The Reckoning

by Chonghaile, Clár Ní;

  I watched the US slide ever deeper into a moral and military quagmire in Vietnam and I thought about going back but I knew this was a war for a new generation. I would not be able to capture what it meant, as a good journalist should. So I became one of the watchers of this televised conflict and I was forced to recognise that in this new world, my place was less secure. Editors used to say they didn’t need photographs when I reported because my descriptions were so vivid but this praise was no longer relevant because the pictures were always there and now they moved too.

  I was also becoming less ambitious. Whatever hunger or fear used to drive me to see what had to be seen firsthand was waning. As my truth-telling impulse diminished so too did my empathy. One would probably call it compassion fatigue now, although I did not recognise it as such. I assumed I was becoming grumpier and more heartless because I was getting older. I groused, mostly to myself for I was not entirely stupid, about how similar all crises were. Refugees were refugees wherever they ended up; their plight was always the same; their faces were always the same, the very words they used lacked originality. I realise now I was burnt-out.

  I decided I needed a break; I yearned to get away from what I saw as the West’s destructive impulses, its wars and scandals and unremitting harshness. I wanted to find my own Shangri-La and I picked Africa, in an uncharacteristically sentimental act of loyalty to Penrose. I recalled how he had talked so excitedly about his plans to visit his uncle in Kenya after the war. I knew so little about the continent myself, having only ever been to Algeria, so Penrose’s enthusiastic descriptions seemed a good place to start.

  I can’t say I never thought of Penrose after his death but I tried very hard to forget him. Our time together was so short, so surreal and so inseparable from the unlife that was the war. It would have been absurd, given all of that, to wonder ‘what if’. A meritless dream, like wishing for clouds made of candyfloss. And in any case, I had forced myself to bury his memory when Robert came back. We were already living on a cliff edge and I knew thoughts of Penrose could push us over. In the end, I was more like Charlotte than I imagined. I had a will of steel too and who is to say that I did not also use it for the greater good.

  But 20 years on, I felt a move to Kenya could offer both an escape and a fitting tribute to a wonderful man who passed as most wonderful men do: silently, barely ruffling the air around him.

  The Gazette did not have an African correspondent at that time, relying instead on the news wires for any information it thought its readers needed. But as the Cold War split the world into us and them, and African states began to shake off the shackles of colonialism, McNeish was open to the idea of a permanent correspondent to track these changes. I suspect he also sensed my ennui and he was always a loyal man. He was grateful for what I had done, proud of what I had become and he wanted to keep me on board. Making the case for Nairobi was easy: I pretended, once again, to be running towards something rather than running away.

  After the Mau Mau rebellion, the state of emergency, the horror of the detention camps, the torture and the murders, it was clear that independence for Kenya was a given. I wanted to be there to witness it. I felt, somewhat arrogantly I know, that I deserved a good news story. I assumed I could find one in Africa. It’s hard to believe now that I could have been so naïve.

  I arrived in Nairobi in February 1963 and at the end of the year, I covered the country’s independence and met the man who would teach me to love again. What gluttony! To seize another chance at love after all I had done. What can I say, Diane? These are the cards I was dealt. I may have stacked the deck a little but it was not all my doing. I was granted, or I granted myself, a second chance at life and now I found another love. It seemed too much and indeed it was. Do not despair though, Diane. The delayed punishment now coming my way is both delightfully vindictive and wonderfully apt.

  I loved Kenya. For a time, I thought I would live out the rest of my days there. I realise I will come across as a ludicrously dewy-eyed white tourist but I can’t help it. I was captivated by the colours, the heat, the chaos and noise of the street markets, the depth of the inky night skies with their freckling of stars, the unbounded sweep of the savannahs and the ponderous grandeur of herds of elephants trudging through low scrub. I felt truly alive for the first time in decades.

