PHOTOGRAPHS
Mama is grief, the one clinging onto a portrait size photograph. She is the photograph’s cold eyes, the dimness of its cold hunch, the smile hanging in other photograph encasings under thin films of dusty layers gathered over the years on glass coverings. This grief has sprouted a withering, a sheave of crunchy petals in the carcass of defunct bliss, roasted like the dust on the glass. Mama is the remains of despair, the soft dirge in her breathing, the dying flames of a flickering lantern, and the death of her husband in the photograph.
She lets this photograph drop from her hands. The photograph finds itself in my aunt Amulioto’s hands. Those hands with a heart the size of big footprints, the empathy you gulp from a glass of water when you are thirsty. My eyes follow the hands up the owl rimmed bespectacled face in the photograph. From it I unstring a memory. The one he bought me my first ever Kaunda suit and taught me how to tie shoelaces. I was then just a boy and he was this prodigy cracking the cryptic codes of all my curiosities, boyhood curiosities, the wonderful curiosities of happy years with papa. The photograph is rested on the coffee table beneath my sigh.
“God gives and takes.”
“Very true, on this earth, we came naked.”
“And we shall return naked.”
“You must stand in his memory, our son.”
“Like the cornerstone of the home.”
I breathe in. So what is, to be the cornerstone, isn’t it the darkness I’m floundering through, standing stiff and no wrinkle on my face, only smiling for strength, making sure I drop no tear from weakness so that mama doesn’t rise in despair and my sister sitting beside her doesn’t sink deeper into sobs over papa’s death. And how does one balance being a man and burying a lost estranged father so that they don’t look the parody that I am: a pale shadow of mourning and the grief in weeping beside his grave, the prodigal son, the unostentatious, and the estranged. In my anxiety, this air of grief breaks into tiny bits of memory.
So, my thoughts flounder. Achando sobs. My sister’s stern voice is in her sobs: go back to that forsaken pit where hermit of the blackened hearts, you crawled from. After all, you and papa never walked a mutual path. Who have you become? No longer do we identify you in our faces, not even in the yellowing old family photos where in some you are in tiny shorts nibbling at your school tie; cobwebs in the house corners have come and gone and here you are; the blot in the mirror of grief, the itch on our conscience, the wild cactus in dandelions; the stench of a strange city. Who are you? The sobs fade in my guilt.
I was the prodigal son. I went to South Sudan after the silencing of guns: the scraggy haired young dreamer with a Kodak camera, I jumped on the wagon of dreams. I left without anyone knowing where I had gone. I undressed from apprehension and went to Juba, that city dressing me in its dust, unpacking its silenced guns in my anxiety; denuding from years of deafening gunshots. I am the fool that phoned Achando on my arrival in Juba.
“You have a death wish,” my sister had blasted me.
“I’m safe,” my reply had been stiff.
And papa, if only his photograph could speak. In those days he told Achando I had made a mockery of logic and signed my life away. He was certain I had become a living corpse. If I had craved for suicide with such bravado; he owned countless ropes, enough rafters in the cowshed and there had been no heroism in draining a sugar free coke, crunching ginger biscuits from airport duty-free shops, ogling at air hostesses in some KQ Boeing, only to plunge into dragging the family pride through the muck of war statistics; he jested. I presumed he had imagined me returning headless, and my incomplete body stuffed in a makeshift coffin, my head decapitated by a Kalashnikov or my limbs hacked by an IED. Who could blame him— famine, bloody deaths, groaning tanks ramming through buildings, rasping rockets stinging into motorcades, Apache helicopter gunships rumbling in the skies and relentless civil bloodshed in that oil-rich parch over the great Sudan of Khartoum flourishing, filled the international press stories which had been for years our staple diet. Many fathers would have sold their souls to buy sense and pump it into their sons that they should never peep into such uncanny misadventures as the one in the popular war stories I had delved into, even at the prospects of a peace deal, or the Juba economic boom.
My leaving had incensed the patriarch but nothing like the undisciplined cactus that had once pricked him when he was picking weeds from his dandelion garden. Or neither as my unimpressive wearing Sanyo watches on the right wrist and not the left wrist had wrested peace from him. Or my combing hair forwards and not backwards which he claimed effeminate, whereas looking in the mirror, I cherished the image of emancipation. All these were incomparable to the great sin of opening the smoky door into juba.
In Juba, after all, the bloody war was dead. Life pulsed in a peace treaty. I took a perfect Kodak shot of a freedom fighter’s statue. The tallness of its height was a post-war nation taking shape. The freedom fighter’s sons considered my immigration a preying on their blood and sweat. Blood and sweat they had paid for with his death. I the emigree from decades of potholes, dysfunctional public libraries, dead factories, overrunning sewerage, water cuts, power cuts, egregious sores of affliction, mountains of insurmountable debt, bread stolen from my craving hands; I was endowed with the reality of my predicament; I knew I was sticking my dreams out and stories from Johannesburg and other South African tales of the Makwerekwere convolutions were summoned into my heart.
Fear wasn’t my heart but the new world I added to the shots of my Kodak camera, the world of decaying smiles, khat chewing taxi drivers and scraggy market women. The blanket of war’s darkness peeling off, atrocity’s aftermath scattered all over in bonnet yawns of bullet-riddled car leftovers, and rundown buildings; the dingy cigarette smoke of hallucinating ex-rebels, spies and hawkers’ scar-splotched faces. And dreams found eyes in the photographs, the tree of a new life. It remained a beautiful memory. I took shots of the White Nile shimmering in the hot sun, and traffic crossing the Bailey Bridge; and the vintage hotels with mostly thick accented American tourists lounging in their luminous blue cigarette smoke; diplomats; the loud-mouthed UN military expatriates; self-righteous journalists sticking out their stained reputation of noisy patrons wastefully drunk on Heineken cans and whisky punch in their Ozymandias pomposity: headlines soaked in hubris. These reflections I arrested in numerous shots opening up the starry sky of my new world.
