Fatboy and the Dancing Ladies

by Michael Holman

  “The St Joseph Primary School for Boys,” repeated Rutere.

  “Really, Rutere? First I heard of it,” said Furniver.

  St Joseph’s was the only state primary school of any merit, and its list of distinguished former pupils was a long one.

  “Just when were you there?” asked Furniver.

  Rutere fell silent, and Ntoto said nothing.

  “You have to tell the truth, you know,” said Furniver.

  Rutere asked: “Am I stupid, Mr Furniver?”

  “Good God, Rutere, certainly not. You’re as sharp as a tack.”

  “Would I have failed at St Joseph?”

  “Jolly sure you would have made a good fist of it.”

  “My father had no money,” said Rutere. “But I am a sharp tack with a good fist. So would I have gone to St Joseph if my father had the money?”

  “St Joseph it is,” Furniver conceded.

  A few minutes later all that remained was for the boys to get a passport-size photo of Rutere, clip it to the form, and return it to Podmore. That could be done easily enough at one of the several photo booths in Kireba, and Furniver handed over the ngwee required.

  Arms folded, Charity said nothing. But those boys were up to some sort of mischief . . .

  38

  “Mboga!”

  The call began in the heart of the overgrown kitchen garden and travelled between the neglected cabbage and carrot beds, crossed the path that led to the disused boathouse, and over the hedge that was the last obstacle before the lawn that led to the French windows of State House.

  “Mboga!”

  The weekly staff meeting was coming to an end.

  Lovemore Mboga gave no sign that he had heard the interruption.

  “Mbooogaaa!”

  The voice, quavering with tension, came from a young throat, whose owner was concealed behind the hedge.

  To address the senior State House steward in this fashion was disrespectful in itself. All but a handful of the assembled staff knew him only as “Senior Steward, suh”, and woe betide the forgetful few who left off the “suh”. The rest called him “Mr Mboga, suh”, and only President Nduka called him “Mr Mboga”.

  The senior steward continued to read out the final instructions for the week, from the provision of fresh flowers – something the president set great store by – to warning that the consumption of sugar was far in excess of demand. Someone was stealing State House sugar. It had to stop, warned Mboga.

  “Mbogaaa!”

  The call came once again, gathering in confidence, and this time with an obscenity attached, so crude that the men in the group looked at their feet and the women let out little gasps of dismay.

  Even Ntoto and Rutere, who had returned at dawn and had concealed themselves in a mango tree at the point where the path to the old boathouse forked, could not help feeling shocked to hear Mlambo’s challenge take to the air.

  Beneath their defiance was a respect for authority, and to hear a man who personified that authority treated in this way made their stomachs tense, and left them unsure whether or not to giggle.

  “What do you see, Ntoto?” hissed Rutere, perched on one of the branches below his friend.

  Ntoto peeked cautiously through the leaves, and described the scene.

  “Mlambo is behind the hedge . . . now he is getting close to the gap in the hedge . . .”

  “Security,” hissed Rutere. “What are security people doing . . .”

  “Watching, just watching . . . Mboga is looking, but cannot see . . . oh yes, yes, he is looking now, at Mlambo, who is standing in the opening of the hedge . . .”

  The steward had put down his file, left the podium, and walked through the ranks of the assembled staff.

  “I see you, Fatboy. I see you.”

  He turned to the staff. Like a conductor, he orchestrated a chant of “Fatboy! Fatboy! Fatboy!”

  As the staff did his bidding, he moved closer to Mlambo.

  “Fatboy, you are sick in the head.”

  “Don’t Fatboy me, Mboga,” said Mlambo quietly.

  He took a step forward, and his bare feet encountered the lawn.

  “Are you afraid, Mboga? Do you need your security people? Why are you frightened, Mboga, of a sick toto who has Aids?”

  Mboga’s cruel response sealed his fate.

  “You have Aids, Fatboy, because you sleep with your mother and your sisters.”

  “Mboga, you are just a piece of dog nothing.”

