Africa39

by Wole Soyinka

  What is home if you don’t have the right size of shoes to take you there?

  Dik Dik walks into Marienbad, says ‘Good morning, M’bad.’ The people laugh with their mouths closed, in the burrows of their smiles and creases are incomplete guides to difficult museum pieces.

  He kisses each man, slowly, takes time to get the tilt angle just right, just the right amount of aftershave, just the right amount of tongue. JIMI HENDRIX is playing.

  Conversations circle around modern architecture. Ah, Nairobi is a riot in July. The sun is out, Hartlaub’s Turacos play in certain gardens. Dead children come out to sing the anthem. So much sun in this city. Wounds fester. Everyone is happy with the government and the children of diplomats are happier with the dollar rate.

  Dik Dik had dated the son of a diplomat not a long time back, he tells them. South Sudan. They toast: here’s to wishing for places much further from the Greenwich Meridian.

  There was the her – cinematography and choice of costume notwithstanding – he met along the sands of Casablanca. He forgave her for so many things, pretended not to notice other men (and women), as long as she agreed to sign a memorandum stating their memories would not be erased by the happy men at immigration. Casablanca had old men who reminded him of a rundown smoking zone on Koinange Street, but he stayed there for years, long after his parents had left the place and long after they’d stop sending him postcards. He understood the postcards to be a form of their nostalgia, so he forgave them – it was enough that they suffered. He wanted to be near Europe, in Lampedusa, near the cemetery of sunken boats, in commune with so many West Africans he could dream dreams where he spoke with an accent and impressed the women almost enough to make them smile but not enough to take them home.

  In the end he left and immigration said the memorandum was a forgery.

  Casablanca stayed with him. In a certain dream Dik Dik can smell the loins of a woman who has travelled from Syria through Jordan though Tunisia to Lampedusa only to die on the shallow shores of a European beach. The morning after a child smiles at the shallowness of the shore: she knows it’s easy to conquer the ocean, for her, on this other side; no other truth will be truer than the ocean being conquerable and distance being nothing more than the wet lips of a generous lover between her legs.

  Chromosome-1972 calls, says as way of salutation: ‘What Chromosome sees in the eyes of the goat.’ He’s tired but humours her. She’s dialling him in her sleep again. He knows what goat she is speaking of but does not stop her when she goes into the details of its appearance. Finally she returns to the eyes of the goat. They are far from perfect spheres, she explains. What she means is that she felt something in the way the goat looked at her. It’s the same way children born long ago would look at you with tilted heads, thinking: ‘asshole’. It’s the same way he looks at her, not entirely trusting her love and all the tongue she offers him, the dead colours, the dead children she brings to life when she licks his anus and tells him it’s OK, you don’t need to be afraid, there no shame in enjoying anal. She’s saying goat but he hears ghosts.

  A beep goes off and he notices his register is running low. He dials for the police and gives them her address.

  Talking Money

  Stanley Gazemba

  Mukidanyi stood in his doorway and watched his elder brothers as they walked towards the compound gate. His eyes were flaming red. The three of them had almost come to blows.

  ‘Go on, get out of my compound, you two!’ he shouted after them, waving a thick index finger at their backs. ‘I don’t need your help here, hear? I don’t need anyone’s help at all! This is my household, and I will run it as I deem fit, understood?’

  Ngoseywe, the elder of the two, stopped and turned, leaning on his walking stick, the patched old greatcoat he wore hanging about his tall thin frame like a scarecrow’s weather-scoured sacking.

  ‘You say you don’t need us?’ he said softly, stabbing his finger at their younger brother. ‘Today your head has swollen like that of a child-heavy toad in the ploughed field, hasn’t it, ndugu? Well, you will need us some day,’ said the old man, with a slow nod, wiping at a line of spit snaking out of his trembling mouth. ‘Yes, you will eat dirt, I tell you; and you will send for us.’ Turning, he went on slowly out of the gate.

  ‘Jinga sana!’ shouted Mukidanyi after them, waving his fists. ‘This here is my land, and I am going to do damn well what I please with it!’ he exclaimed with a loud click of the tongue, spitting angrily in the grass.