  I thrilled to a certain loucheness I found in Nairobi, a refusal of consequences. Or maybe I am remaking a city, and indeed a country, in my own image. That would not be beyond me. By the time I got to Kenya, I no longer believed in consequences. I refused them their due. Maybe there was nothing quintessentially louche in the clammy heat, the long, hot nights, the intoxicating air after early afternoon downpours. Maybe it was all me. Me, me, me. Kenya was what I wanted it to be. What I needed it to be.

  I rented a low bungalow in Muthaiga, not far from the diplomats’ residences and the notorious but now rather seedy Muthaiga Country Club. I hired a driver, a heavyset man from the Luo tribe called Norbert. He wore a black leather jacket in all weather and had a thrilling disregard for any and all driving regulations. At best, he regarded the rules of the road as guidance for other less skilled individuals. At worst, they were challenges.

  I dived into the job, rediscovering the enthusiasm that had propelled me to Korea and Vietnam. Kenya was at a crossroads and the potential thrilled me. I had seen too much of countries laboriously rebuilding after war or blindly wandering down the path to conflict again. I needed hope and I found it in 1963 in Nairobi.

  I reported from the slums of the capital, from the Indian Ocean coast around Mombasa where monkeys chattered in the palm trees and dhows glided lazily beyond the reefs, and from the sprawling farms of British settlers who couldn’t believe the natives were actually going to take over. These men and women reminded me of Neville Chamberlain: they too supposed that their stubborn refusal to believe in the inevitable could change the course of history. Children with their hands over their eyes, convinced that no one could see them. I pitied them and I despised them. I realise now that I was too harsh. Their views had been forged in battle – they had lived in fear of being hacked to death and had seen neighbours and children murdered. I should have recognised the anger that fuelled their refusal to accept the obvious. But I wanted to forget those feelings. I wanted a good news story for once.

  However, I could not totally ignore the other side and there is always another side. We had all heard whispers of the torture of Kikuyu men, women and children in the detention camps set up during the state of emergency, although details and numbers were disputed. They are still being disputed today. There is no doubt that during the 1950s Kenya was often a violent, brutal place for its own people, particularly the Kikuyu tribe, but by the time I arrived, the price of freedom had mostly been paid. The labour pains had reached a climax and a new life was ready to be born. Of course, there was excruciating poverty and need and it was there if you wanted to see it but if you didn’t want to, it was easily avoided. Especially around Muthaiga. You’ve probably heard stories of the orgies and drug-fuelled parties that allegedly took place at the club, Diane? I can’t say I ever saw anything too terrible – things had quietened down considerably since the heady 1920s and the murder of the Earl of Erroll. On the few occasions I went to the club, the misdemeanours I witnessed were disappointingly tame: a few people staggering around in a drunken stupor, the odd semi-naked couple running across the lawn and the occasional fist-fight, sometimes over a woman. But it was no Sodom and Gomorrah by 1963.

  Independence was declared on December 12th. I stood near the dais in Uhuru Park in the centre of the city as the Duke of Edinburgh handed over the articles of independence to Jomo Kenyatta, who wore his customary fez-like hat and held his traditional fly whisk throughout the ceremony. At midnight, the Union Jack was lowered and the red-black-green-and-white flag of Kenya was raised. People danced and cried and sang and fireworks exploded overhead and there was something beautiful and pure about this birth of a nation despite the b
izarre, unsettling juxtaposition of British pomp and African pageantry. Even a hardened hack like myself couldn’t help but feel uplifted. I do, however, remember feeling concerned when I was told that the red in the flag signified the blood spilled to achieve freedom. I never did trust gains made through the shedding of blood. Blood meant sacrifice and in my experience, sacrifice never went unpunished.

  I had been frantically busy for weeks, writing about the prospects for Africa’s newest country, interviewing settlers and slum dwellers and politicians. And despite my emotional response on the day itself, my articles were characteristically prescient. I did raise the spectre of corruption, of tribalism, of a cronyism encouraged for decades by British rule. Today, I read of Kenya and it does not cheer me at all to find that I was right. All the potential that I pretended I could believe in on that December day was illusory. We British had already done too much damage. The baby never had a chance, some might say.

