I Built No Schools in Kenya Read online

  The third factor – the main thing, really, feeding my curiosity – was my own connection to Africa. My parents and most of their immediate families left Zimbabwe for Australia in the early eighties, but all our history – for several generations, on both sides of the family – is back there, somewhere, scattered across the continent along with a few remaining distant relatives.

  I’ve always been fascinated and appalled by my family’s stories of life in Africa. That exciting and romantic but fundamentally unjust colonial life was so many miles and years from my upbringing in sleepy little Mackay – and my progressive millennial persuasion – that it seemed as though it couldn’t possibly be real, couldn’t have ever been real. Still, I had an overwhelming longing to see it. The Finnish have a word for this strange emotion: kaukokaipuu. A feeling of homesickness for a place you’ve never been.

  So. Although Kenya is a different country, thousands of kilometres from Zimbabwe, it is still Africa, and the time-warp colonial world of the Smyth household would be something akin to the one my parents had known. This was a pretty rare chance to see it up close. Probably as close as I would ever get.

  I told Alice to book my flights, and I landed in Nairobi a week later.

  The thing is, when my good friend Alice called to offer me a job on the other side of the world, she didn’t give me the full story.

  Not even close.

  Big chunks were missing. Huge chunks. Crucial chunks, you might say. Chunks you can be sure a person would want to know about before signing up to a gig like this.

  So when I first arrived at the Smyths’ house in Nairobi, I was more than a little baffled when the first thing Fiona – who was visiting at the time – said to me wasn’t ‘Hello!’, or ‘How was your flight?’, or ‘You must be tired! What a long way you’ve come.’ Nope. Nothing like that.

  The very first thing Fiona said to me, in a low voice while looking at me sideways, was simply: ‘You’re brave.’

  2

  THE PLACE

  I fly down the Queensland coastline to Brisbane, then west over the Northern Territory, then over Indonesia and Malaysia and the Bay of Bengal, and across the guts of India and the Arabian Sea.

  From Dubai I fly south through a cloudless sky, over Saudi Arabia and Yemen. I look out the window as we pass over blue-violet water where the Gulf of Aden meets the Red Sea, and then over the seas of red sand in Djibouti and Ethiopia. The desert gives way to pocky scrub, then rocky mountains, then more of that dead dry desert, as I crosscheck the view from the window with a map showing the flight path on the screen in front of me, alternating between English and Arabic text every few seconds. The beautiful strange places below have ancient names like Berbera, Hargeisa, Dire Dawa, Awasa and Arba Minch. The only one I recognise is Addis Ababa.

  Inside the cabin, the modern world closes in.

  The young Kenyan sitting next to me, Leo, could be from anywhere. The Killers wail through the Sony headphones plugged into his iPhone. He’s wearing a black Adidas flat cap with a logo embroidered in metallic rainbow thread, a pair of baggy blue denim jeans and a white singlet with a red flannelette shirt open over the top, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Leo and I chat about music as we wash down our lunch with Heineken. He tells me the band Gorillaz are rumoured to be playing a music festival the following month, at Lake Naivasha, only a couple of hours’ drive from Nairobi. I should go! He has a friend organising the event who booked one of the DJs. Leo can’t get there, though. He’ll be on holiday ‘either in Phuket or Cape Town’. He’s still deciding.

  God fills the row in front of us. Three African nuns in full kit: white coifs, black tunics, rosaries, the lot. Where have they just been? I wonder. Not so long ago it was one-way traffic, white missionaries bringing His Word to the newly encountered heathens of the Dark Continent. Have they been so successful that the message is now being returned to sender? I hope so. I really, really hope so. I love the thought of these sweet African ladies strolling through an Iowan cornfield, climbing up to knock on the farmer’s air-conditioned tractor cab and introducing him to the Holy Spirit.

  In the middle aisles, a group of Irish teenagers in orange shirts chat excitedly. Their chaperone tells me they’ve come for a two-week charity project, to dig wells for a local school. I don’t tell him I’ve come to care for the wealthy. There doesn’t seem a good way to put it.

  On our descent to Nairobi, the ground turns much greener. It sprouts combed rows of emerald and clumps of wet jade, while fine networks of yellow-brown veins crawl across the swathes of pale green grass that stretch west towards the East African Rift, that aching great rent in the Earth’s crust where humanity began. I catch my breath as we drop lower; the ground sparkles with tin roofs and windscreens, buildings and buses, and then suddenly it’s a blur of bitumen black.

  And still, I don’t know what I’m in for.

  Jomo Kenyatta International Airport is the hub of East Africa, and – whether by design or by accident – does a great job of preparing you for the place you’re about to experience. In this case: a perplexing mix of the ancient and modern worlds, of dysfunction and achievement, of tribalism and globalism, of poverty and wealth, of racial tension and harmony, hope and frustration.

  In posters along the corridor walls, telcos called Safaricom and Airtel and Orange implore me to buy one of their SIM cards. ‘Jambo! Karibu to Kenya!’ they read in cartoon speech bubbles, next to photographs of jumping Masai men holding spears and smartphones, or Warhol’d portraits of pink giraffes poking out neon green tongues.