  So great was Mukidanyi’s fury it could only be assuaged after he had picked up a water pot left lying outside and dashed it against the wall.

  And as he lumbered back into the house, his neighbours, who had gathered on the path outside the compound, shook their heads and one by one retreated to their own compounds. In that terrible rage no one dared approach him.

  Later that night, after the children had gone to bed, his wife Ronika came up to where he was warming himself in the main room and sat down on her little stool, drying her hands nervously on the edge of her worn lesso.

  ‘Mukidanyi, my husband. You must listen to what your brothers are telling you,’ she pleaded. ‘Ngoseywe and Agoya have a point. No one can stop you doing what you please with the land, but still, selling it off needs consultation. Maybe you should think of leasing it for a period of time instead.’

  She watched him, awaiting a response. But he said nothing.

  ‘Mukidanyi, I am speaking to you,’ she carried on, emboldened. ‘Do you even know those people you want to sell the land to? Eh? You know that hardly anyone in this village does business with the Galos. Their money is not good; we don’t know where they get it from. You should not turn a deaf ear to what everyone tells you, Mukidanyi.’

  All this while Mukidanyi was sitting still, his gaze fixed on a point on the wall in front of him. All of a sudden he sprang to his feet, his hand reaching up into the smoky jamvi ceiling where he kept his hippo-hide whip.

  The woman’s screams rang through the village as the blows fell, shattering the still of the dark August night. It was only in the small hours that her whimpering finally died down.

  Galo’s large four-wheel-drive turned into the compound and drove up to the huge msunzu tree, startling the cows tethered to the scarred tree trunk with the deep roar of the motor as it was turned off. Mukidanyi came out of his house and went to meet his visitors. He was dressed in the long kitenge shirt that he kept at the bottom of the clothes trunk reserved for special occasions, his shepherd’s hat set at an angle on his rounded head.

  ‘Karibu sana! You have kept me waiting longer than we agreed, Bwana Galo. For a while there I thought you would not come!’ he said with a bright smile, glancing at the heavy watch on his wrist though it had stopped functioning long ago.

  ‘Ah, good day to you, Mukidanyi!’ said Galo with an equally bright smile, climbing out of the vehicle. ‘You know I am a terribly busy man, bwana! Sometimes I even forget my appointments!’ He was a stout man, round like a barrel, with a dark chubby face which shone like that of a well-fed hippo. Galo was in the company of a thin bespectacled man who Mukidanyi had never seen before, and who wore a stiff smile that didn’t quite reach his steely eyes. He was dressed in a crisp karani’s suit and carried a leather attaché case.

  ‘Well, at least you came then. I don’t think anything is lost.’

  After the introductions had been made, Mukidanyi bade them welcome into the house but they declined. And so they set off for the portion of the land that Galo was eyeing down by the river.

  As they surveyed the land Mukidanyi walked alongside, chatting them up.

  ‘You have seen for yourself. A fine piece of land,’ he said after they had returned to the shade of the msunzu tree.

  ‘The fertility of the land is certainly not in doubt,’ said Galo, taking out a crisp, perfumed white handkerchief. ‘It will certainly grow good Napier grass for my cattle. What I am worried about is how my truck will access it to collect the
fodder. The road here seems rather narrow.’

  ‘Ah, that is a small matter, my friend,’ said Mukidanyi enthusiastically. ‘I can organise a band of boys to clear the bush along my fence. I wouldn’t mind felling the trees along that side.’

  ‘Well, if you can organise the work gang for me, I will be most willing to negotiate their pay with them,’ said Galo.

  ‘That I will, bwana! Just leave it to me.’

  ‘In that case then I suppose we negotiate.’

  Mukidanyi had expected it to be a long tussle in which either party would tug back and forth, something he was well prepared for, given his experience buying and selling cattle at the local market. He was surprised when the wealthy man accepted his opening offer of half-a-million shillings, which he had sprung out of the blue, as was the haggling custom. Really his intention was that they pull and push to roughly half the figure.

