I Built No Schools in Kenya

by Kirsten Drysdale

  That afternoon, when Alice takes over, I have a chance to Skype my family to explain the situation I have arrived to is not quite the situation I was expecting.

  Esther is vacuuming in our room, and Walt, Alice and Fiona are having tea on the patio, so I find myself huddled over my laptop in the study, whispering my unlikely predicament into the microphone and listening through headphones to muffle the incredulous responses.

  ‘What!?’ my sisters say. ‘Whaaaaaaaat? You need to get out of there. You need to come home.’

  My parents roar with laughter.

  ‘So, what,’ says Mum, ‘are these people part of the “Happy Valley set” or something?’

  ‘The what-set?’

  ‘You know, all those wife-swapping murderers they had running around up there in “British East Africa”,’ says Dad, in a tone that suggests Rhodesian colonials didn’t think much of their equatorial counterparts. ‘Lord Delamere and that mad bloody bunch.’

  I don’t know what they’re talking about.

  Later, I look it up. The ‘Happy Valley set’ was a group of early colonial aristocrats who settled in the Wanjohi Valley, at the edge of the Aberdare ranges. Legend has it these lords and ladies lived large. From the 1920s through to the 1940s, while the rest of the world was recovering from the Great War and the Great Depression, they were enjoying a Great Gatsby lifestyle under the African sun. They did heroin and cocaine. They threw wild parties. They slept with one another’s partners and occasionally murdered one another’s partners, in fits of jealous rage. One notable member, Kiki Preston – an American socialite who’d moved to Kenya with her big-game hunter husband – allegedly had an affair with Prince George, introduced him to drugs, and spawned him an illegitimate son. Her own drug habit was so conspicuous that she was nicknamed ‘the girl with the silver syringe’. Kiki ended up jumping out of a window in New York City. Not many of the Happy Valley set had happy endings.

  I can see why people like my parents have never thought much of these types. And neither, apparently, did the rest of the colonial community in Kenya. Hard-working settlers and administrative types were embarrassed by the raucous tales of horses being ridden through dining rooms and chandeliers being shot to pieces. They didn’t see Africa as a playground: they saw it as Serious Empire-Building Business. A wild and dangerous land that needed to be tamed in order to reach its – and its people’s – full potential. Its people, no doubt, have always had a different view.

  I don’t think Walt and Marguerite were part of that hedonistic crew. But they certainly seem to share some measure of the madness that many in the Motherland put down to Kenya’s altitude and sunshine.

  ‘Just be careful, hey?’ Mum says. ‘Really, you must. And if you think you’re not safe there, you need to come home.’

  ‘Yah,’ says Dad. ‘Watch out for nyamazanes. And don’t you be a bloody nyamazane!’

  (Not-being-a-bloody-nyamazane was our parents’ golden rule when we were growing up. The word means ‘wild animal’ in Zulu – they used it to describe anyone who behaves foolishly. ‘Like a “badly behaved bloody bogan”,’ was my father’s translation.)

  Fiona bursts into the study, reeking of contained panic. ‘Quickly, I need you to go around the side of the house. Dad’s on the move.’

  I say a rushed goodbye to Mum and Dad, close my computer and head through to the garage. On the move? Where can he possibly move to? The gates are padlocked shut. He’s an octogenarian, for god’s sake. He’s hardly going to scale the fence and mongrel his way over broken glass and through electrified barbed wire.

  I get to the garage and spot him – strolling, calmly, past the gardenias near the granny flat, hands clasped behind his back. He stops, tilts his face towards the sun and shuts his eyes, soaking in the warmth.

  Walt is fine.

  Fiona is not.

  She pokes her head from around the corner. ‘Go!’ she mouths, urgently waving me over to Walt, like a commando sending soldiers into a cleared area.

  I follow orders. I walk over to him. ‘Hi, Walt,’ I say.

  He opens his eyes and turns to face me, smiling. ‘Oh, hello there.’ He chuckles. ‘I was just enjoying this lovely sunshine.’ He takes my arm and we carry on with his loop of the garden.