  Blast! Despite the rehearsal of the night before, he had not got the abuse quite right. Nevertheless, the message was clearly getting through to the State House steward.

  Mboga’s offensive response overcame any doubts Mlambo had about delivering his final insult, so disgusting that until then he had been far from certain that he could bring himself to employ it.

  The steward unbuckled his leather belt, and slapping it against his palm, advanced slowly on Mlambo.

  “I see you, Fatboy,” he said again, his voice filled with menace. “Fatboy, forever Fatboy.”

  Mboga repeated the phrase, with various tones of loathing and contempt.

  Mlambo stood his ground.

  Rutere was beside himself.

  “Mlambo must run, very soon! Tell him to run . . .”

  The toto, trembling, took half a pace forward.

  The security staff, who until then had guffawed and taken no action, began to get nervous and started to advance on the boy.

  Mlambo had reckoned on this – and he had also reckoned that Mboga would not want to be physically humiliated in front of his underlings.

  “Are you afraid, Mboga? Afraid, so you send your security people?”

  Mboga started to chatter with rage, and Fatboy knew then that he could get his man.

  “Mboga. Don’t Fatboy me, never. I can forgive you Mboga, and spare you, only if you give me my name back and call me, in front of every people present, my name – Mzilikazi, which is my new name, Mzilikazi Ferdinand Mhango Mlambo.”

  “Fatboy, Fatboy, Fatboy,” sneered the steward.

  Flecks of spittle appeared at the corners of Mboga’s mouth.

  “Don’t Fatboy me, Mboga. Remember, I have thin disease.”

  The steward continued to slap his belt against the palm of his hand, chanting “Fatboy, Fatboy” as he did so.

  Barely the length of a cricket pitch separated the two. Mboga continued to advance. Still Fatboy stood his ground.

  “What is happening?” demanded Rutere, his view of events blocked by the intervening hedge.

  “Get ready,” said Ntoto, “Mboga is close to smelling Mlambo.”

  He dropped from the tree to the ground, and he and Rutere waited for the shout from Mlambo that would set them running.

  Fatboy and Mboga faced each other, both motionless.

  Suddenly Mlambo, in one movement, stepped out of his shorts, turned around, touched his toes, and looking at Mboga from between his splayed legs, shouted the obscenity which was to seal the fate of the steward:

  “Kiss my arse, Mbogaaaaaa.”

  A split second later, letting out a shrill scream of terror, Mlambo emerged from the gap in the hedge. His arms and legs pumping, he ran for his life.

  Mboga led the pursuing, whooping crowd, belt still in hand.

  “Run, run,” shrieked Ntoto and Rutere, now alongside their panting friend, but their urging was not needed.

  39

  Like police motorbike outriders, Ntoto and Rutere ran a few paces ahead of Mlambo, pursued by a furious Mboga, trailed by a dozen overweight security staff, and followed by a hollering and hooting throng of State House domestic staff.

  When they reached the State House perimeter fence, Ntoto and Rutere each pinned back a flap of the wire, leaving a gap through which Mlambo scrambled a few seconds later, pausing only to slip on the pair of Furniver’s blue underpants many sizes too big for him.

  Ntoto had reduced the waist by knotting one side, and to the boys’ relief, they now f
itted Mlambo.

  Rutere had been adamant.

  “I myself cannot let my friend Mlambo not run across Uhuru Park to Outspan with his butumba showing and his balubas bouncing. Never! Neeever!”

  Such public exposure would be so humiliating that neither he nor Mlambo would be able to commune with their respective grandmothers again. And what was more, any mungiki lurking in the park would have the opportunity to see whether an Mboya boy had been circumcised.

  “Well done, Ntoto, well done, Mlambo!” shouted Rutere.

  So far, so good.

  Across the park, past the monument and the water fountain, they ran, all the way monitored by strategically placed street boys, equipped with flying toilets. There was less than a hundred paces to go to the exit when Mlambo let out a wail, and hopping on one foot, as if he had stood on a thorn, came to a halt.

  Mboga redoubled his efforts as the distance between the two shrank.

  As Mlambo set off again, Ntoto hugged himself with delight and relief.

