I Built No Schools in Kenya

by Kirsten Drysdale

  We buy a round of beers and find ourselves a spot on the grass in front of the main stage, where a man in a dashiki and jeans blasts the saxophone, and a drum team stirs the air with a steady reggae beat. The alcohol hits my bloodstream, the breeze kisses my face, a fish eagle cries, and I’m intoxicated by the sheer loveliness of being here.

  The afternoon ripples by, full of guitars and rhythm and chorus, then as dusk falls one of the headliners takes the stage: Ayub Ogada, a Mombasa-born singer-songwriter. The crowd falls quiet as Ogada, dressed head to toe in embroidered periwinkle blue, sits on a stool and plays the nyatiti, a traditional eight-stringed lyre made of cow skin stretched over a hollow wooden bowl. It makes a haunting sound I recognise from the soundtrack to The Constant Gardener, and it turns out Ogada provided the music for that film and many others. What a moment, to sit with five thousand people and see him sing the stars into the African sky.

  We decide to wait for the traffic to clear before heading back to Nairobi the next morning. We fill the time with a trek up nearby Mount Longonot, the dormant volcano overlooking Lake Naivasha, its name derived from the Masai word oloonong’ot, meaning ‘mountains of many spurs’ or ‘steep ridges’. It’s about an hour’s hike to the top, then another to walk around the rim of the yawning crater that reaches almost ten thousand feet at its highest peak. We sit on a ledge and take turns peering through binoculars at the miniature world inside the caldera – home to its own oblivious ecosystem teeming with wildlife: zebras and giraffe and antelope – and make a hasty descent when a passing guide points out fresh leopard tracks on the dirt path beside us.

  When I get back to the house just after lunchtime, the lion is off the wall. It’s stretched out in the afternoon sun on the patio steps, one front leg resting on the top of the handrail, its scruffy maned head propped up on a table. It looks, from behind, like a drunk man leaning against a urinal. Chiku is keeping a sensible distance.

  ‘Marguerite’s idea,’ says Annette, sitting with the baby monitor in her lap. Walt must still be having his afternoon sleep. Marguerite, on her laptop in the study, overhears and comes out to explain.

  ‘Yes, well, I do feel it’s a bit confusing for Walt when we’re playing along with the idea that he’s in England. So I’m putting it into storage. Just want to air it out first. Give the simba a bit of a tan!’ She snorts with laughter.

  I’m impressed Marguerite has given it that much thought. She’s never – as far as I’ve seen – done anything as malicious as Fiona would have us believe. But nor has she been especially attuned to what might help make Walt’s care run more smoothly. This is a positive development.

  ‘Now, which of you girls is my “helper” today?’ she asks.

  ‘I think that must be me,’ I say. Ruby is off duty and Annette is on with Walt, meaning I’m in charge of errands for the afternoon.

  ‘Very good. Would you mind going down to Village Market – the fellow there knows to expect you – and picking up some fabric samples for me? I’m getting new curtains made up.’

  I don’t see what’s wrong with the old ones, but Marguerite is insistent they need replacing and plans to give them to Esther.

  ‘She’ll be thrilled, I dare say! They can do such marvellous things with old bits of fabric, you know. Oooh! Maybe she’ll make one of those lovely head-wrap things? They do look splendid.’

  I haven’t seen an African head wrap made out of floral chintz before, but hey, maybe Esther can start a new trend.

  So I take the Peugeot and drive down to Village Market, past families walking home from church in their Sunday best, past tethered goats and cattle and Masai shepherds dozing upright nearby, leaning on slender sticks.

  I find the fabric shop, where the man expecting someone for ‘Lady Marguerite’ gives me a folder full of swatches in sensible colours like taupe and maroon and moss green, and I head back out to the car park.

  But I stop in my tracks when I see a semi-naked man staring at me from a noticeboard.

  The bodybuilder is standing on a stage, holding a trophy and grinning. His flexed and oiled muscles reflect the light at all angles, an ebony Adonis in budgie smugglers. He draws me in closer. I remember my trip to Mombasa, all those months ago, and the Mr Tembo competition I’d wanted to see. This flyer is for the Mr Kenya Junior Bodybuilding Championship to be held the following week at the National Theatre, across the road from the Norfolk Hotel – one of Nairobi’s most iconic colonial-era relics.

