer and closer—the yells, insults, threats of what they are going to do us—I don’t need an interpreter now—I will gut you alive and fuck your women as you bleed to death sounds the same in all languages. We are moving fast toward what has now become their rear. I now know the taste of fear, and it’s the smell of a burning house and the musky smell of the tea plants, as anonymous flashlights and, behind them, men intent on killing you, close in.

  I have my Glock—and I’m wondering whether there is solace in not dying easy. The fear, I have come to know it well over the years, my whole body, my whole being, all the thoughts and fibers are now primed to fight or flee. Fleeing is not an option here. So it’s fear and fight. Fear is primal; fear is what I and the people besieging us have in common. They are afraid, more afraid than they have ever been, because they know we can kill—some of them saw their friend’s head exploding in the full glare of the Land Rover lights. Death and blood are no longer abstract—something that you do only to other people. They know that, they are afraid—that is why they are yelling and talking about gutting and raping.

  My advantage is that I know my fear. When it comes down to it, I know how to bathe in it, to luxuriate painfully in it, until the moment when I need to let go and let my instincts, honed by years of training and adversity, take over. I wouldn’t survive in a world where there is no fear. Only once have I really known despair and that was just a few days ago, when I thought we would all die and there was little I could do about it. But here I am out in the open; with my hands armed and feet free, I control my destiny.

  And then when Muddy calls to me in short bursts from her AK, all I am left with is a violent clarity about what must be done—to kill and kill until I remain alive. I fire my Glock into the flashlights, picking one at a time, hearing a scream of pain as a flashlight falls to the ground.

  I fire at a spit of light, then I hear the recoil of a gotora. I fire and advance into their rear. Muddy is doing the same with Mumbi behind her. O falls behind us and I can hear short busy bursts.

  A few rows down, I hear an AK-47. It’s not us, and I calm the fear that comes with knowing the efficiency of the weapon. I crawl on my belly and hide between some bushes as two machetes swish past me. I kill them both, shoot them in the back and advance, and keep crawling on my stomach, waiting so I can pick out the AK. An AK fires in my direction and I stay down as a minty wet tea-leaf smell wafts my way. Guided by the silhouette and his long police overcoat hitting against the leaves, I shoot at the mass. He falls. I crawl to him. I can feel his warm blood against the coolness of the dead leaves on the ground. I slither, groping for his extra magazines—I find them, tuck my Glock into the small of my back, and pick up his AK.

  “I have an AK,” I shout to my comrades.

  More AK fire coming from the rear and once again I wait, and then continue crawling until the policeman is almost standing over me. He sees or senses me, but it’s too late to recoil his arms and clear the length he needs for the AK. I edge just a little bit closer, spin onto my back, and fire the AK into his chin—he topples backwards. I can feel a sudden burst of rainwater but I know it’s blood splattering on my face. Before he hits the ground, I am on one knee, firing into whoever is behind.

  We slowly, mercilessly, and methodically dig a hole through their rearguard. We sound more organized. The young men and what is left of the police force lose the will to fight. They slow down, and keep slowing down until ahead and around us there are no more flashlights. We make it to the clearing and back on the path to the house. It’s only then that we realize that Ngatia is not with us. As we start to wonder, we hear O’s .45 reporting back to us, followed by a yell, then silence.

  “Mother, we have to go. You have a daughter to bury,” Muddy says as she gently pushes Mary’s mother, now catatonic and staring at her burning house and life, into the Land Rover. They didn’t torch the Land Rover—they needed it more than they needed Mumbi’s house.

  “I am too old to be alone,” she says to me as she gets in. Everything she had ever worked for, all she had loved, she has lost everything except her own life—and at her age, how can one start all over again? All she had to look forward to was burying her daughter in a country that had gone to hell.

  “Your husband, he gave his life so we could escape. He held them back until we were in the clear. Then they overran him. We are here because of him,” I say to her, though I’m not sure. He could just as easily have tried to make a run for it.

  “There was a lot of good in him,” she says.

  I suddenly double up and heave and heave but nothing comes out.

  Muddy places her hand on my shoulder. I shudder at her touch and she spins me around, so that I am looking at her, her face glowing from the flames of the burning house.

  “How many of them were armed?” she asks.

  “I don’t know, Muddy—all of them—some of them,” I say.

  “Not all of them had guns, not all of them could even have had sharpened machetes. You understand? Some of them were just young, jobless, hopeless men. Peer pressure forced some of them to belong to the gang. If Amnesty comes here tomorrow and they count the bodies, this will be a massacre, no matter what we say. But you know what you know—okay? Should we have left Mary’s parents to burn with the house so that we could escape? Should we have let them kill us? Fuck you! Fuck you and your fucked-up conscience, you chose to live so you killed,” she says, hitting me in the chest.

