Fatboy and the Dancing Ladies

by Michael Holman

  “And more cashew nuts, if you please, Mr Rugiru,” the OM called out. “As I was saying . . . Plenty of activity. Too many gimmicks, not enough progress,” said the OM.

  He gestured at the newspapers:

  “Trouser talk, my boy, that’s all it is. These chaps turning up for this World Bank conference – all bloody trouser talk. Save the bloody rhino one week, gender issues in semi-arid regions the next. When that doesn’t work, the silly buggers hug a tree and plant a street boy,” he rumbled on.

  Did the former district commissioner have a point, Furniver wondered?

  Forty years after independence, Kuwisha was poorer than ever. Millions and millions of dollars in assistance from donors seemed to have made little discernible difference. Surely the OM was right – things should be better?

  “It’s all a bit like the wheeze that chap Potemkin pulled.”

  Edward must have still looked puzzled, and the OM continued: “You know, the soldier chap who fooled his wotchacallit, empress, Catherine, Russia, couple hundred years ago. Gave her the impression that she was in charge of a better show than was actually the case.”

  History was not the strong point of Edward Furniver, ex-London investment banker turned micro-lender to the masses of Kuwisha’s biggest slum. But he dimly recalled reading that in General Grigori Potemkin’s time, Russian villagers were instructed to erect elaborate façades portraying thriving settlements. They concealed the brutal realities, and misled the empress about conditions under her rule, leaving her convinced that her affairs were in far better shape than was actually the case. The OM drained his gin and tonic, and again summoned Boniface, who was polishing glasses behind the mahogany bar counter. He said something in Swahili that made them both chuckle.

  “These days we fool the old ladies who run the WorldFeed bookshops and rattle the collecting cans. Get them believing that poor bloody Africa is better off for their help. Not so. In fact, it’s the victim – of the very people who claim to be its friends.”

  “Steady on,” said Furniver, although somewhat nervously. Disagreeing with the OM could bring out the mean streak in the old settler. “Steady on. May have been true a few years ago, but things have been picking up. World is taking notice, and there is more aid money promised. Growth rates up. And there’s debt relief . . . and China wants its raw materials, oil, copper, coffee . . . Geldof, Bono and so on . . .”

  Edward Furniver tailed off.

  The OM brushed his intervention aside, flapping a dismissive, liver-spotted wrinkled hand.

  “Fact is, you and I know that Kuwisha is deep in the poo. Africa ditto. Writing was on the wall long before Aids appeared. God knows who to blame . . . foreigners, slave trade, colonialism, Cold War, didn’t help. The indigenous have got a lot to answer for . . . and the poor sods have been cursed with bloody awful leaders.”

  If it were possible to take an angry sip of a gin and tonic, the OM took one, and as he swallowed he made a face, as if he had downed a mouthful of bitter medicine. He wiped his narrow moustache, a carefully trimmed mix of ginger and grey, and reached out for the nuts.

  “Not just that they were unable to run the traditional in a brewery. Not their fault they couldn’t. Weren’t trained. But come independence, the blighters drank the place dry, so to speak, and borrowed from banks, which were all too happy to lend. And instead of spending the money on a decent brewery or whatever, they put it under their mattress. Not in Africa – in their new homes in London, or Paris or New York . . .”

  The OM marked the end of what for him was a speech by sucking his teeth, and with his tongue, adjusted his dentures, making a soft clicking sound.

  “Of course, the Foreign Office Johnnies didn’t help, giving ’em independence too soon. Frankly, we all share the blame. Now we plan to send more billions in aid, to little effect, ends up in bank accounts abroad.”

  He reached into his jacket, and extracted a packet of Sportsman cigarettes, along with a box of matches. After four unsuccessful attempts, he got a stick to light.

  The OM took a long draw.

  “Have to justify this help, so we all pretend aid works. WorldFeed and their pals pretend it works, otherwise their collection boxes would be empty. The local politicians pretend it works, or their overseas bank accounts would run dry. Visiting politicians pretend it works, otherwise they would have to explain to their voters back home why so much has been wasted.