  The day before independence, I was invited to Government House in Nairobi for what was billed as an informal farewell to the British. The Duke was there, this time in a lounge suit, alongside an array of finely dressed members of the Kenyan and white elite. I wandered around the parched garden, feeling ridiculous in my white dress and straw hat and stumbling like a drunk in the high heels I had bought especially for the occasion. I almost never wore dresses by then. One of the greatest things to come out of our war, to my mind, was the fact that women could wear trousers always and everywhere. I had embraced the trend with a passion and I was annoyed that I had to conform to such outdated British convention in such an exotic location.

  I tottered to the edge of the garden and leaned gratefully against a palm tree. Looking around at the crowd, I wondered if any of the smug-looking guests had been in the Mau Mau and had taken the legendary oath to drive out the white settlers. I tried to guess which demure British wives had slept with loaded revolvers under their pillows as their husbands patrolled Nairobi’s streets during the state of emergency. I was thoroughly enjoying my fantasies until a tall man with a lean fox-like face stopped beside me. His fair hair was thinning on top and there were deep lines etched around his mouth, like a pair of parentheses. His eyes were a startling slate-grey and there was something infinitely capable about his sinewy frame. In his crumpled cream suit and brown loafers, he looked as uncomfortable as I felt. He glanced at my notebook.

  “I suppose you’re one of those hailing the dawn of a bright new era,” he said.

  I tried to place his accent. The words were perfectly correct but the clipped way he uttered them was definitely not English, or South African, my second choice for a white man at such a grand do.

  “Well, isn’t it?” I replied, slightly stung by his dismissive tone.

  “A new era, yes. But not necessarily a bright one. But I suppose I must not spoil the party.”

  He fell silent, morosely sipping his drink and running a hand through his limp hair as he surveyed the guests in their suits, summer dresses and colourful kangas. I felt unreasonably annoyed that he was raining on this admittedly elitist parade. It was one thing to harbour my own doubts but I didn’t want to hear them voiced by someone else on this day. I thought about moving away from the palm tree’s precious shade. I had enough quotes already for the piece I planned to write and I did not feel up to engaging in conversation with another white doomsayer. I had heard enough of their arguments and while I agreed with some of their concerns, I wanted to postpone my natural cynicism for another 24 hours.

  “Who do you write for?” he asked.

  When I told him, he shook his head.

  “Never heard of it but I do not read very often.”

  “A man of the soil? Brawn over brain?” I said tartly.

  “Nothing is wrong with that,” he replied slowly. “Humans have been writing forever and I cannot see what good it has done.”

  Despite myself, I laughed. His tone was so disparaging and he looked so very cross that I couldn’t help myself.

  “Go on, then. What’s your prediction for Kenya’s future? You seem to consider yourself a bit of an expert,” I said.

  He turned to me, seemingly surprised by my mirth but too uncertain of the reason to join in. Definitely not a native English speaker, I thought.

  “It will be the same as before. Except this time the blacks will be in charge. This time, they will keep the others under. They will do the stealing and the oppressing and the looting. It will be the same as everywhere else. This… This kind of… What is that English word I love, yes, farce… This kind of farce makes me feel sick. So many people, all with blood on their hands, all puffed up like peacocks, all this entitlement but no sense of responsibility.”

  He pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and mopped his brow.

  “Things will be the same because people are the same, whatever the place, whatever the colour of their skin.”

  “My goodness, you’re not very optimistic, are you?”

  He turned and fixed his penetrating eyes on me. I blushed and it had been years since I did that. I felt naked before him as though he could read the darkest recesses of my mind.

  “And you are optimistic? You must not be very good at your job if so,” he said.

  “You’re very blunt,” I said, feeling my cheeks redden even more. “And annoyingly judgmental, if you don’t mind me saying so. You know nothing about me. How dare you jump to conclusions.”