  And he was even more surprised when Galo’s slim accomplice rose and went to the car and returned shortly with another black leather briefcase. The slim man donned a pair of spectacles and opened the case. He took out a stapled sheaf of papers and scanned them briefly, entering some figures in the blank spaces with his biro, before passing it across to Mukidanyi to sign.

  ‘You can put your sign at the places marked with an “X”’ said the man in the crisp Kiswahili tone of a cultured man who spent his days in a neat office.

  Now, the truth was that Mukidanyi had never been to any classroom to speak of. The few occasions his father, Kizungu, had attempted to take him to the local school he had jumped out through the window and dashed across the yard, hopping over the school hedge and away to the marshes down by the river where he passed his day with his friends playing simbi and roasting maize that they had carried off someone’s farm.

  But that was not to say that the lack of a classroom education had denied him much in life. For soon after he came of age and graduated from the marshes and got married he moved to the local cattle market, where he perfected the art of buying and selling, mastering the steadfast stare with which you arrested the buyer and the firm handshake that rattled the shoulder, and which sealed a deal like nothing else he knew of. Thereafter he left the market and passed by the butchery for a cut of beef before retiring to laugh off the day’s good fortune with his buddies at the beer halls, stealing pinches at the rump of the fat proprietress, his day ended.

  But right then, confronted with the papers needing his signature, he faltered. Perhaps Ngoseywe and Agoya were not so bad to have around after all.

  The slim man promptly surmised the cause of his discomfiture and rushed off to fetch an inkpad, to which Mukidanyi applied his thumb and transferred the prints to the places the man pointed out. It was the routine he was more accustomed to whenever he went to the local tea banda where he delivered his little crop of tea for the monthly pay, and even at the bank in Kakamega for the end-of-year bonus.

  The messy paper business done with, Mukidanyi was even more surprised when the slim man opened the briefcase and directed it his way, exposing the contents to him.

  Mukidanyi had handled a bit of money in his cattle trade, but he had never seen that much money all at once. Inside the leather case, stacked in neat rows, were bundles and bundles of money in used bills that were held together with rubber bands – just like in the bank at Kakamega.

  ‘Your half-a-million, Mukidanyi,’ said Galo coolly, as if he was offering fifty shillings for a kilo of meat at the local butchery. ‘You can count it. Take your time.’

  ‘. . . Well, won’t you count it?’ said Galo, his brow slightly raised after a length of time elapsed in which Mukidanyi just sat there staring at the money in the case in his lap. ‘We really need to be getting on our way for some other business.’

  ‘Ah, I don’t think there is need,’ said Mukidanyi nervously, passing his trembling hand over the top row. ‘Ahm . . . I trust you, my friend. I don’t think you would lie to a clansman, Galo.’

  ‘Well, in that case, then I suppose you release us. Still, just in case anything comes short in your counting, I will be very willing to come back and settle with you,’ said Galo with a confident smile. ‘I will tell you when we will be going to Kakamega to sort out the transfer and title deed at the survey office. Good day to you then, and looking forward to us being good neighbours!’

  Long after the two visitors had climbed in the car and left Mukidanyi sat there under the msunzu tree, clasping the black briefcase in his lap. His gaze was fixed on a point in the distant hills, trained on an object in the periphery that only he could see. And then it occurred to him that he was holding money – lots of it – in his lap, and he stood up and rushed into the house, his heart thumping in his chest, dry throat craving a drink of water. He didn’t eat anything for supper that evening.

  It was later in the night after they had gone to bed that he uttered the first words to his wife Ronika, who had stretched out next to him in their narrow termite-infested wooden bed. Twice he had woken up and lit the lamp to make certain the briefcase was still there, chained to the bedpost with the rusty chain and padlock that he usually used to secure his old bicycle to the trees at the market.

  ‘Ronika!’ he whispered after the usual night sounds had died and the night had matured to silence. ‘Can you hear me? What time is it?’

  His wife turned over and sleepily opened one eye. ‘Just how do I know a thing like that at this hour?’ She was still bristling from the lashing he had given her the day before.

  ‘I meant, is it nearly daybreak?’

  She squinted at the parting between the thatch and the top of the wall and shook her head groggily. ‘Unless you are dreaming, Mukidanyi, but this seems like the middle of the night to me – the hour for witches. And so, unless you are one yourself, I think you had better go back to sleep.’

