Always Another Country. Sisonke Msimang

      KENYA NEVER OWNED us the way Zambia did. The ANC community in Nairobi was less structured; while Lusaka had been our home because it was the headquarters of the ANC, Nairobi was our home because Baba had a job there and his job had nothing to do with the revolution.

      This one fact – that Baba now had a place of employment and was not a full-time member of the ANC – began to open up possibilities for us. We went from being refugees in Zambia – a country whose entire foreign policy was built around our protection and emancipation – to being expatriates in a city concerned with feeding its rich and distancing itself from its poor.

      On weekends we would drive across town to visit other South African families. A year after we arrived in Nairobi, Uncle Stan and Aunty Angela joined us. By now Lindi was in boarding school in Swaziland and Dumi enrolled in Nairobi Academy, where we also went. Having our old friends in Nairobi made it feel more like home, but the city itself remained a mystery.

      To get to the house where the Sangwenis lived we often took Arboretum Drive, which was flanked on one side by a micro-forest with ancient trees hung with vines. It was a lush, impossibly green daub of paint that seemed to emerge from nowhere, just past the busy shopping area of Westlands. Once we were past Arboretum Drive, we were in a proper suburb – on our way into Kileleshwa. I would look out of the window, catching glimpses of colonial villas behind high walls covered in Bougainvillea vines. The flowers – purple and peach and red – bounced across the tops of wroughtiron gates and tumbled onto the dark green of hedges that made me want to jump out of the car and smell them. That would have been impossible, of course; a wall bordered every house and every gate was guarded by an askari – a man whose only job was to keep strangers out.

      Like Lusaka, Nairobi had many roundabouts. These intersections were still elegant, in spite of the increasing traffic. They were beautiful places of near-lawlessness. On weekends, Baba sped through the city’s roundabouts without slowing down. In the back, my sisters and I would slip and slide, giggling at the motion, certain that the car looked like a cartoon – on the verge of tipping over.

      During the week, the city was completely different. From Monday to Friday traffic was controlled not by lights and careful observance of the rules, no; our car moved on the basis of the instructions of white-gloved traffic police. Both hands up meant stop. A slow deliberate arm with a hand pointing told us to proceed left. The right hand would continue to signal stop to oncoming traffic. The drivers would do as they were told until the cops turned away. Then they would sneak forward, hoot and carry on without regard for decorum.

      The officers wore braided hats and crisp light-blue shirts and navy-blue shorts. Their sinewy African legs were familiar. I had seen them in Lusaka, motioning in the same way, standing in the sun yet somehow not sweating. I was in another country, but somehow things were the same.

      Except, they weren’t. Nairobi had harder edges. It was faster-paced, noisier, and much bigger than sleepy Lusaka. Nairobi screeched and clanged and was in a hurry to go somewhere important. Kenyans were sure-footed and confident. They were brash and impatient where Zambians took life easier, moved more slowly. Perhaps it was because the recent past was so bloody in Kenya. The country preferred to look ahead, because looking back was too painful.

      I was only eight when we moved to Kenya. I did not know that, in the decade leading up to Kenyan independence in 1963, the British had behaved like violent thugs. Kenya’s colonial history is as bloody as any other in Africa, although until recently Kenyans had managed to pretend that theirs was a history that never happened.

      So, had I asked, no one in the city would have willingly told me about the Mau Mau. They would have avoided telling me stories of the hundreds of Kikuyu women who took oaths and picked up machetes to defend their land against the British. They would not have said a word about the Mau Mau men who were killed in their thousands in the 1950s in a brave uprising that dared to kill whites. Kenya was a place of secrets and Nairobi was a city whose residents knew far more than they were prepared to say.

      Daniel arap Moi was Kenya’s president. He was different from President Kaunda, who cared about Zambia to the point of tears. President Moi seemed unmoved by the slums and the potholes and the malnutrition. He wore dark suits and had red eyes. He rarely smiled on the television.

      In Lusaka Mummy and Baba used to say, ‘Say what you will about President Kaunda, he certainly loves his people.’ In Kenya, I never heard them say this about President Moi. Instead, when the evening news came on they would shush us and we would watch as the unsmiling president opened schools and addressed conferences. He did not cry when he saw the goitres and the thin legs of the children who gathered in their school uniforms to greet him.

      While the sight of President Kaunda had inspired excitement in us, here we watched the president with a sort of fearful awe.

      Everywhere you looked in Nairobi there were unfathomably poor people. Many of them were children. They chased us in hordes on nights when we went out to restaurants in the city. Their eyes would bore into our backs as we rushed quickly back to the car. Then they would look on in silence, staring at us through the windows as we pulled up to traffic lights.

      On the weekends they spilled onto the roads, too poor to buy anything to sell – not even food. Their hands were always cupped and their faces looked as though they had never been clean.

      I wondered how they didn’t get run over by the reckless matatus whose drivers sped past them with deadened eyes. They lived on the centre line of Nairobi’s busy roads, between whizzing cars, and learnt to give way to big men whose tyres drove relentlessly across lanes so dilapidated it was hard to imagine that they could take the country into a new kind of future.

      The Nairobi of my childhood refused to look up. It was interested only in the midline, in the space between the stomach and the wallet. It was intent on avoiding eye contact at all costs. That was how you managed the city – by shrinking into yourself and closing your eyes and covering your ears to block out the noise of it all.

      There were places in that city too violent or too dirty or too terrible for us to enter, places where armies of children lived and slept and which they never left. There were children in Nairobi whose particular corners of misery might as well have been another country. I was shielded from the pain of this sort of belonging. The children of Nairobi’s underclass knew their place, and the children of the upper classes expected them to stay there. Kenya’s leaders were not planning for growth. Their strategy was premised not on building the middle classes, but on empowering the elite.

      Uncle and Aunty and Mummy and Baba decided to buy