  I look back at Fiona. She gives me the thumbs up, then signals that she’ll meet us back at the patio. I can’t figure it out – is this a test or something? Why am I chaperoning him around the lawn? Why can’t we let him be? Surely we can’t lose him if we keep him in sight.

  On our way past the bougainvillea, Walt snaps off a few overgrown branches and nicks the back of his hand on a thorn.

  It’s the first thing Fiona notices when we get back to the patio. ‘Now what have you done there, Dad?’ she says, dabbing at the fine stripe of crimson on his knuckle.

  ‘No idea,’ says Walt, ‘no need to make a fuss!’

  ‘I think it’s a scratch from the bougainvillea,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ Fiona says. ‘Go and get the medi-kit, if you wouldn’t mind? It’s in the cupboard in your room.’

  I bring her the medi-kit. Ignoring his protestations, she wipes Walt’s hand down with antiseptic and sticks a bandaid over the tiny cut. ‘That’s why we must be so careful with him in the garden,’ she says to me once he’s gone back to reading his newspaper. ‘His skin is so delicate – any little bump can cause a bleed. And with all the blood thinners he’s on, he won’t be able to clot so well.’

  Ah, so it was a test. And I failed.

  Oops.

  It’s not for another few days, when Fiona and Alice take Walt out for a doctor’s appointment and Millicent goes home across town to check on her mother, that I get a chance to nose around the property. Some of the staff, I discover, live in a small block of rooms in the back corner of the garden. Esther, Patrick, David and James have a room each, and only go home to visit their families in nearby towns every other weekend, while Khamisi, Peter and Frank live in outer suburbs of Nairobi, and travel to and from the house each day by matatu. I haven’t been told not to go into the staff quarters, but I get the sense that I shouldn’t. That it’s their space, their one patch of privacy to retreat to at the end of a working day. Hopefully, I think, once we’ve got to know each other better, I’ll be able to have a look. But for now I think I should keep a respectful distance.

  The house itself is less grand than I was expecting. There are signs of wealth, but no ostentatiousness. It’s a slightly rambling old place full of homely tones, chintz and oiled oak, polished silver and brass and china. Worn Persian rugs over polished parquetry. Reupholstered furniture and mug rings covered with doilies. Uncoordinated pastels and floral patterns on curtains, bedspreads, sheets; tartan blankets, a cabinet of crystal, a storeroom, a fireplace. It’s decidedly English, though seasoned with African touches: carvings and beads and sculptures and ornaments that decorate sideboards and occasional tables and windowsills.

  In a strange way, it reminds me of home. I grew up in a creaky, hundred-year-old Queenslander that had miraculously survived the Mackay cyclone of 1918. By the time we moved in, termites had all but eaten away its stumps, the corrugated-iron roof was rusted red, and possums patrolled the rafters. In a few places, where the boughs of the six mango trees in the yard hung close enough to drop fruit onto it, the roof looked as though it had been shelled. The gaps between the floorboards in my bedroom were so big we had to cover them with gauze to stop the mosquitoes and carpet snakes from getting in. My parents couldn’t afford to fix it up – let alone renovate or put in air conditioning – so we sweltered through summer, deafened by a chorus of green frogs and surrounded by sickening armies of cane toads.

  It was about as ocker a place as you could get – and filled to the brim with African-colonial furnishings. Oil paintings of elephants having dust baths. A knee-high soapstone statue of a rhinoceros. Decorative ostrich eggs. Antique ivory lampstands with fringed silk shades. (The lampstands are family heirlooms. They’re from a time when ki
lling elephants for their tusks was seen as an admirable pursuit, not the barbaric, cowardly abomination it is. We see them as a talking point – not a point of pride.) Silverware that tarnished with the humidity and dust. Copper that turned green in the humidity and dust. Did I mention the humidity and dust? There were days the air felt like warm soup, while tractors pulling sugarcane bins up and down the road filled the atmosphere with ash and topsoil.