“You’ll not be returning to Juba I hope,” Amulioto plucks me from my wavering into the past. It is late in the afternoon, three hours after papa’s burial.
“He knows his mother needs him,” my uncle her husband beside her emphasises. He is playing with a skullcap rolling it in circles. I’m certain he is not speaking his heart. He is no imperfect squirrel. He is one of those camouflaging animals that flourish in enrobing themselves with a benefactor’s sheepskin.
“Mama is a widow now, she requires protection,” Amulioto out of nothing else left to say, offers audacious wisdom. And consensus swings around it in the nodding of everyone’s head. Papa’s photograph stares at me. Nobody needs to say it. The photograph says as much. I am the man supposed to offer the protection.
And mama, Amulioto, her husband and I finally huddle over late lunch, some chicken stew and millet flour ugali. Mama is silent. But in the way she scans me, her eyes dilated and expectantly still, I can smell that her appetite for the food has been made cold in her conscientious poring over Amulioto’s question sterilized in between us. I smile and circumvent her expectations. I grab a bottle of mineral water from a tray and gulp its iciness down my throat. There is the overwhelming chance I will not give a straight answer. How can straight be birthed from crooked, how? I allow the water to wash the saltiness from my thoughts. I have bitten my lower lip.
*
There is solitude in pain that has to crust in the wound, and my lip needs to heal. I can’t bear my tongue licking over it. From mama’s eyes, in my attempt to distract from the wound’s solitude, I meet vacuity sprouting in her gaze. A diversion into papa’s memories from dusty photographs—as I flirt with the stark presence of his immortal absence, running away from that vacuity of mama’s vacant gazes and lengthy silences that indict me—unearths darkness. I sit my thoughts in the ambivalence of a troubled mind.
Pity and terror jump over each other in my head. Achando is arranging photographs in an old album. Why isn’t anyone thinking about her; or the carnations on the grave that have turned colour; or papa’s funeral photograph that today lies on its stomach, seven days after the burial. Or mama, who will have to undergo widowhood’s final rituals like —esiinini. She will have to send papa’s relatives away with some gifts then offer tokens of his clothes to the households in this ritual of the ghosts.
I decide to take a stroll into the vast tree groves enclosing the front courtyard beyond a cluster of geraniums in papa’s courtyard. It’s in the late afternoon. The sound of crunching chocolate joins me; it’s my sister, a chocolate bar in the grasp of her fingers.
“What shall happen?”
I know Achando is asking about mama. I snap at an overhanging guava branch laden with yellow-green ripe mapera.
“I don’t know,” I mumble, as I dig my teeth into a juicy mapera.
“You don’t have to return,” she says. I chuckle as some mapera juice trickles between my fingers. I lick it away.
“Seriously!”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about her.”
“There is nothing I can do,” I take another bite, “you know there is nothing I can do.”
“Really?”
I nod.
“She is scared that ethnic factions are forming again and there’s another fermenting war, the festered of them all which will break out in Juba and you will not return alive if you go back. She is afraid you are the soul of a wild cactus on foreign soil. She is afraid she will bury her only son and be left with a bottomless hole in her twilight dreams. Don’t they say that war can never stop in Juba? The curse of black gold is the famished owl that has perched on an old acacia to wither the cactus of that land. That the Americans, the Russians, Saudis and Iranians like vultures intersecting in their greed, are interested in the direction the wheel of fortune rolls.”
“I never knew you to ever have been that seriously geopolitical.” I attempt tact from magnanimity’s hand, the offer of another juicy mapera. She blatantly ignores my bribe.
“Has Juba chopped to pieces a brilliant sensitivity?” She rolls her eyes in the way she does whenever she catches the sight of a crawling caterpillar, the beast which spikes her heart into a strange beat and sometimes thunks it into the pit of her stomach.
I haven’t forgotten her allergy. I stray my eyes to her chocolate bar. There is in my head a ploy to avoid the probing twist her conversation is turning into; a figuring out the best approach to vaporize her fears.
“Look, siz,” I wipe my forehead with the back of my hand, “mapera gives you stomach cramps but papa’s death manufactured an endless migraine in me. There’re heavy fetters around my neck and over the blades of my grieving shoulders pulling against my desire to live free. Remember how I left. I hadn’t properly reconciled with the patriarch, I shoulder the burden of a twisted prodigal son, now that he is cold meat and rotting bones in the earth. And there is a life in full blossom, beyond resetting, I have planted elsewhere. My teeth are dug in ice, frozen. And even if I die, or retrieve my teeth from the ice, mama will not be left with an empty sky. In my place, there will be the gleaming Venus of a strong woman. I can’t see a returning home for me.”
“Cheap, nonsense, you are talking cheap nonsense. God made you the son. Only a son shall return and build mama’s years of good fortune and love as her youthful days of marriage and love did. Why are we even arguing over this? You are the embodiment of papa’s continuity. Mama can only live seeing her husband in her son and not her daughter. Hasn’t she told you he forgave you, he understood you had to go make a living, become a man, and that he was once young and had made some foolish decisions in the process of himself becoming.”
