We saw Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and Hans Christian Andersen. The politics of race, identity, culture and “appropriate-for” had not yet penetrated our imaginations. For us, it was plausible that Janet and John would go tobogganing down winter slopes and evoke in us a yearning for winter in a city that promised to be Arcadian (though it now looks less idyllic). It was not yet the time to understand that the gollywog in Noddy was a problematic presence. To go into the bookshop was to enter a boundary-less territory where anything could be experienced. A hundred Enid Blytons, fifty Wilbur Smiths, Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew, Franklin Dixon’s Hardy Boys and Jack London, whose works made us cry and yearn for more winters. It would take a long time to learn to separate the world we lived in from the ones we travelled through in words.
Choose one.
Only one?
My sister and I tiptoed in nervous reverence before the bounty of titles, touching book spines, peeping at the “big people’s” books on our way to the children’s section. At the children’s books shelves, we would discover Anne of Green Gables. We chose her. We took her home. She became one of us. We would fight over her, learn to daydream as she did, and wait for Gilbert Blythe to pass by. Later the book would be covered with plastic, and become a tradable commodity and currency among school friends. The barter created access to other storybooks, companions to be sought after, bargained with, and mourned when lost. Mother would review the books we chose. We followed her to the counter where the book people presided over the shop. From a child’s height they looked so alien—a greying man, his dark-haired daughter. I was jealous of the book people and the country of literature they could access at will. Nairobi’s frontiers were boundless inside the shop; they contained, for example, Tolkien’s Middle Earth.
It is 9.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 6th April 2016. I return to the original site of the bookshop of my childhood. But this is Nairobi in the twenty-first century. It is in a delirium of reconstructive surgery. Cosy shops have been replaced by glossy gleaming surfaces that exalt gadgets. Westlands Sundries in the Westlands district appears to have relocated. The area of the old shop is taken over by a bland and steel sameness that is wounding this city, spaces of memory buried in rubble without sentiment. The brushing past of phantoms of loss. Within me, a twinge of grief. I leave, aiming for the bookshop’s sister outlets, including the iconic Nation Bookshop, in the middle of the central business district…
… gone.
Surprise. The small familiar touchstones of life do crumble into nothing. I can recall that as a child who collected words, I found one in a story from middle England:
Fugacious.
I had sought its meaning from my father since my school dictionary did not contain it. Daddy was a wordsmith. He explained it. Ephemeral. Evanescent. Does not last. Like fog. Fugacious. Nobody ever thinks of sending the children of a particular memory-scape a notice of change of use so they can try to retrieve the portions of themselves—in my case, shadowy shards stored within books on familiar bookshelves.
It is official. I have become part of that generation that stares at fresh spots in old landscapes and mutters, “When I was young there used to be…” I have grown older. My city has grown younger, cosmetically adjusting its face with no nostalgia for its (in our eyes, always) beautiful past or care for the feelings of those it had previously sheltered differently.
I gape at the gap where the bookshop used to be, as if time might fall away and reveal the past intact. An elderly watchman dressed in faded blue with red stripes crosses the street and stops next to me. Later, I will remember that, without seeing the irony, we had stood beside one of Nairobi’s roadside booksellers from whom one could obtain a copy of the Odyssey, Petina Gappah’s Book of Memory and last month’s Vanity Fair magazine for the price of a new self-help-change-your-thoughts book from one of the mall bookshops.
“Where did the old bookshop go?” I murmur to the watchman.
He says, “Walihama.” They moved. We stare at the spot in the wall. “Many stop here,” he observes, “and ask the same question.”
Silence. This had been a locale of my slow coming of age. This was the place to find the literature of becoming woman, being woman, yearning, failing, falling in love, falling out of love, seeking, desiring, losing, finding the world, losing the soul, travelling, returning, coming home, leaving home and giving meaning to life. This bookshop, and its familiar tentacles, was always there: a sentinel, guardian and guiding rod. Behind us, the hooting, screeches, chatter and other noises of life going on. I comfort myself. “They have moved” is better than “They have disappeared”.