  For a long while, my mother tried to keep on top of the housework these trappings demanded: the dusting, the polishing, the removing of spiderwebs and hornets’ nests. Until one day, the dining table strewn with Brasso-stained felt rags and miniature salt shakers clogged up with wet grit, she threw it in. ‘Fuck it,’ she said. We knew she must be mad – she never said ‘fuck’. ‘I’ve had a gutful of this shit. Fuck, fuck, fuck it.’ ‘Then don’t bloody do it!’ said Dad. He’d never cared for finishings. ‘I won’t!’ said Mum. And she didn’t, ever again. I reckon that’s the day they truly became fully fledged, fair dinkum, unpretentious Aussies. But here in actual colonial Africa, where people have the help of ‘the help’ to keep everything sparkling, it all makes much more sense.

  Looking after Walt can be intense, but I find it also involves a lot of quiet time just sitting, being, contemplating the world around me. It’s nice. I can feel myself catching my breath.

  I start to understand things about my parents’ life in Africa in a way I didn’t before. They’re things I’d known to expect, but I’m appreciating them on a visceral level now. Most striking is the sense of danger. Growing up in north Queensland we had a permanently unlocked house: a home we couldn’t have secured even if we’d wanted to – we literally did not have a set of keys for the doors. We left car keys in the ignitions of vehicles; we casually left handbags and wallets on café tables. In most parts of Australia, you can freely walk around at night with only a half-serious fear that something bad might happen, knowing how rare such incidents are.

  Here in Nairobi, beneath the surface, the threat to personal safety is ever-present. The police can’t be relied upon; instead, private security companies like G4S, KK and Hatari boast about their ‘rapid response’ times, promising that their people will arrive within minutes of a call, decked out in paramilitary uniforms. There are big red panic buttons on the walls of every room of the house; they summon the twenty-four-hour armed security patrols that coast the neighbourhood streets, their vans packed with squads of German shepherds barking viciously through bars. Home invasions aren’t uncommon, especially in wealthy areas. Theft is usually the primary motivation, but break-ins often feature gratuitous violence.

  After sundown, we lock and chock every door and window. Slide heavy brass bars across the main entrance. Pull shut a deadlocked iron gate that separates the back half of the house from the front, cocooning the bedrooms in an extra layer of security. Here, we hide passports and an emergency stash of cash in a safe under the floor, because ‘you never know when a revolution might break out’. We wind the windows up and lock the doors before we drive out the front gate. We are patted down before entering shopping centres, and use ATMs inside locked cubicles, and don’t stop for anyone on the road after dark.

  I am also acutely aware of my status as a member of a privileged racial group. My white skin makes me part of a comfortable minority in Kenya, a position that somehow feels simultaneously safer and more vulnerable than most, as it casts me as a valuable target for thugs and opportunists.

  Having so many people around the house also takes some getting used to. The staff are rostered on six days a week, from seven in the morning through to seven at night with a two-hour break in the afternoon, except for Saturdays when they finish at noon. They take turns covering Sundays.

  Alice and I occasionally join them on their breaks, sipping sweet tea in the shade of the jacaranda tree around the side of the garage, but I’m sure this isn’t usually the ‘done thing’ and it takes us some time to work out where we fit into this strange arrangement. On the one hand, we’re supposed to blend in as ‘part of the family’ when Walt’s around, so we’re imbued with their status. On the other, we’re uncomfortable with being waited on – not least because we’re staff too. Our solution is to accept the domestic staff’s service when we’re on duty with Walt, for the sake of the charade, but to help with chores like clearing tables or washing up when we aren’t. I worry that our wanting to ‘pitch in and do our bit’ might actually be standing on someone else’s toes – or implying that the staff aren’t doing a good enough job. But after a time, it means we’re able to chip away at the barriers between us and them, and can start building a more personal rapport.

  Even so, there are all kinds of customs and protocols to learn in order to ensure the smooth running of day-to-day life.

  Things like, you know, proper underwear etiquette.

  ‘You mustn’t put them in with the rest of the wash,’ my mother lectures me over Skype one afternoon, while the house is quiet during Walt’s post-lunch zizz and I’m sitting on the patio. ‘They don’t like it. It’s disrespectful. You must hand-wash them yourself.’

