Someone tittered with excitement. The robbers waited for Godspeed to beg, to plead for his women, to back down. With each second that ticked, the scent of blood grew thicker.
“Daddy, please, it’s all right,” Daoju whispered, and stretched out her hand to her father, her face a mask of dread. Perpetua, sprawled on her side, did not stir.
“Daddy, please, listen to your daughter,” one of the robbers lisped. Then he grabbed his crotch and thrust his hips rapidly back and forth, to raucous laughter.
Godspeed glanced down at his daughter and saw the infant he once saved, and he turned away, his jaw trembling. He stared at the ceiling, bit his swollen underlip, and renewed his pledge. He would not fail. He was ready; only one thing remained. He looked at Perpetua, stared at her bowed head until she sighed weakly and raised her face. I love you too, he mouthed. Her eyes widened, moistened, and she brushed the tears away, anxious to hold his gaze. Then she nodded — and was still nodding when the grandfather clock tolled.
A Nairobi Story of Comings and Goings
Let’s call her Leo. White, thin, auburn-haired, South African. Clan mother to waifs, yet childless herself, monthly mourning missed chances. Fierce as the Chinese dragon, green and red inked, bug-eyed and fire-spitting, tattooed on her back, under her left shoulder. Rebel, polymath, denim-jacket-and-jeans-wearing Leo, swaggering helter-skelter in her grubby tennis shoes, puffing her reefers with a GI Jane sneer, holding her own with the playground bullies, the boys.
— If you’re a white woman in Africa, penises are not your problem. Arse envy is.
That’s Leo for you.
Leo liked factoids, UN statistics, Wikipedia. The first time we fucked, afterward, she said:
— You are the twenty-five percent.
(Seventy-five percent of men ejaculate two minutes after penetrating.)
The setting, Nairobi: the multiracial mix of people, the idiosyncratic weather, the sights, the sounds of that gray-stone city. I traveled to Nairobi for a change of scenery, and to get as far away as possible from my stepmother, who had started befriending my girlfriends in an effort to get me to settle down. With careful management of my savings, I figured I could afford a month of laziness. So I applied for a two-month visa, and flew second-class on the cheapest airline out of MMIA, the crappiest airport in the world. Lagos to Nairobi via Addis Ababa. It was my first trip outside Nigeria, and the more countries I passed through the better, I had thought; also, Addis Ababa was a beautiful city, everyone said, a city ringed by hills and steeped in mist and history. Wisps of mist and distant hilltops were all I saw through the glass walls of BIA’s Terminal II, where I remained for six hours — unable to pass immigration because I had no Ethiopian visa, afraid to close my eyes for fear of bag snatchers, with nothing to do but ogle airline hostesses — waiting for my connecting flight, just another Nigerian in a noisy crowd of raffia bag-lugging cheapskates. After that experience in its best airport, at the hand of its national carrier, Ethiopia can keep its history.
JKIA is the second crappiest airport in the world.
The engine of Nairobi is fired by cash-crop farming, oiled by tourism, and steered by NGO money. Everywhere you turn in the city you find NGO people, camouflaged by straw hats and safari boots and the skin color of the tourist, white. In the supermarkets (Indian-run), the swanky restaurants (white Kenyan— run), the bus parks, souvenir bazaars, immigration offices (black Kenyan — run), luxurious hotels and safari lodges (British-run), AIDS patients’ wards and spoken-word poetry slams (American-funded), and, in small sightseeing groups, in Kibera, the largest zoo in Africa.
I had a Facebook friend, a Rwandan living in Nairobi, who met me at the airport and drove me to the apartment in Kilimani rented with money I had wired him. After removing my shoes to relieve my altitude-swollen feet, I walked in tow round the bed-sit shaking my head at the scuffed floorboards, the threadbare velveteen chairs, the bathroom tub rimmed by scum the color of lead, the shit-stained Armitage Shanks, forced to feign approval because the Rwandan thought we all lived in shanties in Nigeria. He worked for a Belgian NGO, wore Italian designer shoes, and affected French mannerisms. Four days after my arrival we quarreled over my intimacy with Leo, he unfriended me on Facebook, and that was that.
Leo worked for an NGO too, a British concern with regional offices in many parts of black Africa. Before she was dispatched to Nairobi for a special project, she worked in the Cape Town office. The main office in West Africa was sited in Accra, Ghana, and she had been there, but had visited Nigeria as well, several times. She liked Nigerians (passionate, assertive people) and she was proud of her grasp of pidgin. Her dope dealer in Cape Town was Nigerian.
Leo was not your average NGO person. She was no Mother Teresa, she did not like Nelson Mandela, she dressed like a Wonderboom roadie, she disdained Bob Geldof’s song and dance, and, unlike her colleagues — who fucked like goats, within the flock — she took local, non-NGO lovers. About her job, she said:
— You know how it is, it pays good money, and I’ve earned it, I’ve done my bit, I served the ANC when it was still high treason, I played my part in the struggle, and now, how do you Nigerians say it, man must. . what’s the term, it means eat. .
— Man mus’ wack.
— Ja, that’s it. Man mos wack. No be so, broda?
I met Leo the same evening I arrived in Nairobi. Some NGO people were throwing a party for a colleague who was returning to the mother ship, berthed somewhere in civilization, and the Rwandan took me along. A place called Sippers on Argwings Kodhek Road. (As we drove past the road sign I asked about the source of the name, but the Rwandan had no idea. Sounds Klingon, I said; and his rejoinder: Is that one of the Nigerian tribes?) The restaurant was packed, tables were arranged outside, several parties were going strong, and the noisiest was a mainly white crowd gathered around two pushed-together tables. The Rwandan headed straight for this group, and to a raucous chorus of animal noises, sat at the table. A hush fell as I, too, sat down.
— This is my friend from Nigeria. He arrived today. He’s in Nairobi on vacation.
Among people of a certain economic status, the word vacation is as potent as open sesame. I was good people, a gourmand, a hedonist, a connoisseur of the finer things in life, their expressions seemed to say. The silence lifted, the smiles beamed forth, the drinking glasses tinkled, and soon I found myself plied with questions from all sides.
— What do you think of Robert Mugabe?
— Obama has been a huge disappointment, wouldn’t you agree?
— Not to be rude, but why are so many Nigerians engaged in e-mail fraud?
— How about you get away from those wazungu and come sit beside an African sister?
That was Leo, slouched in her seat at one end of the table, her tennis shoe — clad foot propped on the table’s edge, a reefer dangling from her lips. From the first she was brazen, meeting my startled gaze with a twinkle in her smile. I moved to her side.
Introductions were dispensed with. She was a fast talker, a nonstop talker, a fish in water with words, instinctively articulate. In twenty minutes I knew enough about her to be intimidated. By this time she had offered me her reefer to finish, and also pressed on me her glass of whiskey (Black Label, she stressed), though she borrowed it now and again to sip from, her eyes holding mine over the rim. She had crazy eyes, crafty eyes, bewitching eyes, benevolent eyes, depending on how the light reflected off them. Most times it reflected crazy.