“It’s not about his forgiveness. You know I hadn’t had the privilege of a proper atonement for my transgressions. A stiff neck planted on my shoulders for the three years denied me life. I first must transplant the stiffness with forgiveness. But do I have room for redemption? Can anyone ever pay my ransom? After papa’s first visit to the oncologist mama called, I remember I heard her tears groan in the pit of my stomach when she dropped the bombshell and that was it. I felt sorry but you see I didn’t talk to him. I didn’t even make a trip as she wished. I did nothing. I should have done something more for mama’s sake. I should have been a man. After staying away for years, staying away from him, it would have been better I had stayed away.”
“Rubbish! You sent W.U money. The dollars helped relieve the monstrous chemotherapy bills. And don’t talk such chicken pooh, such nonsense again because we have all seen your great dedication in this funeral. There’s no better atonement. You know our Amuliotos kept their eccentric appetites out of papa’s funeral because you stood firm like a son otherwise they would have called for the land title deed. Sooner or later I see them trudge their greed here. And you must be here to chop off the feet and the heads of their greed. Mama is proud of you, all this time she has been talking about how you stopped uncle Amulioto the senior from enforcing a burial date in their favour until she gave her date.”
“My place here is an echo in a valley.”
“Bro, there must be frogs croaking in your ears, why are you listening to the song of amphibians and not listening to me? Don’t you realize you are the cornerstone, mama’s song of comfort?”
I take an implausible bite into the third mapera. We are now facing papa’s gate on the right of the vast tree groves: the guava, the crotons, the scarlet flowered fountains, the cypresses and the yellow-flowered olusiola trees, our feet thudding into our thoughts. I sweep my eyes over these trees before I turn to Achando. A party of hornbills flaps overhead, trailed by the echo of their guttural cries.
“Tell me about that doktari.” Her resilience fades in a blush.
I push, “Has he proposed?” Her blush fattens into dimples.
“When are bulls and cows squelching into this compound? Should I prepare to break my legs with lipala, our indomitable dance, and prepare uncle Amulioto to light grandfather’s old Optimus lamp in the night of your party, drink himself into a piss with busaa as he gyrates through the mwana wa amberi rhythms and Kalwoto guitars, a dust devil, walking around with the lamp like some fraudulent Diogenes, reincarnating his Afro gramophone heydays in the gyration, and of course the uninvited crows will show up to indulge, do I?”
She shakes her head looking straight into my eyes. She crumples the emptied brittle wrapper of the chocolate bar into a ball and hurls it in her next words.
“Not yet. Doktari is still weighing his options—”
“Weighing? He better be urgent with his stethoscope before he ends up with his heavy heart in empty hands to weigh.”
“You sound so convicted about dotari’s chances.”
“Lawyers and doctors, you have too much book sitting in your heads and no life running in your hearts. And that is why you should get a new boyfriend before uncle Amulioto dies with the blessing of his saliva for your bride price.”
A short but heavy curtain of awkward silence falls between us.
“With all those teeth out of his mouth, and still he has great saliva and a big dog’s appetite. Take me to this market selling hot boyfriends,” she rips into the silence, “I am hungry.”
I chuckle, “A girl should never put her legs in the still part of a river and her eggs in a basket with holes, the timeless fermented wisdom of river Nzoia?”
She chuckles, “I don’t mind the man’s tribe. Big bro, leave that basket to me, you three wise men in one stereotype. And since when were you in a girl’s body to understand.”
“I don’t have to be in a girl’s body to understand a girl. And yeah, you are iron. Red and hot, let it be remembered. I hope you take my wisdom seriously though.”
“What’s wrong with you? Return home. Please return. I see nothing in that Juba photograph you gifted me.”
“You see nothing? I see so much. I see lots of constructions in a man’s dream. That youthful metropolis is not the shadow of death or a dingy slaughterhouse splurging with rivers of blood. On the contrary, it is a magnificent haven with people toiling for their lives like the hawkers and their trays, the tailors and their rattling sewing machines, the cobblers and their mending tools, the newspaper vendors and their rolls of paper, the teachers and any everyday person. It is just like Nairobi, Johannesburg or Lagos, a city, a haven for me. It is not the thrones of lords of war, and it’s not a city of dogs of war. It is the light of great beauty in its flocks of wild pigeons, in its stray dogs, in its cats and its sultry heat and bountiful hauls of tranquillity. It is not an industrial-military complexity of Mujahedeen Taliban proportions as we read in our newspapers, listen over the radio and watch on TV to fill our empty days. It is not the hollow eyes of a hungry child scrapping from a bowl with his ribs sticking out, flies buzzing around him and hordes of vultures waiting in the wings for his carcass. It is not a paradise neither the ancient hanging gardens of Babylon. It is the fishing boats of the Nile. It is the wild cactus that pricks yet is still adored beyond its pain. It’s the ubiquitous hibiscus found in every eye that seeks repose. I call it freedom. It is me finding myself a shadow in the valley, watching the miracle of flesh joining onto bones. It is me, the cactus, grafted in the rich fertile soils of peace by God’s mercy. It is Invictus.”
“Something about this Juba has sprouted you into a mystical plant.”
She is right. But there can’t be bitter fruit. I have a wife and twins back in Juba: Omaya and Ajuma: ones I named after papa and mama.
*
On papa’s first death anniversary, I’m looking at their photograph, thinking about home. It is raining in Juba. I’m thinking about mama standing beside him. I lied to her that I was coming here to resign from my English teaching post and return. I have made three trips back home and piled stacks of empty promises. During the last trip, I learnt that papa’s final wish was for me to return home and build a house for myself. And he wanted Achando to find a man, a man like this man in the photograph; a man with a Volkswagen beetle, a big smile and a bungalow. On this anniversary I have made up my mind. I will take a photograph of my wife, my two children and carry it with me on my next trip home.

