to divide it and put its pieces into the deep freezer. That would be cheaper than buying fresh meat every week. Baba asked the askari posted at the front gate of the small complex where we lived where he might find the place where this sort of service was offered. The guard told him he could buy a sheep at Dagoretti Corner or in Kibera – the massive slum across the road and past the golf course. He urged Baba not to go there himself. ‘I will do it for you, sir,’ he suggested. He wanted to earn some extra money, but there was something else there, something more urgent. He wanted to protect us – with our polished shoes and our pan-African aspirations. He wanted to prevent us from seeing Nairobi’s gaunt and pock-marked buttocks.
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At Nairobi Academy, the roster of students was an amalgam of Patels and Richardsons and Kariukis. All our parents were intent on providing us with a sound British education. Every morning we would start the day by singing the Kenyan national anthem. Then we would recite our times tables by rote. ‘Three times one is three. Three times two is six. Three times three is nine.’ We spoke as one. Those who stumbled were rapped on the knuckles. We only stopped when we had done the twelve times table. The ones who sat at the front, with their uniforms orderly and neat, were always correct. Mrs Richards kept her eyes on the ones who sat at the back. They mumbled and messed up though they were less afraid of the ruler than I ever was.
Although we read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and idolised them all, it never occurred to me to want to be blonde and American. No one at school was as confident or as beautiful as Ethel Wanjiku. While my socks inevitably drifted down to my skinny ankles, Ethel’s stayed up all day, every single day. Her legs were straight and brown and slightly plump in that perfect way. She had calves that were not too skinny and her pinafore never seemed to crease. She had plaited hair that touched her shoulders and was held in place by two immaculate dark-green barrettes that perfectly matched our dark-green cardigans.
When I tried to get Mummy to do my hair like that she said it wasn’t long enough. I had to be content with six scrappy cornrows going backwards. No ribbons, no barrettes. Not even a hairpin. When I begged Mummy at least to let me have green rubber bands to go with my uniform she said, ‘School is not a modelling competition. Concentrate on your books, not your looks, my girl.’ Often by the middle of the week there were little kinky balls at the nape of my neck and the lines of scalp between each braid were no longer so clear. It was hard not to be jealous of Ethel.
Still, I had a few things going for me. One of them was my love of reading. I don’t remember a time I didn’t know how to read. When I was still very small – maybe four or five – I would crawl into Baba’s lap and read along silently, not understanding the meaning of the words but knowing how to put them together.
Shortly after we started at Nairobi Academy, Mummy came up with a new rule. If there were no visitors, then we would do our chores and play, and then, by 3 p.m., we would be in our bedroom, reading. Mandla and Zeng would sometimes giggle and try to talk. Often, they would fall asleep.
I never did. I curled up and read, even if my eyes were droopy. The stories were a respite – I could be a dragon or a princess, a beggar or a thief. And after a while I realised I could write, too. In real life, I may have envied Ethel, but on the page I could be her or Gogo Lindi. In the stories I scribbled on those quiet Sunday afternoons I could be anyone, anywhere.
We could afford to go to Nairobi Academy because Baba was now an employee of the United Nations. In Lusaka he had volunteered for the United Nations Environment Programme. After he finished his degree, he had been offered a chance to go to Kenya as a proper employee. The transition served us well but it wasn’t enough to allay the bigger fears he and Mummy had.
The ANC had a tenuous presence in Kenya. The community that had nurtured us in Zambia simply didn’t exist here. For one thing, Zambia was geographically much closer to South Africa. It was a leading member of the Frontline States, so the threat and fear of apartheid among ordinary Zambians and within the ANC community had been more significant. But more importantly, unlike President Kaunda, President Moi was not invested in the future of black South Africa, so our fate was not inextricably linked to the fate of his own country. Moi was hardly enthused by the idea of educating and ministering to the health needs of his own people. Like many of Africa’s rulers in the 1980s, he had no great moral agenda and was interested in little beyond maintaining power.
Kenya pulsed with money. It was East Africa’s regional financial nerve centre, yet it had no real political heart. Mummy and Baba knew that, unlike Zambia or Tanzania or Mozambique – countries where the Big Men understood the power of ideas – Kenya would not defend or protect them if times got rough. It would offer nothing on the basis of solidarity.
Our situation was compounded by our legal status, which was ad hoc and tenuous. It was clear that my sisters and I would need citizenship. The older we got, the more urgent this issue became.
At the same time, inside South Africa the fight against apartheid was heating up. The regime was getting more brutal and, in response, activists were becoming increasingly militant, as were millions of ordinary black South Africans inside the country. Week after week there were funerals for murdered activists. Hundreds gathered to mourn, and each event turned into a rally. There were strikes and burning tyres, round-ups of comrades, reports of the dead and the tortured.
It was a dark and difficult time, yet it was imbued with a spare sort of hope. Our life in Kenya seemed many miles away from South Africa and freedom seemed to be just a faint outline – a sort of hologram we could put our fingers to but couldn’t feel.
This Africa held nothing in store for us. Kenya was not Zambia. There was no revolutionary spirit; there was only the sort of crass mobility that would never protect us. So, Mummy and Baba made a plan.
In 1984, as South Africa began its final paroxysms, the last decade before independence when freedom seemed both very far away and impossibly close, we got on a plane headed for Canada. Mummy and Baba left, seeking a place where we might have more secure tenure in the future – where we might have a chance at the kinds of opportunities that accompany the terrain of citizenship and belonging.
We left for yet another country, a place where everything would be clean and new and where Mummy and Baba thought nothing could hurt us.
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O! Canada
THE IMPETUS FOR the move to North America was practical. We had a good life in Nairobi, but Baba was technically stateless, which meant that, in time, my sisters and I would be too. In addition, as a woman, Mummy – who wasn’t a terrorist and had a perfectly legitimate passport – couldn’t pass her Swazi citizenship on to us.
When we were babies, Mummy had managed to wangle favours and talk to Big Men. She would smile sweetly in a waiting room, she would speak softly and not say a word about her accounting diploma or the Toyota Corolla she drove. She would arrive in a doek and look down and they would nod brusquely and say, ‘Okay ntombazana, sizobona.’ Not a definitive ‘yes’ but not a ‘no’ either. Sometimes they would speak sternly, reminding her that it wasn’t their fault that she had married a guerrilla, which they would pronounce ‘gorilla’. And in time, Mummy knew, the Big Men would demand more from her than she was prepared to part with, or that someone in the machine would simply say ‘no’ and her children would be stranded without identities.
Leaving Nairobi to seek a future that could guarantee us documents and a certain stability could only have been Mummy’s choice.
Ever the accountant, she was prudent but knew when to champion a short-term venture that would have long-term payoffs. Baba had probably resisted because freedom would one day come; because the kids would be fine; because we would find a way. In the end, her logic and determination would have worn him down. ‘Freedom will come,’ I can hear her say, ‘but in the meantime, there is life.’
We needed to be somewhere, to rest in safety while the drums of war beat elsewhere.
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In photographs taken in the