  ‘Disrespectful to who?’ I ask.

  ‘To the staff! How would you like to wash someone else’s knickers?’

  ‘What do you mean? I’ve washed plenty of other people’s jocks in my time. As long as they don’t have skid marks, what’s the big deal?’

  ‘Ag sies, man!’ she said, breaking into the Afrikaans slang she and Dad always used to express disgust.

  ‘Jesus, Mum, it’s not 1960s Rhodesia anymore. It’s not like they’re doing it by hand. There’s a washing machine here. Everyone else puts theirs in.’

  ‘It’s not about that – it’s a boundaries thing. Personal items should be kept personal.’

  ‘But what if they think I’m being weird by not putting them in with the rest of the washing? Like it’s because I don’t want them touching my underwear? Like it’s a weird racial hang-up? Isn’t that just as offensive?’

  ‘No, please man. Please promise me you’ll wash them yourself. You just do it in the sink and hang them to dry in the shower once everyone’s gone to bed.’

  ‘Ugh, fine, Mum. I promise.’

  ‘And another thing – you know there were people who refused to leave Zimbabwe, saying, “We’d rather be murdered in our beds than have to make them ourselves”? Well, some of them were. You must make your bed yourself. Every morning. Don’t become a bloody princess.’

  So, obedient child that I am, that’s what I start doing. Getting up early every morning to make my bed and bring my never-quite-dry underwear in from the bathroom.

  Until one day, when Fiona catches me wringing a pair into the basin, and insists I put them in the wash. ‘Dad will have a fit if he comes to have a piddle in here and there are women’s knickers hanging off the taps!’

  ‘Oh – ah, my mum told me I should do them myself, though?’

  ‘No, that’s nonsense. Besides, you need to have them ironed.’

  ‘Ironed?’

  Fiona opens a cupboard in the hallway to show me where stacks of freshly pressed and folded clothes, towels, sheets and smalls sit in an aura of warm soapy air. It takes less than twenty-four hours for dirty washing to make its way from the wicker hamper in the bathroom to this pristine state in the airing cupboard. And, as it turns out, there’s a very good reason for ironing everything – including underwear.

  There’s a type of blowfly in East Africa known to entomologists as Cordylobia anthropophaga, and to the rest of us as the ‘tumbu fly’, the ‘putzi fly’ or, most tellingly, the ‘skin-maggot fly’. This wonderful creature likes to lay its eggs on damp washing while it’s hanging out to dry, so that three days later when you put your pants on, the larvae can burrow into the warm flesh of your buttock and spend a week feasting on your blood and meat and fat. Then, that sore red bump you thought was just a pimple or mosquito bite ulcerates into a hideously painful boil, out of which wriggles a corpulent little grub and a lifetime of ni
ghtmares. If the eggs are laid on a pillowcase, the worms will emerge from your face. (Look it up on YouTube, if you can bear to.)

  ‘So, yes,’ Fiona says, ‘we iron everything here. With an iron as hot as the fabric can bear.’

  I don’t want to break my promise to Mum, but I also don’t want a butt full of maggots, so I compromise. I wash my underwear in the shower then hang them inside my wardrobe where they drip all night into a bucket. Once they’re dry, I sneak them through to the laundry to throw them in with the clean washing, although every so often I miss the opportunity and have to ‘iron’ them myself with a hair straightener.

  Esther catches me one day. She comes into our room to put fresh sheets on the bed and finds me sitting on the end of it, a pile of damp cotton briefs in my lap, one pair steaming from between the ceramic tongs.

  ‘Sorry! Sorry, sorry!’ Esther mutters, reversing through the door as though she’s walked in on me masturbating.

  ‘No, no, it’s fine, Esther – it’s fine! Come in, please!’ She eyes the hair straightener warily. ‘I’m just – I’m ironing them,’ I explain. ‘To kill the tumbu fly eggs.’

  ‘Ohh … okay.’ She still looks confused.

  Fuck it, I think. I’ll just ask her straight up.

  ‘Hey, Esther, tell me: is it okay for me to put my underpants in the wash basket?’