Between Mombasa and now

I pack my troubles in a sigh and stretch them out of bed in half sleepy eyes. I flick on the light. Its flash disorients for a little while. In night shorts, I flounder my way through scattered pieces of my clothing. On the floor, my other shorts have mingled with remnants of chiffon dresses and scarves in a perfect irregular heap. After less than seventy-two hours disorientation is the irregular heap of messed up clothes on the floor. There are paralyzed moths on the carpet scattered in the disorder in which they sneaked in through the window louvres that remain open. A cold streak of wind tickles my ears. On the table sit glossy entertainment magazines partly covering peeping earrings most likely abandoned in haste. The living room is a beautiful mess. I shut the louvres before turning on the TV to scan over a catalogue of international news channels: BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, Sky News, CNN and then back. A significant rush of blood wheels through my veins. I switch from the TV and return my thoughts to the Nairobi railway terminus, three months ago.

*

I was taking a trip from Nairobi to Mombasa in the modern Nairobi-Mombasa Express train on the Chinese built Standard gauge railway (SGR). The term that starts the year had been a protracted school routine that was as flat as an overplayed FM pop song. So, I breathed an obese sigh when the principal, a man whose black turtle suits were synonymous with his moustache, gave his flowery end of school term speech. We had sipped at Cokes, Fantas and Sprites surreptitiously snacking on bits deflowering the man’s speech. It was in the following Saturday morning after the principal’s stuffy speech that I found my way to the Syokimau railway terminus, having booked my ticket a month earlier in advance. It was the Easter season, and everyone would be flocking to the coast, climbing into a smoky country bus to ocha, driving their loftiness into national parks or singing to the memories of their childhood in nostalgic songs, all for the joy of the season. I had booked my ticket in advance to beat the typical mad rush that was an every Easter ritual as my other sister, whom I was visiting for the fourth time, had advised.

Those very early hours of the morning, I needed company and so I settled for reading a Saturday Nation newspaper from a vendor as I sat on a waiting bench beside my tidy suitcase, and waited for the arrival of my train. Unlike the old man in the cry my beloved country movie that had a wife and villagers bidding him farewell gleefully as he boarded a train, I had myself. I kept glancing at the Syokimau terminus public lobby clock. Its hour and minute hand were close. Departure time was in half an hour. Young families, couples, all ages of travellers most of them, the compact majority of Nairobi’s flamboyant bourgeois renaissance crammed the lobby. I skimmed through the newspaper my long fingers perfunctorily flipping through the pages.

“Arsenal.” a voice cut my attention through.

“Arsenal?” I found my lips responding in perplexity

“My football team.” the voice pushed in boldness.

“You are a disciple?”

“Who are your losers?”

“We never walk alone. We are winners.”

“Liverpool,” she screeched. I straight away knew the newspaper was no match of a replacement for this new company.

I dressed my face in a smirk and bundled the newspaper into her hands. She was the daughter of that growing league of women football fans who for many reasons— like their love for nice calves below handsome faces— loved watching football. She stirred a dead man into life with a flicker in her eyes. She from within depths of conviviality procreated leases of life. In the surrender of the newspaper, I rolled my eyes to an evaluating angle to keenly authenticate everything else apart from those eyes. She was short but not as a Volkswagen beetle’s height and her dimples formed after a smile like the one of a fashion magazine model. Maybe perfect is a castle in the air but I felt a melting from the deepest wells of a hungry soul within like a grieving had been soothed and a yearning stirred. These stirred affections, intuitive though, birthed the path to a conquest. And when we got on the train, I discovered she was sitting some three seats ahead of mine. So far yet so near.

As the train scorched itself into a speed, I let her relish the newspaper as much as I had time to trawl composure from unfamiliar faces. My mind splurged with thoughts of how to broach a conversation. Thick baobab arms swung by and yellowish acacia trees shot past like long-distance runners through the glass windows of the train. I felt like grabbing each of them. I found myself dropping into a vision of time’s passage. I had got here, in the train’s clunking, but how?