  Maybe it’s just the novelty of physical perfection when I’ve been spending so much time confronted with the bodily deprivations of ageing and frailty, but I start to feel inspired. There might be a story in this, I think. And I’ve got a good camera with me this time – I could get a few decent shots. Surely someone would be interested in an article about it.

  Back at the house, I email the Kenyan Bodybuilding Federation contact listed on the flyer, asking if I might come along to the competition with a view to writing an article about the sport. Annette and Ruby are happy to juggle the carers’ roster so I can have the day off, and Marguerite – who finds the whole concept hilarious – kindly offers to let me borrow the Peugeot to get there and back.

  A reply is waiting for me the next morning.

  Hi Kristen

  We received a brief about your interest in a meeting last evening.

  Kindly come in the morning hours for a meeting with us before the finals.

  Members agreed the publicity of international level is a (+).

  See you later.

  The expectation of ‘international publicity’ makes me nervous but also committed. I don’t want to mess these people around; if they’re going to give me access, I have to make sure I make something of it. I have to do this properly.

  But when the day comes, Marguerite’s forgotten about our plan.

  ‘Where are you off to?’ she demands, as I race through the kitchen with my camera bag and take the keys out of their hiding place in the back of the cutlery drawer. ‘You’re taking a car, are you?’ She looks cross.

  ‘I – I’m going to the bodybuilding thing,’ I say, wondering whether I dreamed the conversation we had about it last night, when I checked that it was still okay to take the car. Maybe she thinks I’m skiving off work? ‘I’m not on duty until tonight – Ruby and Annette are on today.’

  ‘What bodybuilding thing?’

  Esther puts her head down and concentrates on washing the dishes. She seems embarrassed to be witnessing this.

  ‘The competition,’ I say, ‘at the National Theatre. Remember? I’m hoping it could be good for a story.’

  ‘Ohhhhh, the muscle men!’ Marguerite shrieks, then cackles with delight like she did when I first explained the whole concept to her. ‘With their teeny-tiny costumes!’

  ‘Yes!’ I say, relieved it’s come back to her. ‘The muscle men! So … should I call a cab instead?’

  ‘Ohhh, I know! Why don’t you take the Peugeot if you like? We won’t need it today.’

  The fuck … ‘Yes, that’s what I – never mind. Okay. Thanks so much – I’ll put fuel in it, and I’ll be back this afternoon.’

  Even Esther – who normally wouldn’t dare express any frustration with our capricious memsahib – offers me an understanding eye roll as I wave goodbye.

  Then traffic almost thwarts my plans. A Coca-Cola truck has broken down on the Meru-Nairobi Highway where the new flyover is being built. Another vehicle overturns as it drives off-road to get around it, and cars that try to get around that one start getting bogged in the sludge on the siding, after a water pipe bursts. I drive like a matatu, honk and wave and nose the Peugeot through the melee, arriving with only a few minutes to spare.

  The Kenya National Theatre is a little past its prime. A strange, silt-stained, blocky brick building, it sits beside the University of Nairobi campus as part of the Kenya Cultural Centre. Across the way is the Nairobi Snake Park, the Kenya Conservatoire of Music and the National Museum, where you can see the fossilise
d skulls of some of the earliest known hominids in the ‘Cradle of Humankind’ exhibition. Discovered in the rich soils of the Olduvai Gorge in the Serengeti in Tanzania, and in the northern lakes of Kenya by archaeologists Louis and Mary Leakey, these ancient skeletal faces now sit encased in glass cubes, as the future peers back at them. A short walk away, their distant descendants are putting their own mortal flesh on display, trying to become superhuman.

  As I climb the steps to the building, the only sign of life is a blue-coated janitor listlessly mopping the verandah. He apparently neither knows nor cares that there’s an event on inside, or that I’m entering without a ticket. ‘Sawa sawa,’ he says, shrugging, when I ask if it’s alright to go in.

  I push through the heavy wooden doors and stumble into a darkened hall, where I’m smacked in the face with musty-cool air, the laughter and applause of decades of audiences hanging in the ether.