* * *
The late season Nairobi rains are furious. Dammed streams have turned into almost forgotten rivers that rush across brand new roads, making a mockery of “national vision” plans that are intended to lead Kenya into a glossy, honeyed Canaan. Driving—or, more accurately, boating—beyond the city limits, catching a glimpse of streams where long ago as children we fished for tadpoles and golden fish, which we ferried away in clear bottles. They never did survive. Crossing to the “other side” of town into Gigiri.
The Village Market is a sprawling red-roofed white-brick mall with water features, a haphazard collection of units that somehow work: pretty stalls, shops and food courts. Nairobi’s beautiful people mingle with those of the nations of the world who are here for lunch—the United Nations offices and various embassies are close by.
Meandering down the mall’s numerous corridors that lead off to glamorous shops touting the world’s shiny bounty, I stumble upon my destination. I had walked into a softly lit bookshop to ask directions of a bespectacled woman at the counter. “Hello. Could you help me? Where is Westlands Sundries?”
“You are here.”
“What?”
“Indeed.”
In cursive script, on the wall above the till, an impressive legend: “Between the Lines”.
* * *
“Here” is a capacious rectangle built on two levels. Gone is the aesthetic of a single space differentiated only by shelves and book categories. There are compartments here. One for comics and graphic novels, another for children’s literature, others for the bodice-rippers we used to giggle over and sneak glimpses at—everything so organized and defined. Looking around, like an archaeologist might, I sought relics of the past beyond the veneer of the new. Plenty of children’s books, including the ones that were anathema in my day. The “Africana” that had made the bookshop famous had a corner of their own, as did cookbooks from all parts of the world. There was a book on Celtic aesthetics, a section on personal and spiritual empowerment, and another for biographies. A section labelled “General Ignorance” is filled with adult puzzle books, and profound knowledge succinctly packed—What Is a Supernova? Vestiges remain of the haphazard loveliness of random placements—thankfully (for me) not all books are alphabetically arranged, so in places a book lover can indulge the art of sensing one’s path to desired words and worlds, or call up a guide to point the way. The Penguin series are there: orange, blacks and whites, and now with a strip of colour. In my childhood, these were like a future promise made up of impossible names: Sartre, Eliot, Nabokov and Dostoevsky. These are no longer strangers.
In a niche on the ground level, maps and travel books summon up the past. Wilfred Thesiger is still here; old names, old friends; traces of permanence. It is unfortunate that Paul Theroux and his incessant anti-Africa whining is positioned so close to Thesiger. Other books on the shelves recall a season when it was easier to idolize my country; it has since fallen off its pedestal. The section that Heinemann’s African Writers’ Series used to occupy is tenanted by a fresh wave of writers writing Africa: Selasi, Mengiste, Lalami, Baingana, Adichie, Cole, Wainaina, Ontita, Mda, Wrong and Gurnah among others. The covers of these books are a stunning mosaic of a complex African imaginary.
I look around. Not even the dust of old dreams persists. No Enid Blytons, no Wilbur Smiths, no Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew or Famous Fives. The
Norse, Greek, Roman and other gods are confined to a new twilight. Portions of their lives reside in comic books—portions they would not recognize as themselves.
Touching the shelves, my nose close to the spines of books, I find books that breep, squeak and, the horror, presume to talk back. I meet old friends in new shapes: Charlotte’s Web, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and I tell Dr Seuss, “I remember you.” There are new creatures in old places: long-toothed Gruffalo, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Diary of a Worm, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter in its assorted manifestations; The Hunger Games, Girl Online, Dork Diaries, the Divergent series, Horrid Henrys and The World of Norm. I have fallen forward and emerged into a new realm of words!