A year before this trip there was a journey from my hometown Luanda in the hilly west of the country that I made. The journey to Nairobi, to get a job; any job I could lay my skills on. Though I was a qualified high school teacher of English, I was all in to give up my hands onto anything that would transform my anxiety into money. I arrived at my sister’s house and gave my head, extravagant with expectations, a roof. I poured out my plans to her. Atemi backed me up against the dry visions of nothingness before my eyes, the morbid ambiguities of Nairobi’s prospects. I plunged into the hustle of hunting for a job, with a desperation which surprised her. I earned her husband’s admiration. He was very handy.

Nairobi’s first experiences were strenuous. I jumped from one office door to the next. Putting up with acidic-face-slamming, wrapped in the candy of mellow diplomacy, “We will get back to you as soon as we have assessed your documents.” I soldiered on, abating none of my desires. I walked with my father’s cautions, that Nairobi was the house of all tricks and the bed of all dreams, crammed in my fist. There was sweat, but no gnashing of teeth; or tears, only a couple of skipped lunches and a slap in the face, once or thrice, of despair. Many times I haggardly sunk innumerable hollow groans of desperation into one particular sofa I preferred. My sister’s piteous heart came to her face every of these times. But her husband fired me on: “Nairobi constructs men out of boys.” Something electrifying in those words ignited me. I grabbed that fire right into my arteries from his deep, thoughtful eyes.  Hadn’t I come to be a man, to be a lion of the lions of the concrete jungle of Nairobi? Then if it constructed men, wasn’t I mortar and concrete enough? I was. Then to be among them, counted among the brave at the fronts, not the weaklings on the fringes, was inevitably something my spirit had a yearning for. I endured the hell of rush hours, in the daily grime of traffics, in the sickness of the cut-throat hustle, and leant to smell conmen who fronted their opportunities in the disguise of employment agents. They hawked promises like their first class visas to the Emirates of the Middle East on scruffy placards in dingy River Road alleys, some promising magic, and some selling untold miracles of profound magnitudes. Nairobi. I was vigilant. Finally, I beat it at its game. I lucked on a temporary teaching job in an Indian owned private school, as an English teacher. The salary wasn’t much, but it allowed me a few luxuries like infrequent visits to the shopping mall. I counted my luck and life started. It was something. I got myself a modest apartment whose rent wouldn’t leave me sleeping hungry or crawling back to beg from my sister. I send my father a message and he said he was happy for me. I was happy with everything.

Recycling memories on that train, the girl on the train in my head, I felt deep satisfaction. I figured she could be anything. Only it was too early to think her a wife: it was too grand, in my mid-twenties, I judged myself too inexperienced for marriage. I reclined on my velvet seat let my mind travel in the clunking of the train and waited for the next stop. There I would unload whatever my mind’s baggage was.

Mtito Andei, the next stop before my final stop, and the train groaned and puffed into its first stop from Nairobi. Some tourists— two ladies and a man, all with splotched sunburnt skin— joined incumbent travellers. The man who had glasses pushed back into his hair wore khaki shorts; he held a safari hat in his hand. He covered his awkwardness with a public relations smile as he took his seat. The ladies whose linen trousers flapped their scent around the passengers in the cabin looked discordant beneath their baggy kitenge shirts. They joined their younger faces in seats adjacent to his. He was probably their father. They sat clutching at their backpacks and conversing in German. They reminded me of German classes back in Musingu High school.  Auf wiedersehen Mtito Andei the German goodbye leaped in my head, refreshing my fantasies of making a trip to Berlin, as the train jerked into a fresh motion. In its new chugging, I dozed off.

When I woke up there were activities all over the place: hawkers selling, travellers dragging suitcases, and pockets of tourists getting into creaky old taxis. She was right there before my sleepy red eyes.

“We are in Mombasa,” she chimed. I stirred in my seat.

“This is it.” I managed a phrase.

“So this is it?”

“Mombasa Raha, easy to enter hard to leave.”

She chuckled. I floated in that chuckle. The sun sparkled in the early afternoon. I picked my suitcase as the two of us started disembarking in a body. The humid Mombasa air hit our nostrils with the smell of the sea. My nose caught crustacean odour in the thick air that clung onto our skin as we walked against an incoming breeze from palm fronds that rigidly stuck their tallness in the searching eyes of tourists.

“It’s my first time here,” she opined.

She fumbled to keep in check her very long braids. We wended through masses of human traffic, cars, trucks, buses, honking tuk-tuks and motorbikes outside the terminus’ expansive gates.

A tingle of nervousness struck in her words. I guessed it was our unfamiliarity digging at her sense of guard. My pulse was calm, my eyes intermittently roamed around searching for nothing in particular, and a cough came up my throat from nowhere.

“I’ve come here every year.” The lie popped at the end of my cough, “It is a magnificent place, and the people are friendly. Only don’t bring your Nairobianism of cunning and boisterousness. Mombasa is a Swahili lady, Nairobi is an English conman.”

She smiled. Successfully, I had chunked away monstrous lumps of uneasiness. Perhaps even flattened unfamiliarity into a plateau on which we were both going to walk familiar strangers.