  “And of course there are the tossers who come to Africa at the taxpayers’ expense.”

  In the OM’s pecking order of villains, a tosser was about the worst there was, reviled beyond a “loafer”, and far worse than a “so-and-so”.

  “See the ads, every week, in The Economist. Take the latest one . . .”

  He picked up a copy of the magazine from the rack next to his chair, and flicked through the appointment pages.

  “Got it! Listen to this: Climate Change Adaptation Support Programme for Action: Research and Capacity Development in Africa – CCASPARCDA.”

  A piece of cashew nut had stuck under his dentures; he removed the plate, gave it a wipe with his handkerchief, replaced it and continued.

  “As a general rule, old boy, the longer the acronym of an Africa do-gooder, the bigger the waste of rations. And what will these chaps in CC etc. do?” He tapped the offending page with a nicotine-stained forefinger.

  The OM read out the job description: “The successful candidate will have an entrepreneurial approach to the identification, design and management of research for development; providing intellectual leadership . . . a demonstrated track record in working effectively within multidisciplinary teams . . . What the hell does all that mean?”

  The Oldest Member tossed another cashew into his mouth, and looked at Furniver with sharp pale blue eyes.

  “Flogger had the right idea,” he said wistfully. “Ever hear from him?”

  The OM had got it into his head that Furniver was related to “Flogger” Morland, a district commissioner notorious for his iron rule during the colonial era, when he ran an area of Kuwisha nearly the size of Texas. Furniver had given up trying to convince the OM that Morland was no relation; indeed, he had never heard of the man. He said nothing, and shrugged his shoulders.

  “Pity,” said the OM. “When you next write, give him my best.”

  The evening was ending.

  Furniver went to relieve himself while his host signed for their drinks.

  He took advantage of the full-length mirror in the Gents, and on his way out paused to inspect his reflection. He sucked in his stomach, pulled his shoulders back, and straightened up. Charity was right. His posture was terrible. He vowed to take more exercise.

  Re-emerging into the lobby a few minutes later, he nearly bumped into Boniface, busy polishing the brass door-handle of the Gents. The steward looked embarrassed, and mumbled a response to Furniver’s greeting. Looking back a few days later, Furniver realised that he should have spotted that something was amiss. Club chores were allocated with iron precision. Never would a bar steward perform any task not directly connected with dispensing drinks.

  The OM joined him in the lobby, and sniffed loudly.

  “Has someone been using a bloody aftershave?” He sniffed again: “Pongs to high heaven! Give you a lift home? By the way, gather you and that bar owner, Charity Mupanga, good friends, hmm? Splendid woman! Word of advice, old boy. Marula berries make the thingy wotsit – old Batonka proverb. Or to put it crudely, the wise man counts his buttons when the crow feeds, as they say in Nyali. Get my drift?”

  The two men walked through the arched club entrance into the African night, and Furniver used his expensive high-tech key-ring torch, “visible from a mile away” the makers claimed, to light the way.

  He changed the subject.

  “About this Potemkin business . . .” he said as he got into his host’s Mercedes.

  The OM’s reply was drowned out by the roar of the night flight to London as it passed overhead.

  In
the undercarriage of the plane, a young stowaway started to shiver . . .

  2

  “Fatboy!”

  The sun was still burning the dew off the grass when the call from Lovemore Mboga emerged from within State House, seat of government in the East African state of Kuwisha.

  “Fatboy!”

  Ferdinand Mhango Mlambo, the disgraced kitchen toto, stirred, his head full of dreams, still in the thrall of the last of his store of Mtoko Gold, the best bhang the country grew.

  “Faatboy!”

  The mocking summons left the colonnaded, colonial mansion, white as a wedding cake, once the residence of the British governor, drifted across the ninth green of the State House golf course, between the strutting peacocks, and beyond. It slid like a snake, through the flowerbeds, around the purple bougainvillaea and red hibiscus, sidling along the unkempt rows of cabbage and gone-to-seed lettuce, in what was once a well-maintained kitchen garden.