* * *
I head downstairs to introduce myself to the woman at the till. Her name is Elizabeth Kitema. I explain how I went looking for them, how long it took to find them. I realize my tone sounds aggrieved. I pull myself together. “Why did you leave Westlands?”
She watches me for a second before answering carefully. “The ownership of the building changed. We had to leave.” Something in her face suggests that this is a no-go area. So we talk some more about books, life and the meaning of book-vending. Nostalgia’s bug is catching. Elizabeth has been with the bookshop since 1977 when Yasmin Manji, only child of its founder, bibliophile Sayed Mohamed, took it over. “I went through the doors as a nervous little girl. I grew up as a woman among these books that have fed my family,” Elizabeth says.
“I must have seen you,” I say.
“Nation Bookshop?”
I nod. Nation Bookshop was often mentioned in travel guides and had been a staple of Kenya’s tourist circuit. Elizabeth continues, her gaze turning inwards to the persistent past. “You remember we were a major tourist stop? For Kenyans too. But travellers identified most with us. Visitors could find the books of Africa and Kenya that were difficult to find anywhere else.”
It is true, for Sayed Mohamed would travel the country and the world hunting for out-of-print Kenyan and African books, which he would then arrange to have reprinted and republished under the Westlands Sundries imprint. Our family copy of The Lunatic Express, the story of a railway line that forged a country, belongs to this category. Mr Mohamed also collaborated with the late documentarian and photographer Mohammed Amin on a couple of volumes that he published and sold at the bookshop.
Elizabeth also remembers how many people would return to the bookshop armed with new stories about their lives. More anecdotes of human encounters mediated by a bookshop: the Japanese tourists brought in by a diligent master tour guide, a Kenyan bibliophile married to a Japanese woman, who would give impromptu book reviews and lectures in Japanese to his clients in the shop before tailoring book choices for them, based on what he thought they ought to learn.
“Maps,” pipes up a medium-height man, with the kind of rough-edged face that evokes weathered male beauty in black and white photographs. Deep eyes, the kind that listen so that he does not need to say much. He had been eavesdropping. This was Jackson Mutuku. He has worked all his life in bookshops. He joins in. “Those tourists would leave with maps of different parts of Kenya.” A soft smile. “He loved maps. He read them as books. He is dead now.” His voice is tinged with odd regret as he continues: “The city was filled with visitors then. It truly belonged to the world. Our shop was always full of people.”
Silence.
We stand around the till, lost in the memory of a past which feels, in that moment, so much more intense, simple and human. A woman enters with her baby daughter. She heads straight to the children’s section and sits the child on the warm, carpeted and colourful ground. You get the sense that she just needed to breathe differently, to pause a while before she continued with her tasks for the day. Ten minutes later, the baby is asleep. The woman leaves without buying anything, without saying anything. Elizabeth and Jackson are unfazed. “Book people,” smiles Jackson. “We know them. They come into a bookshop to find themselves. Book people.”
A bulked-up man limps in. He is looking for a book on fixing motorbikes. Jackson goes off to locate something for him. He browses through the selection. He talks about rolling on his bike. How it fell on him. He glances at a page. He chooses one book. He leaves. I ask about that, the notion of bookshop as a mini confessional where one deposits revelations of one’s true self. Both Elizabeth and Jackson laugh.
In essence, they tell me, a bookshop is a crucible of human habit. The character of a person—their loves, loathings, hopes and fears—can be discerned in the books they choose, their movement in and about the bookshop, and in their interactions with literature and also their book vendor. They imagine that the habits of clients also help form and inform the character of the bookseller. “We depend on their patronage. Whatever they demand, we must listen and attend to it, no matter the manner in which the request is made.”
They have had a glimpse into the many modes of human beingness. In the morning, a woman can come in and show them her ring while singing, “Do you have a book on wedding planning?” In the afternoon, another will stop by to whisper, “Can you recommend a book on managing grief? I lost my son last week.”