  ‘Well, I was just wondering how soon the day will break so I can take the money to the Post Office in Mbale.’

  ‘Break it will, if you don’t rush it by refusing to go to sleep.’ And with that Ronika turned over and resumed her soft snoring, pulling the patched old blanket up to her ears. With an uneasy shrug Mukidanyi too turned on his side and, drawing the old nylon shirt that he slept in closer about him, squeezed his eyes shut and tried likewise to work up a snore.

  It was as the downy wing of sleep was starting to spread its shadow over Mukidanyi’s pillow that he woke with a start, blinking rapidly in the dark. He was certain he had heard voices, and they sure hadn’t been dream voices. ‘Ronika!’ he whispered, nudging his wife in the ribs sharply. ‘Wake up!’

  Of all his shortcomings, Mukidanyi couldn’t be accused of sleeping like a corpse. He had always slept with one ear open, and would spring awake at the slightest stirring in the cattle boma outside.

  ‘Now what is it?’ said the audibly irritated Ronika. ‘Just because you have money in that briefcase does it mean we’ll not have a night’s sleep today? What is wrong with this man!’

  ‘Shhhh . . . ! Ronika, listen!’ he said with a note of urgency, cupping his hand over her mouth. ‘Please be still. I am not imagining this!’

  A length of time elapsed in which a pack of dogs in a homestead across the valley engaged a chicken-stealing mongoose in a shouting match. And then in the ensuing silence the voices that had woken Mukidanyi returned, tinny and playful, like a couple of school children chatting along the village path on their way home from school, albeit strangely disembodied.

  ‘This place is nice . . . I like it very much,’ piped the first voice.

  ‘Indeed. It is much better than our old place,’ said the corresponding voice.

  ‘Magu! It is very warm here close to the fire. We will grow fat in a couple of days . . . magu! . . . magu!’

  ‘Magu! And our new hosts are kind-hearted people too!’

  ‘Yes, they welcomed us very well . . . at least here we’ll have space to play . . . magu! . . .magu!’

  Mukidanyi had frozen stiff beside his wife in the bed as they listened to t
he strange conversation, his whole body covered in sweat. Beside him, his wife was none the better for fright, her bony hand clasped on his wrist, bosom heaving. The strange voices were coming from right underneath the bed where Mukidanyi had left the briefcase.

  In the morbid silence that had descended they waited, their breath held. But the voices did not come again.

  ‘You heard that clearly, didn’t you, Ronika?’ said Mukidanyi at length, still speaking in a whisper, letting out his breath slowly.

  ‘I did, Mukidanyi,’ said Ronika, letting go of his wrist. ‘My ears are fully awake.’

  ‘Who were they?’ said Mukidanyi in a frightened child-like whisper.

  ‘You ask who they were, do you?’ said Ronika in a shrill voice, sitting up in bed. Her breath was whistling through her teeth in the tense darkness, her tone scolding. ‘I will be damned, but those were certainly viganda spirits speaking. I have no doubt in my mind about it. I have heard of these things before, but today was really my first encounter with them. Light the lamp, I say!’

  ‘But . . .’ Mukidanyi’s hands were shaking as he groped about for a matchbox and put a flame to the sooty tin lamp on the rack above the bed.

  ‘Yes, now you will listen to people, Mukidanyi. Now you will listen, I tell you!’ said Ronika, springing out of bed and moving to the far end of the room. There was a wild look in her eyes, her face slick with sweat.

  ‘That was the money in the briefcase speaking, you mean?’ Mukidanyi was shaking.

  ‘Go on, take it!’ snapped Ronika, a note of hysteria in her voice. ‘Take your millions, Mukidanyi, go on . . . do not now be afraid of it, big man who is hard of hearing!’ She was adjusting her lesso around her waist, her lined face set as if she was going to fly at him and wrest him to the floor. ‘I warned you about the Galos, didn’t I? Eh? Ngoseywe and Agoya warned you too against this, didn’t they, big man? . . . And what did you do . . . eh? Tell me, what did you do?’