  “Muddy! Enough,” O yells from the driver’s seat. “Enough—we need to get the fuck out of here!”

  I don’t say anything, even though I understand her.

  “Sometimes your guilt is disguised self-righteousness,” she says as s
he goes to the front to sit with O. She’s taking it personally, as if I were passing judgment on her. But I wasn’t, it was just me reacting to staying alive in so much death.

  “This shit, Muddy, it makes me wonder about you in Rwanda—whose side you were really on,” I say to her. The words just come out of me. I know I am being mean, but I can’t help it.

  She turns and looks at me for a while without saying anything.

  “They had a choice not to massacre innocent people. We were the ones without a choice,” she says finally.

  I don’t ask her which “they”—in Rwanda or tonight in Limuru. We make it to her place and we sit up all night waiting for them to regroup and attack. They don’t, and sunrise finds us with O lost in thought, trying to make his omelette.

  “We have to send her home today,” he says, as he absentmindedly slops the worst omelette he has ever made onto my plate. “No matter what, we bury her today.”

  CHAPTER 8

  BURYING MARY

  Before burying Mary, we had to find her father where he had fallen the night before. The tea plantation looked like the war zone it had been, bodies all over the place. Just a few hours ago, these bodies, now bloody and carelessly strewn, had been alive. As Muddy had guessed, the young men had not come for their dead; they were probably too busy plotting how to avenge their deaths to bury them, or, more likely, scared of seeing the carnage that they had caused. We each picked two or three rows to weave in and out of in our search.

  It was O who stumbled onto Ngatia. He called us to his row urgently. We rushed there as if we expected to find Ngatia miraculously alive. For the first time since I had known him, O was doubled over, throwing up violently. Ngatia had been hacked into little pieces. Only his head, with deep gashes, was left intact. They had taken it all out on him, and his body reminded me of the dead young man we had found in the forest. It could just as easily have been us lying there in bits. Around him, there were three of his attackers, shot to death, and in contrast, their death seemed kinder and gentler.

  Mumbi let out a wail and knelt by what was left of him. She removed her wrap and gently started filling it with Ngatia’s remains until she could fit no more.

  Muddy tripped on something and, looking down, we saw it was O’s .45. We couldn’t tell whether Ngatia had hidden it or whether it had been buried in the struggle that had ensued, but it was empty. O reloaded and tucked it into his empty holster. It was as if he had been expecting to be reunited with his gun.

  Mumbi tried hoisting the wrap that had now become a sack onto her shoulders, but it was as heavy as it was bloody. O and I grabbed one end each and we hauled it to the Land Rover.

  “Why would they do this? To die is to die,” I asked once we were in the car.

  “You don’t know, do you?” Mumbi said. “That is how the Kikuyu treated their traitors. Traitors were cut into little pieces.” She paused.

  “Yes, he was a traitor—he helped the British. He was a home guard. He was a coward, but no one deserves to die like a dog,” she added bitterly.

  “Why did you stay with him?” I asked her.

  “Why does anybody stay with anybody? I loved him … and people, even the worst of them, change,” she said simply. “But that is not why they killed him. They killed him because his daughter married a Luo. But that makes his murderers worse—they are traitors to the human race.”

  “Mother, did he change?” Muddy asked.

  “No,” she answered as she leaned her head against the window. We didn’t have far to go to get to what had been her home but I reached out and pulled her toward me so that she lay her head on my chest. She sighed and closed her eyes.

  “At my age, what am I going to do all alone?” she asked.

  We had no answers, except first to bury Ngatia and Mary. We could bury Ngatia at the back of what had been their house—now a smoldering skeleton—and then leave to get Mary’s body.

  The four of us dug Ngatia’s grave, taking turns digging and shoveling out the soil until we were six feet into the ground. Mumbi said a quick prayer and then we started on Mary’s grave. A few hours later, hungry, dirty, and thirsty, we were off to pick up Janet, buy Mary a coffin, and bring her back home.

  By the time we were driving back with Mary’s body, the young men had regrouped, but we were at that point where we didn’t care. The transition from casual lawlessness into the hell of anarchy wasn’t difficult to adjust to. As detectives we lived on this side of the world anyway. Within the logic of anarchy, everything just made sense. We had to bury Mary. Some people would try to stop us. To bury Mary we had to go through them or die trying.