A bookshop memory: a businessman in a dark suit struggling to keep his composure rushes in desperately seeking a “how-to” business book. Not this one. Do you have another one? he pleads and then he breaks down. “I mortgaged the family home for a business loan. My wife and children do not know. They are coming to auction everything tomorrow. There is nothing left.”
“What do you do?” I finally ask.
Jackson answers. “We listen. We look for the books. If they want to, they buy. But we also know that sometimes people just need to pour out their hearts to another human being.” Jackson shrugs. “It costs nothing to say sorry.”
Right then, a stately woman strolls in. She is a traveller. From her greeting and accent, she is probably North American. She wanders through the shop and returns to the till with six children’s books. She says she is buying these for a book vendor she ran into in one of Kenya’s more distant counties. She says the vendor’s nomad client needed puzzle books for his children. This is her second sally into the bookshop. She had stopped there when she first landed in Kenya two months ago.
Two teenagers talk to each other while their phones erupt with zany sounds. They head straight to the graphic novels section. Their rapid exchange is about Jon Snow and Game of Thrones, interspersed with the expression “Rad!” I watch them surreptitiously. In the manner of old-timers, I recall how impossible it would have been for my generation to walk into a place without acknowledging the adults. We would not have dared broadcast our personal business at the top of our voice in a bookshop!
Elizabeth glances quickly at the pair and returns to our conversation. She says that she feels that the quality of people’s love for books has changed over the years. It is an interesting idea. Jackson agrees. He worries that new technologies are fragmenting the attention span of young people.
I ask the unavoidable question: “Is there a future for books and bookshops as they are now?”
Elizabeth and Jackson merely offer wry smiles.
Around us flutters a ghostly impression of the ephemeral.
Later, Elizabeth reaches for her phone. “You have to speak to Yasmin,” she says.
A woman with a laugh in her voice says “Hello”.
“Is this the book lady?” I ask.
Yasmin giggles.
Later she asks, “Do you know that ours was the first real bookshop in Nairobi?”
* * *
The vision started in the time before 1971, the year that Westlands Sundries became a legal entity. It is the story of a man’s profound love affair with books in an era when television broadcasts stopped at 10 p.m. and there was plenty of time to read and talk. Sayed Mohamed, in between his accounting duties, would lurk in auction houses waiting to bid on book lots. The books were for his own consumption. He had already acquired a large collection when a friend w
ho had built an office block in Westlands asked if he wanted a shop space downstairs. He took the space and registered the business as “Westlands Sundries”, intending to sell anything—toys, stationery, household goods—not yet imagining that the books he also sold would become the mainstay.
Yasmin, his daughter, would visit the shop with her father before she went to school, and attended to it after school. She saw the books take over the store.
“It was inevitable,” Yasmin notes, “for literature was my father’s true passion. Anyone who walked into the shop to buy an oven, more often than not, ended up leaving with a book or two.”
We laugh.
I met with Yasmin a few days later. Though deeply modest about her spectacular achievements in the service of literature in Kenya, she acknowledges that my honorific—“book lady”—is not uncommon. So many children journeyed into life and adulthood by way of this enterprise that co-opted her whole family. Yasmin is a woman through whom life shines in colour, hope and joy. Ageless and gorgeous, her hair is glossy black; her clothes, lilac and gold and green, reflect her warm spirit. Yasmin has a detailed recall of faces, of family book-shopping routines; a memory of the children who showed up every weekend with their parents to buy “one book each”, others who turned up on weekdays after school, still others who bought books in bulk before the school holidays, the children living in faraway corners of Kenya who travelled twice a year to the shop to stock up on storybooks, the children who skipped school to hide out in the shop and read. She has a memory of the adults too—numerous clients who turned up with stories of their lives, who stopped by because they were lonely, the ones who showed up twice a week as a matter of routine to buy a book, any book. Since this is a journey linked to nostalgia and childhood, we stay with the memory of the children, one of whom, Christina Leone, by coincidence, strolls in and plonks herself down on a chair to join our interview session.
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