  This was where Kipanga – Kenya’s first stand-up comic – performed in the 1950s in the midst of the Mau Mau uprising, delighting crowds with his goofy impressions of a retired Mau Mau leader. His routine so impressed the colonial authorities of the time that they played recordings of his shows to the inmates at rebel detention camps as part of their ‘rehabilitation’. (This was certainly not indicative of the way hundreds of thousands of prisoners were otherwise treated by the British in what were essentially gulags – the true horrors of which are excruciatingly documented in Caroline Elkins’ Pulitzer Prize–winning book Imperial Reckoning.) Twenty years later, post-Independence, a very different kind of performance about the Mau Mau graced the stage: Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s play The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, a drama about the movement’s executed leader from the point of view of Kenyan nationalists. I suspect white audiences weren’t quite as enamoured with that piece of theatre.

  As my eyes adjust to the light, I feel my way past rows of empty vinyl seats with dog-eared seams towards the front of the stage, where a couple of floor-mounted spotlights illuminate a huge white ‘Kenya Bodybuilding Federation’ banner, strung up across red velvet curtains.

  A few contestants are milling around the wings, rubbing oil on each other and doing push-ups, pumping themselves full of fresh blood.

  One of the judges waves me over. ‘Hello! Miss Kristen?’ It’s George, the secretary who replied to my email. He introduces me to his colleagues as ‘the Australian journalist here to cover the event’. Again, I feel a pang of guilt and pressure.

  ‘Well, I’m hoping to,’ I said, anxious to lower expectations, ‘but I’m freelancing, I haven’t actually been commissioned by a publisher yet.’

  ‘Sure, sure, you’ll have no problem,’ George assures me, unfazed by my lack of confidence. I’m realising that I’ll have to contend with the assumption that as a wealthy white foreigner, I can get anything I want. ‘We’re just about to go through the next qualification round, but, please – feel free to go backstage and interview our contestants in the break. I have advised them of your work.’

  I get chatting to Wilson Munene, an agricultural science student and semi-pro bodybuilder who would go on to become one of Kenya’s most recognised male models, featured in advertisements for everything from body lotion and cooking oil to mobile phone companies.

  Wilson tells me he’s been bodybuilding since he was in high school. That as a teenager, he cut out pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronnie Coleman from magazines and stuck them to his bedroom wall as inspiration. ‘At school, I was discouraged from getting into it. The teachers thought it was aggressive and violent, so I used to hide my training. There was no gym in our town anyway. I used stones as weights and used the rafters to do chin-ups.’ Wilson laments that the sport is so misunderstood in Kenya. He says he wants to change that public perception – to help people see that far from being a thug’s pursuit, bodybuilding is a discipline. ‘Too many young men are idle these days,’ he tells me. ‘They are wasting time with drugs and drinking and promiscuous sex. Bodybuilding is a good way to focus energy and be healthy. I encourage them to come to the gym with me and get into bodybuilding instead.’

  Today, he’s supporting his younger brother, Joseph, who is competing in the bantam-weight division. ‘That’s him there –’ Wilson points to a tall, lean figure at the end of the line-up on stage, just as the judges request a hamstring display: all six men turn and bend over, lycra-clad derrières pointing high in the air.

  Backstage, I’m swarmed. I have no shortage of willing subjects – they’re all happy to have their photograph taken, as long as I promise to email them copies to include in their budding portfolios, and to introduce them to any talent scouts I might know. (‘I really don’t know any!’ I try to explain, as I scribble down dozens of email addresses in my notebook, but I can tell they don’t believe me.) The bodybuilders cavort in the hallway, show off their lats, their obliques, their glutes. They jostle for position in the front and centre of group shots, grinning so hard tendons pop out of their necks, shouting at me and pointing out their best bits: Here! Look! My biceps! My triceps! My abs! At one point, an organiser has to interrupt us and corral the heavyweights on stage – they’re so preoccupied with our photo shoot, they’ve missed the call for their set.