  The ruse had worked.

  “Say what you like,” said Japer to no-one in particular, “I know it’s a cliché, but they really do have an amazing sense of rhythm.”

  The return journey from Lokio had been uneventful, and in the few hours to spare before leaving for the airport to catch the overnight flight back to London, he had joined up with a group of delegates and gone shopping in the city market.

  About fifty Mboya Boys, several clutching plastic bags, were assembled in the flower section, their reputation and numbers a guarantee that none of the stallholders would dare try to eject them. But there seemed no reason to be alarmed. The boys appeared both drugged and disciplined.

  They had entered the market, less than a block from the Outspan Hotel, doing the toyi-toyi, the South African protest dance, running on the spot yet inching forward, knees raised as high as their bones and sinews allowed, all the while grunting, deep sounds that came from the solar plexus.

  The delegates were thrilled.

  As they followed in the boys’ wake, heading for the Outspan, cameras popping and videos whirring, Japer provided a running commentary on what they were watching and just who was performing. Some delegates thought it might be a Masaai cattle dance; others suggested they were Samburu performing a fertility ritual.

  What was later to be universally and tactfully referred to as “the event” reached its conclusion when the procession reached the hotel lobby. Japer displayed an extraordinarily cool and calm demeanour. Perhaps with good reason, for he had every right to consider himself an old hand. He had, after all, read most of the Rugged Guide to Kuwisha, he had seen Kireba for himself, had made the trip to Lokio and survived an encounter with a rhino.

  “You really are jolly lucky. We may have bumped into a gang of moran, young Masaai warriors, practising one of their ritual dances. Most people go a lifetime without seeing it . . .”

  The delegates were impressed, and Japaid hissed in appreciation, saying, “Please wait for camera.”

  The leader of the delegates bowed to the receptionist, was given his room key, and returned with a tiny digital camera. For the next ten minutes, he and his colleagues filmed enthusiastically, delighted to have the chance to capture raw, untamed Africa in such an incongruous setting.

  “I say, be careful with that thing, you could do yourself an injury,” exclaimed a delegate, backing away as one of the youths appeared with a needle which he plunged into a paw-paw, time and time again.

  At this point, cutting through the hubbub came Japer’s cool, measured tones, like a young David Attenborough.

  “Samburu – fertility dance,” said Japer confidently. He was beginning to enjoy himself. He smirked.

  “I think you can guess the significance. The needle represents the thingy, and the paw-paw the wotsit . . .”

  But when members of the group tried to leave the lobby, the boys contrived to make it impossible.

  Adrian Mullivant turned to Japer and asked him if he would take a picture of him standing next to a “Masaai”.

  “My turn next,” said Japer.

  He was now delivering a running commentary.

  “Ritual scarring – usually follows the jigjig business.

  “Don’t leave now,” he cautioned DANIDA. “Would be bloody rude. We should feel privileged.”

  “This,” said Mullivant, “is the real Africa – and we are seeing it in the middle of a city!”

  Bearing the two knitting needles sticking out of the paws-paws, the dancers circled the tourists, most of whom were beaming with pleasure at their good fortune to have encountered – indeed, almost to be part of – this remarkable ceremony.

  One of the boys barked an order. With timing that the president’s brigade of guards would have been proud of, the needles were removed from the paw-paws. The boys formed a line, and at that moment it seemed that the dart-like needles had vanished . . .

  40

  The run that led through Uhuru Park was the stretch that was the easiest for the street boys to protect. The difficult section began when Mlambo emerged from the park, puffing heavily. Just five blocks on the edge of the city centre lay between him and the final showdown with Mboga at the Outspan Hotel.

  The traffic hazard was easily resolved. A well-aimed stone from a catapult shattered the traffic lights that regulated cars travelling along Uhuru Highway to the airport. At the end of the road on which the Outspan stood, a matatu was hastily abandoned by driver and passengers after a flying toilet had been emptied inside. Within a few moments, a long queue of cars had formed behind it.