“So many chilling stories about this place have been told to me.”

I looked at her knowingly. She, most likely, was about to reach into a hidden bag of stories. Maybe, fascinating bits of the Mombasa majini tales hidden in there, half-fiction, half-truth. Stories weaved from a variety of experiences.

“There are thousands of those Swahili tales and more twisted ones. There is one old one told of a man from Nairobi who drove a lorry down here to deliver some cargo. On his way back home, he huddled some stray goats roaming the streets into his lorry, to make a quick buck. Do you know? As he drove, people in the street stared some laughed knowingly. Then a bold man, he was sympathetic and stopped him and asked him why he was carrying so many weeping women on his lorry. Imagine what the poor man of big business did? The guy jumped out of his lorry and run out of his senses. He now roams the streets of Mombasa today eating from piles of trash and bleating like a goat. He had huddled stray goats from the streets in the night only to discover they were not goats.”

“But a bunch of women who were goats?”

“Huh! Genies that turned into goats that turned into women.”

“Is it just fables?”

“Who knows?”

“You know, right?”

“Me? No. I just collected the story.”

“You tell it better than the man himself would have told it.”

“No. You are a keen listener, and keen listeners are good storytellers, and…”

“And?”

“Good storytellers are prominent liars.”

She giggled. We stumbled into chatting about ourselves. I learnt that her name was Sonia, a journalist on her first very significant assignment as an intern of the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC). She was going to cover a story on the toxic child sex rings in Malindi, Kilifi and Ukunda. A dangerous assignment, I thought (unless she was lying to me). And she was alone. Drugs were, in many instances, involved in running those rings. Mombasa and its environs had numerous hideouts for drug kingpins. Some had been smoked out of their hibernation and extradited. Others were untouchable with power broking influences that extended to the high echelons of intelligence forces and law enforcement. I didn’t want to scare her kitten face, so I talked about the Mombasa heat and humidity. And when she got to the point she was to board her matatu, to Mtwapa, I let her go in peace as I stood in the confidence that we were not hearing from each other for the last time. She was all over my mind.

We met several times over some seafood lunches; we tried octopus soup once or twice; it could as well have been thrice, and we got close. She was a cautious bird. I took her to Jomo Kenyatta public beach once or twice. We sipped in breezes from the rustling of palm leaves, enjoyed madafu the famous coconut drink. She animated me with stories about her cousin’s husband, the cousin she was putting up with in Mtwapa, she told me about his prurient advances on her.  It boiled me over with jealous when she confided about those lascivious advances from a man I hardly cared to know. Immediately, I knew that was the signal of being in love. Sonia, this stranger I had met on the train, was sending palpitation up my heart.

We kissed in the night before I was to leave for Nairobi, the night I also confessed my affection. She did not push me back; neither did she say a thing. But the expansive Kenyatta public beach spread before our warm breath. And the ocean water gently rushed in waves back and forth in regular intervals under a benign moonlighted Indian Ocean evening sky. A ship cut its way to the Kilindini harbour some miles into the west of the ocean, its magnificent lights floating away. I smelt Sonia’s perfumed braids in the rush of a breeze that blew into my shirt and on my skin. I was holding her close, my hand around her shoulder. The awkward clamminess in my hands slightly discomforted me; my voice staggered out groggy as I tried to disorient my discomfort with some platitude. Then we melted into sudden silence.

Three days afterwards, as I jumped into my train back to Nairobi, she was there with me. I saw her wipe a tear and my hands shook, my throat hardened, I gave my tiny suitcase handle a tight grip such that were it a person it would have protested of my unkindness. I was moved by the power of raw emotion that travels with electrification in the hollowness of a long time’s emptiness being filled. My feet numbed for a few seconds. Here was a girl who had finally beaten me into emotional pulp. But I couldn’t climb down the train or go crazy; I was comforted because she had promised to find me as soon as she returned to Nairobi at the end of her internship. The train jerked into motion as if begrudging my new-found enchantment and she blew me a kiss. I blew it back through the window near my seat, unbelieving my Easter luck, and waved. We attracted some disapproving stares from spectators, and clearly, I was in my world performing for no one, I didn’t care. Blood was some fire in my veins. This fire burnt until I got miles into the jerking that had evolved into droning far away from Mombasa somewhere in the Tsavo savannahs.

*

It has been three months and now two significant weeks since we met. Sonia has given me many nights. She has driven away loneliness in these nights. But tonight is a different night. I’m not on the train to Mombasa. I am on the train of my thoughts. Sonia is all over my mind again but not like the first time. She is gone. She has been a sweet girl all along, but, something is the hot blood with her. If she is pregnant—well? Why didn’t I think about these things? In the throes of passion who thinks? If she is pregnant, I have to—well, do what? I have no clue. We’ve been having sex. A familiar equilibrium nowadays, however, that doesn’t take away my responsibility. It doesn’t. And I am guilty. But all these are my midnight speculations—Imaginations—Probably unfounded. Is this how Nairobi constructs men? It’s only a matter of time after which everything will be crystal clear. And what is everything? I don’t know. A few minutes to 1 a.m., I hope I will find sleep. I hope the irregular rubble of chiffon dresses will regain order when Sonia shall return and we shall have our wedding. But for now, I must switch off the TV and return to bed.