  By the end of the day, I have some great shots and have made some good contacts – but I have a problem. Today’s competition really isn’t a big deal. It was poorly attended and, in any case, not an official circuit event – it doesn’t make for much of a story in and of itself. But I can see a story in the competition Wilson mentions he’s entering in a couple of months’ time: the Mr Kericho Championship, one of the East African bodybuilding scene’s most prestigious titles, complete with prize money and a chance to attract sponsorship. Many of the men I’ve met backstage will be competing; I can follow up with them there, where the stakes will be much higher. It will be an unexpected window to modern Africa.

  13

  SHORTCOMINGS

  Annette, Ruby and I enjoy about a month of relative calm, lulling us into a false sense of security, feeling like finally we’ve worked it all out. SPECAL seems to be delivering on everything it promises. Walt is, as predicted, far more relaxed wallowing in happy memories than he is being dragged from the past into the present. And, as a bonus, we are far more stimulated in his company by the improvisational challenge of working out which world to apply to each moment.

  ‘Are you here with the army, too?’ he might ask, peering at me curiously, trying to place my face.

  Aha, I’ll think, it’s King’s African Rifles time.

  ‘Yes,’ I’ll say. ‘Well, I’m with the administration. I believe you’re fresh back from Ethiopia, is that right? Wasn’t it you who oversaw the construction of that marvellous bridge?’

  Walt loves it if I bring up the bridge in Ethiopia. It sparks a twenty-minute recounting of the time he and a friend, though both of them were officers, nonetheless pitched in with their subordinates, labouring in the sun for months to help open up a crucial supply route for the troops. Whenever Walt is done reminiscing about that particular engineering accomplishment, he launches into stories about the time he just spent in the desert, fondly recalling what a ‘beautiful people’ and ‘noble race’ the Somalis are, and how ‘the Wogs should really just give up now; they’re fighting a losing battle’. (The Italians didn’t, in fact, give up until 1960.)

  If Walt sees a bill lying around, we no longer spend hours trying to convince him he doesn’t need to worry about paying it. Instead, we give him an expired chequebook and help him fill one out, put it in an envelope, and drive him down to the Club to put it in the mailbox. The Club staff play along and know to throw it in the bin once we’ve left.

  Chiku, lovely little Chiku, brings great happiness to us all. She’s always there, waiting and wagging her tail, when Esther comes through in the mornings to unlock the internal security gate. Then she sprints laps up and down the hallway, nose nudging each door on the way until she finds one she can push open to burst into the room a
nd jump onto the end of a bed, twisting blankets as she spins in excitement and licking the snoozy hands that reach to contain her before springing away to find her next willing victim. It means Walt wakes up to laughter – his own, or others’ – most mornings.

  Marguerite goes away for a week: back to England, to have her cataracts looked at. For the first few days without her, things with Walt go fairly smoothly.

  Ruby, Annette and I take him on seaside holidays, have secret affairs, pack his suitcase for trips to New Zealand that we never depart for. Almost nothing Walt experiences is real, but his quality of life is, and surely that’s what really matters?

  Life in the Smyths’ house is as close as it’s ever been to relaxed.

  Until we go hunting in 1975.

  All three of us are home for dinner. Khamisi has made a roast chicken stuffed with lemon and thyme – he brings it out to the table surrounded by golden potatoes and mint peas, a gravy boat on the side.

  Walt claps with delight in his seat. ‘Oh my, that is a fair size, isn’t it?’ He leans in towards the chicken, examining it from all angles. ‘Whose is it?’

  ‘It is for everyone, bwana,’ Khamisi says, beaming with pride. ‘It is your dinner.’

  ‘Well yes, I can see that, but who shot it? It’s one from today, isn’t it?’

  Walt looks at the three of us, expectantly. Khamisi looks confused. Annette winks at him, then he gets it. ‘Ah, yes, bwana, it is from today,’ he says, making his way back to the kitchen. ‘I hope you enjoy.’

  We all click into SPECAL mode, playing off each other’s cues. That isn’t a chicken on the table: it’s a pheasant, dragged out of a foggy swamp that morning by one of the gun dogs Walt could hear barking outside.

  Ruby is first to get into character. ‘I believe this one’s mine, Walt,’ she claims proudly, standing up to take charge of the carving knife. Ruby is made for this, what with her theatre training.