  I was finding myself living more and more in one moment, trying to get to the next, moments held together only by the need to stay alive, to protect my own, and to see to it that those I cared about were buried. Pulled into this vortex of violence and more violence, my principles of justice were becoming rudimentary—us against them. I knew it even without knowing: I had become dangerous and I had to keep finding a way of getting back to a place of sanity.

  Yet I could not but think that we were at war with people who just a few days ago had been civilians. Here, in Kisumu, in Nairobi, and in the Rift Valley, Luos, Kalenjins, and Kikuyus were killing each other in the name of the fat motherfuckers who were now discussing the future of the country in the comfort of the KICC.

  We got to the roadblock and O slowed down like he was going to stop. The young men started approaching and O stepped on the gas. They recognized the Land Rover roaring toward them and they scattered in all directions. A little farther down the road, we jumped out and waited for them to come at us. They stayed hidden—they had understood our message, that we were ready to die if they were.

  Funerals in a time of war are lonely affairs. For Mary’s burial, the only people in attendance were O, Mumbi, Janet, Muddy, and Joe Sherry. Joe Sherry, so called because of his love for sherry, had dated Mary before O, and I gathered that it was Mumbi who had called him. He owned a bar close to Limuru called the Red Nova that we went to once in a while. The bond between them must have remained strong if he had risked his life to come here, but then again, as a Kikuyu, he would have had an easier time at the Limuru roadblocks.

  With all things being equal, her students and fellow teachers would have been there. Mary’s relatives and O’s would have been there as well—and she would have been buried in Kisumu. As it was, six people buried a life that had touched so many.

  O was dressed in black corduroy pants, a dress shirt, a tie, and his ubiquitous safari boots and black leather jacket. The rest of us were dressed as cleanly as we could manage. Muddy and Janet had picked out Mary’s burial outfit: black shoes, a slab of a green dress that we used to joke was her school uniform, and a cowry necklace that brought out the beauty she was always trying to hide from her students—but she looked every bit the schoolteacher that she had been.

  O was stoic, except for his shaking hands as he threw the first fistful of soil onto her coffin and a painful wince at the drumming sound it made. He came back to where I was standing and put his hand on my shoulder as if to console me.

  As she edged closer to the grave, Mumbi said she had something to say about her daughter.

  “I know we have to be fast because our times will not allow for a long farewell, but I have already buried a husband in silence. I will tell you a story. When Mary was very small, our culture did not allow her to sit with men as they slaughtered a goat and drank muratina—the traditional brew. When she asked why, her father told her it was because she was not a man.

  “ ‘What is the difference between a man and a woman?’ my daughter asked.

  “ ‘Men wear trousers and women don’t,’ Ngatia answered, thinking that was the end of it as Mary walked back to the house. A few minutes later, she walked out wearing, or rather being worn by, her father’s best pair of pants.

  “ ‘I am a man now,’ Mary said when she made it back to us. Defeated, the men had to let her stay. My daughter
never let difference stop her from becoming what she wanted and marrying the man she wanted. In her own gentle constant way, she was better than all of us. As her mother I failed her,” Mumbi concluded, and broke into tears.

  Janet was crying. I was worried about her. I looked at her, her youth shining through the greyness of the funeral, the ethnic war, and the Norfolk bombing. What was going to happen to her without Mary?

  She had survived worse, but as I was slowly learning, it wasn’t just a question of surviving the worst—it’s easy to survive when you have nothing to lose since life itself is the victory. The hard part is when you discover that there is a lot to live for, and it keeps being taken away from you, trying and losing, hoping and losing, loving and losing. O followed my gaze and he gripped my shoulder tighter.

  As I picked up a handful of soil to throw over Mary’s coffin, I had two thoughts—one was that I was sublimating my own pain by worrying about others, and the second was that I had to keep O alive for the sake of Janet. How I would keep him alive and from what, I didn’t know.

  Joe Sherry left by himself—he was safer that way—and the rest of us, including Mumbi, drove back to O’s. When we could, we would take Mumbi back and help her rebuild, but in the meantime she could stay at Muddy’s for as long as she needed. For now, we wanted everyone together—this little family of people who otherwise might have been strangers, brought together by love and violence. What was that saying? A family that eats together stays together? I smiled at the strangeness of my thoughts.

  “A family that suffers together stays together,” I said aloud, and we laughed.

  An hour or so after we got back to O’s, Jason showed up unannounced. It was a relief to see him. It meant movement on the case. We introduced him to Muddy, Janet, and Mumbi.

  “I’ve heard so much about you,” he said to Muddy.

  “From whom? Or should I say, from what file?” I asked him.

  We talked about the crisis in the country and I briefed him on all that had transpired with Helen. That brought us back to the case.