  “And yet that is what you did just now,” he said. “You judged me. Brawn over brain, you said. And just because I do not read your magazine.”

  “Newspaper,” I said hotly.

  “Fine, so newspaper. There is no difference. My point is there are not only two ways to be. One can know things without reading them in newspapers or books or magazines. One does not have to be ignorant just because one doesn’t read all the day. But I imagine that does not suit the way you see the world. It is funny to me how you British are. So rigid, so inflexible in your ideas and often very, very wrong.”

  He finished his drink, burped demurely and bowed his head.

  “Anyway, we shall see, I suppose. We shall see what happens.”

  He started to walk away but I grabbed his arm, alarmed and excited by my own passion.

  “You are very sure in your assumptions about the British. Let me at least know where you are from so that I can make my own snap judgments.”

  “I am from the Netherlands. But I am not representative of all the Dutch. Obviously. Since I am here.”

  He laughed then, a rough, barking sound.

  “And so, I should imagine you may not be representative of all the British. Since you too are here. I apologise for my assumptions. I may have been wrong about your countrymen.”

  “But not about me? Is that what you mean?”

  He stepped backwards and then with a bizarrely ostentatious wave of his hand, he disappeared back into the crowd.

  It was a long time since I had felt so angry and so offended and so very alive.

  CHAPTER 24

  A few weeks later, on a sweltering January day, I was sitting outside a popular roadside bar halfway between Nairobi and Naivasha. I’d been to interview some settlers around the lake and I was eager to get back to my peaceful, jacaranda-shaded home where I hoped to turn the scribbled fragments in my spiral notebook into something thoughtful about the future of the nation. But Norbert was hungry and I knew better than to force the man to drive on an empty stomach. While he ate at a roadside kiosk, I went into the bar for a beer. I was sitting outside, doodling in my notebook and wondering whether I should travel to neighbouring Uganda to see how independence was working out there, when I heard a plane approaching. There was a flat strip of grass to my right and I’d been told that white settlers sometimes flew in from the surrounding farms for a drink at the bar before sundown. It had sounded too exotic to be true so I was eager to spot one of these mythical everyday pilots. Remember, Diane, flying was still quite a rarity then. I straightened up excitedly as
the small, twin-engine plane touched down and then gasped as it skidded slightly on the parched, brown grass. It taxied to a halt and a man hopped easily from the cockpit. The sun was behind him so all I could tell was that he was very tall. He strode towards the terrace where I was sitting in the corner, hopped over the small wooden fence and walked straight to the bar. I resisted the urge to turn around.

  “Stijn, man! Karibu. Cutting it a bit fine if you want to be home by dark?” the barman said loudly.

  “Not going home this time, my man. Heading to Nairobi. I was a little thirsty there and I thought I’d stop off at my favourite watering hole.”

  The barman’s reply was drowned out as a hyena screeched somewhere in the dusky scrubland stretching between the bar and the eggshell blue hills floating on the horizon.

  I could bear it no longer. I twisted around in my seat just as the lanky man at the bar turned. We stared at each other for a long moment and then he did it again. The ostentatious wave with a flourish of his long fingers. He walked over, gestured to the empty chair beside me and sat, plonking his beer down so hard that the rickety table shook.

  “Did you enjoy the rest of the party?” he said.

  “I did. It got steadily better, in fact,” I said. “I managed to find quite a lot of optimistic people, some of whom weren’t English and others who were not even necessarily well-read.”

  He grunted but his lips were twitching.

  “So what are you doing here?”

  I told him about my reporting trip. He asked who I had spoken to and laughed loud and long when I told him that I did not feel comfortable discussing my sources with a stranger. I blushed again. This blunt Dutch man with his unsettling eyes really knew how to irritate me and yet a part of me was thoroughly enjoying the conversation.

  He caught me looking at his plane.

  “Do you fly?” he asked.

  I burst out laughing.

  “What a question. Do many people say yes?”