  Finally the call, sustained in its journey by a brisk breeze, crossed the overgrown path which led to a long-abandoned boathouse on the banks of a green, weed-infested dam that once was the home of the Kuwisha Sailing Club. It slipped through a gap in the sheets of corrugated iron and old plastic bags with which, in happier days, the boy had constructed his den, and burrowed into his ears.

  “Faaatboy!”

  Mlambo squeezed his fingers deeper into his ears.

  They failed to stop the insult from reaching its destination, deep inside the soul of Ferdinand Mlambo. Given the chance, there it would thrive and grow fat, like a tapeworm in a cow.

  No-one, least of all Mlambo, would dispute the fact that he was a big boy. He had always been big for his age, even before becoming the senior kitchen toto soon after he turned 13, when the privilege of office entitled him to feed on unlimited scraps from the State House kitchen.

  He was large, certainly, with a massive butumba that served as a counterweight to his substantial belly, both resting on thick thighs, which made him such a formidable figure on the football pitch. Indeed, his eligibility for the Mboya Boys Under-15 football team had been regularly challenged by opponents, sceptical that someone of his girth and height could qualify. And of course there had been some boys who dared to call him mafuta, or “lard guts”. That was stopped easily enough, for when he won the fights that ensued he sat on his opponent’s head, until he heard a muffled cry for mercy.

  But to suggest that Mlambo was fat was simply not true . . . well built, certainly, stout possibly, even a little overweight. But fat? Never!

  His limbs twitched, as if kicking phantom footballs. Mlambo reluctantly began to surface into the reality of his new life.

  His offence had been unforgivable. He accepted that. He should never have agreed to conceal a tape recorder in the life president’s study on behalf of that English journalist, who hoped it would provide a recording of a compromising exchange between President Nduka and the opposition leader. Loyalty to the president had to be absolute.

  It was no defence, he realised, to explain that the leader of the Mboya Boys’ street gang, who was also the captain of your football team, had threatened to tell the dreaded mungiki thugs that you were uncircumcised. And what those mungiki did with a rusty nail . . . Mlambo’s testicles shrivelled at the mere thought of it.

  “Faatboy! . . . Faaatboy!”

  Once more came the summons, with that sneering, contemptuous tone for which Lovemore Mboga, the State House chief steward, was renowned.

  Ferdinand Mlambo tried to ignore his tormentor. Stretched out on an old mattress, bartered in return for favours to the deputy housekeeper, he pulled a stained grey blanket around his ears and thought about his dear departed grandmother. How he missed the warm untroubled nights, spent curled up under the huge table in the State House kitchen, deep in a nest of old newspapers, like a large dormouse.

  Now he lay restless in his garden shed, alone and vulnerable to the evil spirits that prowled the night, making noises that could quite easily be mistaken for the sound of the wind whistling through the cracks and crevices in his makeshift sanctuary.

  “Let him Fatboy me. I will not answer.”

  Mlambo still felt light-headed from the night before, when he had over-indulged, and had smoked too much Mtoko Gold. Indeed, he had smoked so much that he was finding it hard to distinguish fact from fantasy.

  There was one way to find out.

  He felt under the mattress, scrabbling for the trophies he was almost certain he had carried home from the monthly meeting of the Kireba Christian Ladies’ Sewing Circle. For a few seconds, he was filled with doubt. Could he have imagined the events at Harrods International Bar (and Nightspot)?

  Suddenly his fingers encountered something long and thin, like a bicycle spoke but with a filed, pointed end.

  “Ouch! Ayna!”

  He sucked his thumb, sat bolt upright, and lifted the corner of the mattress, revealing two grey knitting needles.

  Mlambo’s eyes widened, and his stomach tightened.

  Needles? Knitting needles, number nine size?

  If the needles were there, then . . . he had not been dreaming!

  His terrifying encounter with a tokolosh, that mischievous and malicious creature, southern Africa’s fabled equivalent of an Irish leprechaun, ever-present yet seldom spotted, was no creation of the bhang he had been smoking. He, Ferdinand Mlambo, had seen it, with its hideous face, bathed in a curious blue light. Indeed, he had heard it give out a blood-curdling moan as it advanced on his hiding place, next to Harrods, where a meeting of the Kireba Ladies’ Sewing Circle had been in full swing.