The bleeding heart of Love

Justice and righteousness are the foundation of His throne, mercy and truth go before his face.(psalms:89:14)

There is a sudden gleeful avalanche in bashing and mockery of evangelicals and many christians who have made their views on certain issues political, public, especially in regard to the US election–Some are the persecutions to endure. These(Christians and evangelicals– and a certain demographic demarcated by race has been the target ) happen to be human beings and on that front much of their human nature, because of their beliefs,must have been overshadowed. Many bashing and mocking them are finding glory in the mockery and bashing and alas it speaks of how the world has changed, a season has shifted, and we are all imperfect. The validation of being right has become finding that ‘fault’ in the other person’s wrong. Our salvation is no longer worked in fear and trembling, the trust in man is more than the trust in God, the one with a log in their eye is standing on his log to reach for the speck in the other’s eye, forgetting his prominent log. The evangelicals and Christians are not the word of God, if some have in their human moment of weakness(for our righteousness is like filthy rags before God, and all have fallen short of God’s glory) perpetuated a belief that they were incanet truth and you looked at that and not the word of God then return to the scriptures? Find your peace with God, seek His revelation in these uncertain times, look not onto man, pray. Do not fall for the alluring temptation for the collective invalidation of Christians, a false sense of security, happening in the guise of intellectual discourse and others, that is an indubitable lure into a wide path which takes you away from asking yourself the fundamental question which is: Despite the madness in our times, I’m I right with God and His word(for the Christian believer). Politics and politicians have come and gone, empires have risen and fallen, Kings have come and gone. And so as it was, so it is, and so shall it be.Who can search God’s heart? Who knows the foundations of creation in the heavens and the earth? God: who was there, is there and is to come. In all the equation of creation(with your free will, chose to believe or not) God is the unchanging constant. Look not unto man, trust not man even the man within you, look within your heart, seasons rise and fall. The kingdom of God is within you(for this also seek revelation). God sits on a throne.

The bleeding heart of Love

Justice and righteousness are the foundation of His throne, mercy and truth go before his face.

There is a sudden gleeful avalanche in bashing and mockery of evangelicals and many christians who have made their views on certain issues political, public, especially in regard to the US election–Some are the persecutions to endure. These(Christians and evangelicals– and a certain demographic demarcated by race has been the target ) happen to be human beings and on that front much of their human nature, because of their beliefs,must have been overshadowed. Many bashing and mocking them are finding glory in the mockery and bashing and alas it speaks of how the world has changed, a season has shifted, and we are all imperfect. The validation of being right has become finding that ‘fault’ in the other person’s wrong. Our salvation is no longer worked in fear and trembling, the trust in man is more than the trust in God, the one with a log in their eye is standing on his log to reach for the speck in the other’s eye, forgetting his prominent log. The evangelicals and Christians are not the word of God, if some have in their human moment of weakness(for our righteousness is like filthy rags before God, and all have fallen short of God’s glory) perpetuated a belief that they were incanet truth and you looked at that and not the word of God then return to the scriptures? Find your peace with God, seek His revelation in these uncertain times, look not onto man, pray. Do not fall for the alluring temptation for the collective invalidation of Christians, a false sense of security, happening in the guise of intellectual discourse and others, that is an indubitable lure into a wide path which takes you away from asking yourself the fundamental question which is: Despite the madness in our times, I’m I right with God and His word(for the Christian believer). Politics and politicians have come and gone, empires have risen and fallen, Kings have come and gone. And so as it was, so it is, and so shall it be.Who can search God’s heart? Who knows the foundations of creation in the heavens and the earth? God: who was there, is there and is to come. In all the equation of creation(with your free will, chose to believe or not) God is the unchanging constant. Look not unto man, trust not man even the man within you, look within your heart, seasons rise and fall. The kingdom of God is within you(for this also seek revelation). God sits on a throne.

We

 

I am the blowing kiss fleeing in the silence of your shadow, swift like a feathered arrow
Your troubles are the painkiller of my sore heart,
I scramble for your tears
To hold them in my sympathy

You are the unbroken pot, the sign—
The ecstacy of soldiers dishing pleasure in triumphant war songs,
You are the hallucination in composers trapping souls into the mysteries of midnight
To bleed war and quench thirst into peace

I am the river, host of meditation
The elixir of timelessness in second chances
The us in the unbroken sea
From tumultuous running
Finally we are.

Pride

 

Let not the Oasis comfort you
Let I the desert remind you
That your feet blistered in my belly
And the water in your blisters
Quenched not my thirst.

That my sand shadowed the sun
And I made tears, I made night
That the scorpions and snakes I hide
Know your shadow from your soul
Let not the Oasis comfort you.

 

The case for pre-colonial missionaries and their work

First, let me accept that Christianity or the faith that believes Jesus Christ is the saviour has had its fair share of false prophets, charlatans and all sorts of manipulators of its gospel. The Bible, the Holy word of God written by the inspiration of the Holy spirit warns believers of such characters: Look at Mathew 7:15. But that is not my concern.