  At the university opposite the hotel, students needed no encouragement to abandon lecture halls, and gather in the car park, and the police responded in the only way they knew how, cracking the ring leaders over the head with their batons and firing tear gas before retreating under a hail of stones.

  There was a further diversion which nearly cost the life of a curious onlooker, when a street boy yelled “Thief! Thief!” and what had been a passive crowd turned into an angry lynch mob.

  In the bedlam that ensued, the way was left clear for Mlambo, as he ran through the seedy town centre.

  A city that had once had sufficient appeal to claim a day in the schedule of the foreign visitors who visited Kuwisha in their hundreds of thousands each year, had become a place to avoid, and only the ignorant and the foolhardy left the sanctuary of their hotels.

  “Never by foot” was the watchword. Instead wise travellers ventured out in taxis, in search of spoils that would provide evidence on return to Europe that they had been to Africa, whether it be a dozen mangoes, with orange-pink flesh that had the consistency of a peach, a soapstone elephant, a carved walking stick, or a woven basket.

  On Mlambo ran, past the dukas, small family shops whose contents were dominated by tat – plastic wall clocks, nylon socks, cheap watches, calculators made in Taiwan, combs and handkerchiefs, Vaseline and other balms, Chinese-made bric-a-brac, rough blankets, hair pomade, and the tinniest of radios – staffed by father, sitting in one gloomy corner, assisted by son who checked the stock, and employing a single black man who in between serving the customers and keeping a sharp look-out for shop-lifters, made tea and collected the post and raised and lowered the steel grille or roll-up shutters at the start and the end of the day.

  Outside the hotel, as the noise of the chase got louder, sounding like angry bees, a crowd of the curious formed: taxi drivers, messengers, bar stewards and table waiters. The expatriate hotel manager moved through their ranks. Time to move them on.

  From inside, the belly grunts of the dancing children took on a hypnotic note, and one by one the delegates joined in, overcoming any initial unease, grunting in counter-rhythm, arms around the shoulders of the teenagers.

  There was a sudden shout, a shrill sound that came from Ntoto, as he and Rutere peeled away from the fast approaching bunch of runners, allowing Mlambo to keep sprinting through the onlookers, into the hotel lobby, and into the protective
circle of toyi-toyi-ing street boys.

  Although this scene had not appeared in the guidebook, Japer kept his nerve.

  “Obviously, enacting a hunt,” he explained, and any nervous delegates felt reassured.

  “Little bastards,” said the manager. “Clear off, show finished, thank you, very good.”

  Someone in hotel security would pay for this.

  Casually, deliberately, an Mboya Boy thrust his hand into one of the plastic bags, withdrew it, and flicked something at him. It landed just above the pocket of his jacket. The manager brushed it off, and then raised his fingers to his nose. He recoiled.

  Japer looked around desperately for Adrian Mullivant. Spotting him, he gestured across the room and indicated that he was ready to have his photo taken. A big lad seemed to have taken over the proceedings.

  As planned, the confrontation between Mboga and Mlambo took place in the hotel lobby.

  It did not take long. The dancing boys continued to grunt. The steward, panting with anger and exhaustion, seemed barely aware of his surroundings. He gasped over the heads of the stomping children.

  “Fatboy, Fatboy, Fatboy!”

  Saliva began to drool from the corners of his mouth, and his eyes were glazed in fury.

  “Don’t Fatboy me, Mboga,” said Mlambo breathing heavily. “What is my name?”

  “Fatboy!” screamed the steward. “Always, forever, Fatboy!”

  Mlambo held out his hands, like a surgeon in an operating theatre, and kept his eyes on Mboga. Ntoto and Rutere each slapped a sharpened knitting needle, with the dart-like fins which had been attached the night before, onto his open palms.

  With a high-pitched wail, and right hand to left, left hand to right, Mlambo plunged the needles into his bare chest. Blood spurted out.

  The street boys moved aside, leaving the boy with a clear shot.

  Before Mboga could react, or grasp the nature of his danger, Mlambo threw the first needle at the State House steward.

  “Hold on a mo! I want my photo . . .”