  The events of the day before, surely the worst day in his fourteen-year life, were all coming back to him . . .

  The calling ceased. Perhaps Mboga had simply been rubbing salt into the wound. Perhaps it was a reminder that Mlambo was obliged to attend the weekly State House staff meeting that Friday. Whatever lay behind the taunt, Ferdinand Mlambo embraced his bitterness, like a broody hen nursing an egg, reliving that grim morning twenty-four hours before, when he had been summoned to Mboga’s pantry.

  It was there, in that cool, dimly-lit room, with the unexplained aroma of vanilla, shelves running from ceiling to floor, big enough to accommodate a desk which was part of the original State House furniture going back to the 1930s, when it began life as the residence of the British governor, that he heard his punishment.

  From behind the desk, Lovemore Mboga, sporting the ruling party’s flaming torch emblem in the lapel of his green jacket, informed the boy of his fate with all the solemnity of a judge in the colonial era delivering sentence on a “cheeky” native who had dared challenge the European administration.

  Mboga himself had come up with the ingenious and cruel punishment he set out with unseemly relish.

  The steward began quietly.

  “Don’t worry, Mlambo. I am not going to sack you,” he said.

  Mlambo had looked up in astonishment.

  “Sacking is too good for you. Instead, you are demoted. You are now a small boy.”

  Mlambo winced.

  To be demoted to a non-job, a job with no status, at the very bottom of the ladder, was punishment indeed. He would be subject to the beck and call of people whom he considered nonentities, sent out to buy lunch for the State House telephonists, to collect a chicken for the messenger . . . even to buy cigarettes for the pantry boy, a lad he despised. It would be an endless cycle of daily humiliation.

  He had no option but to accept the blow. If he stayed, his life was hell; but if he left, the life on the streets that awaited him was at least as bad. As Mlambo tried to explain to Mboga, it was his fear of mungiki, Kuwisha’s fast-growing street gang of nihilistic thugs, which had overcome his loyalty to the president.

  He would have done better to stay silent, for the steward immediately turned this confession to advantage.

  “Perhaps I should change my mind . . .” Mboga mused, “maybe give you to mungiki as a present . . .”

  He ap
peared to consider his proposal, lips pursed, and looking over and beyond the boy at the end of his desk.

  “Perhaps, perhaps . . . Remember, boy, those mungiki, they are everywhere.”

  Then Mboga got down to business.

  “Your friend Mupanga . . .”

  Mlambo stiffened.

  Charity Mupanga was one of the few people outside his family who had shown him any kindness.

  “She is a troublemaker, a dissident, even,” Mboga continued.

  Mlambo wanted to protest, but fear had frozen his tongue.

  It was true that Charity Mupanga was no supporter of President Nduka. She made little secret of her contempt for the man whom many believed had contrived the death of her husband David, Kuwisha’s much loved bishop, some four years earlier. And as the deputy president of the Mboya Boys United Football Club, as well as running the best bar and eating house in Kireba, while providing a refuge for the city’s growing army of street children, she was a person to reckon with.

  But to call her a dissident was going too far. Frightened though he was, Mlambo tried to speak in Charity Mupanga’s defence.

  “Shut your face,” snapped Mboga. “She is holding dark corner meetings every month. You know this. Every month.”

  He looked suspiciously at the boy.

  “They call it the Christian Ladies’ Sewing Circle.”

  Mboga then spelt out his demand: Mlambo was to become an informer, that creature which had been encouraged during the colonial era and flourished after independence. Reporting back on Charity and her friends was to be the boy’s first task.

  As Mboga detailed the new duty, setting out everything he would expect, from information about the meetings of the Sewing Circle to Charity’s relationship with that Englishman Furniver, Mlambo felt himself swaying on his feet, close to fainting.

  But the worst was yet to come, a final turn of the screw, devised and applied by Mboga himself, a man whose influence went well beyond that of a State House steward, powerful job though it was. According to the gossip, he was almost certainly a senior member of Kuwisha’s Central Intelligence Organisation.