My concern is a growing wave of ‘debunking’ the Christian myth. Or the unearthing of Christian sins. In this ‘debunking’ there are various lynchings of the entire Christian faith. There are those who slander Christianity as a colonial tool of conquest. Is this entirely true? Was this the key inspiration behind missionaries coming to Africa—that as they gave us the Bible and told us to pray, they conquered and colonised us. I find this argument absurd, short of facts. I even find it, in its attempt to decolonise, doing just that.

Do not get it wrong. I am certain there are instances Purporters of the Christian faith might have used the faith for subjugation. Some might even have selectively applied doctrine or misinterpreted it. My argument is however, that the goal of the missionaries and others who came to spread the gospel was first and foremost to do just that, for many of them, some who were martyred in the process. They desired nothing but to spread the gospel. So to entirely accuse the Christian faith of complicity in the subjugation of African people’s is an attempt to paint with a Brad brush.

All said and done the coming of Christianity did bring Africa into light. I know there are names like; colonised in the mind, sellout and brainwashed waiting in the wings for me. But when I look at African history and life I see the pivotal place of Christianity in most of Africa’s progress. I choose to see the light. The painting of Christianity in the colonial and pre colonial era as an indoctrinating tool, entirely, is simply ideological and filled with biases. The other side needs to be known. The fact is the Christian faith is propagated by humans and humans are not angels. Even angels fall when pride enters their hearts. This I hope is a little attempt to turn the other side of the coin as I think of ensuing arguments about Jesus and race in our new world.

A confession and other poems

 

Whispers of Joy

When the time comes
May the clouds unfurl
May the moon emerge
May the flowers smile

When it comes, the time
May the silence be filled
May the hush be short
May the wait be a gift

The time, when it comes
May July be joy
May it’s sky be starred
May it’s grass be dewed
May thirst be quenched

When the time comes
May the sun eat the dew
May the moon kiss the trees
May shadows follow whispers

When the time comes
May fear be weak
May courage speak
May eyes walk
May ears talk
May love live

When the time comes
Let it come, the grace
And may God bless all face
When the time comes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From One Memory of a child

There was once black rain

spattering like a train
From far winds in singing trees

Solemnly in sighing sprees

We were told it was the rain of martyrs
Rain, of the hymns and rhymes, of tartars
Rain from tanks and belching guns

Of many moons and suns

 

So, bleeding bullets sang, in runs
Splattering into our tranquility
Stirring into our purity
Drumming into our curiosity
It was bold black dark rain
Such we have never seen again

 

A confession

 

I’m the song you sing

In your dream

The sugar from nectar plumes

 

I’m the song you sing

Far from grief

Far from tears

 

I’m the song you sing

In the mooned night

Curving the heart into a clef

 

I’m the song you sing

The treble that soars

Like a falcon’s phew!

 

I’m the song you sing

The madness of love

Boiling in innocence

 

I’m the song you sing

Springing the croton sheaves of leaves

With life

 

I’m the song you sing

That climbs in the heart

Like the sunbird’s croon

 

I’m the song you sing

In the private places

That cuddles a fragile smile.

 

Darkness

 

That night has perched

That night without a moon

That night, clothed in a strange disease

That night has come, brother

 

The night that has walked with a knife

From city to city disguised, stalking fretful hearts

That night has come without a face

With an empty coffin, sister

 

That night says a handshake kills

That, blood is thinner than water

That, a hug is contaminated

That souls are harvests, brother

 

That night you dreaded

That night of slavery that shackles hope

That night has perched like a thief

That night of a dark angel, sister

 

That night has perched

That night in the pit

That night in the desolate streets

That night of curfews, brother

 

Brother tell sister to quarantine

Tell the walls and stones to lockdown

Tell the birds and the scoffing hearts

Speak the wisdom of the well that never dries;

to the thirsty multitudes in this darkness

 

 

Small sister, from big sister

Let pleasure be bitter soup
the bed is for your sleep,
And the heart for your dreams

A boy’s touch is not love
but a promise soon scattered,
And dreams broken

Know hot soon is ice
and dreams are brittle eggs,
let them incubate

Let them hatch
a boy’s touch is not love,
But poison in your cup

Let pleasure be bitter soup
the bed is for your sleep,
And the heart for your dreams

Drink patience
and eat this wisdom,
Then your dreams shall live.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Night

When the night is born,

she remembers that night of sin

tears awake her loneliness

 

with screams and blood

her ghosts come

in nightmare piles

 

of her broken dream

right between her feet

her memory trampled in tears

 

she was stabbed with love

and now it is a tiny coffin of crime

a life sentence of guilt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Lord’s grace

His grace, is a light
at the end of a night
In a morning so bright

When I hear songs of life
that slice away like a knife
The long nights and strife

I know I am touched, by grace
From the Lord’s place
And His face

Dedication

When the time comes
May the clouds unfurl
May the moon emerge
May the flowers smile

When it comes, the time
May the silence be filled
May the hush be short
May the wait be a gift

The time, when it comes
May July be joy
May it’s sky be starred
May it’s grass be dewed
May thirst be quenched

When the time comes
May the sun eat the dew
May the moon kiss the trees
May shadows follow whispers

When the time comes
May fear be weak
May courage be strong
May eyes walk
May ears talk
May love live

When the time comes
Let it come, the grace
And may God bless all face
When the time comes.