  I pinball around the arrivals hall, looking for my luggage in a messy throng of people: there are Somali families, tall and slender, the women in jeans and colourful headscarves, the men in white tunics and loose pants, their children wearing sequinned denim jackets and getting tangled up in strangers’ legs as they chase fluorescent rubber balls; Indian families, the men in jeans and polo shirts, the women in glittering saris, their children squabbling over huge cardboard boxes secured with flimsy dollar-shop string; all types of whites – European diplomats and American soldiers, NGO do-gooders and Bible-backed aid-bringers, and rosy-cheeked safari groups, dragging guitar cases and backpacks and camera bags across the tired concrete floor. Here and there, somehow seeming less welcome than anyone else, are small clusters of apprehensive Chinese men; they’re labourers, I later learn, there to build Kenya’s new highways. And, of course, among it all are Kenyans: high-flying businessmen and women, expats on home visits, ground staff and security guards, cleaners and taxi touts and money traders, all of them apparently well accustomed to the influx of visitors to their country and enduring it with weary grace.

  Just as I’m about to give up on my bags, they show up, and a moment later so does Alice.

  ‘Oi!’ she hollers, grabbing me by the arm as I exit through a customs bay. ‘Give that to Peter, he’s our driver.’

  A slight, round-faced man in a grimy Shell Oil baseball cap grins at me. He’s otherwise impeccably dressed, in a Ralph Lauren shirt and pressed pants, with polished leather shoes. Aside from his worn-out teeth, he looks to be in his forties. ‘Jambo!’ he says, shaking my hand, then, before I can stop him, he takes my suitcase out of my hands and races out of the terminal with it balanced on one shoulder. Alice and I chase after him to the car park where an old, olive-green Peugeot sits double-parked and gleaming in the sun.

  It’s in the middle back seat of that car, as we drive down Mombasa Road past the giraffes and zebras gathered at the edge of Nairobi National Park, that Alice fills me in on the missing chunks of the story she’d first told me.

  I’m told that Marguerite is Walt’s second wife (of forty years, mind), and stepmother to Fiona, and that there is no love lost between the two women.

  ‘Marguerite’s a real piece of work, you’ll see,’ Alice said. It’s clear that we are to be on Fiona’s side, even though she’ll soon be returning to England, and we’ll be here with Marguerite.

  I learn that Walt’s being here in Ken
ya at all is … contentious. Two weeks earlier, he’d been in hospital in London, recovering from a heart attack. Fiona, shocked at how frail he had become, had then unilaterally decided that The Wife wasn’t looking after him properly and that he’d fare much better back in his African home with the ‘sun and slaves’ to keep him warm and waited on.

  ‘She actually says that?’

  ‘Well, only to Walt,’ says Alice. ‘Just, like, to muck around with him. He thinks those sorts of jokes are funny.’

  Walt and Marguerite had been living between the two continents for decades, returning to Kenya each year to escape the English winter. But after a lifetime enjoying the best of both worlds, Fiona felt it was time her father went back to Africa for good. And so, without telling The Wife, she discharged him from hospital and put him on a plane to Nairobi – first class, oxygen canister in tow.

  ‘The one time in my life I get to fly first class and it was a fucking nightmare!’ says Alice. ‘Walt fretted about having his passport and ticket the whole way. He didn’t realise we were already on the plane. Wouldn’t keep his mask on, kept trying to get up and walk around. A fucking nightmare. Seriously.’

  I discover that while Alice and Walt and Fiona were being handed hot towels in the air over the Mediterranean Sea, The Wife, upon discovering her husband had vanished, was filing a kidnapping complaint with the London police.

  ‘But she’s decided to drop the charges, thank God. She’s gonna join us here instead.’

  And then I’m told that Fiona suspects The Wife has been ‘doping Walt up’ on antidepressants and sedatives, in an attempt to make him easier for her to manage.

  ‘And you’re telling me all this now?’ I say to Alice.

  ‘Yeah, well …’ she says with a guilty grin, ‘I didn’t want to put you off coming.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I say, reeling. I’m not sure whether to be pissed off or impressed.

  As we approach the city, the national park falls away and buildings and people creep in. Out the window is a whirring tableau of yellow jerry cans and squashed spinach leaves and plastic crates strapped to the backs of rusting bicycles with bungee cords that look like they’ll give out at any second. Sinewed men strain to pull a car-tyre rickshaw through an intersection, their necks cushioned by grey-stained rags wrapped around its yoke; street hawkers leap out of their way at the last possible moment. Sagging shade-cloth roofs hang over market stalls, sheltering towers of tomatoes and piles of limes from the sting of the sun; bright wraps of fabric swaddle the bodies of busy women, all buying and selling, counting cash, swatting vervet monkeys away with long sticks. And right next to all that colour and movement is an OiLibya petrol station, where a fat man in a grey suit and sunglasses climbs out of a silver Mercedes.

  We come to a stop. A truck full of nervous goats is about to tip over – it has somehow backed into a power pole and is stuck with one back wheel spinning across the top of a retaining wall and the other wedged into the gutter. The front axle groans under the weight and the goats bleat over it. I’d pay good money to see how they manage to get out of this mess, but the driver hangs out of his window and waves us around impatiently.

  Peter grins into the rear-view mirror, acknowledging my disappointment. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll see something like that every day,’ he assures me. ‘Welcome to Nairobi traffic!’

  What strikes me most about the city isn’t those developing-world quirks, but the surprising familiarity of everything else. Sofa-filled furniture showrooms and billboards advertising insurance, ‘designer living’ apartments for sale overlooking newly landscaped gardens. Dettol and Nivea and Samsung logos – Kenya is full of all the same overhyped consumerist-capitalist-corporatist promises as home, only here the faces beaming with fraudulent salesman grins are brown, instead of peach-yoghurt-white.

  As we crawl along the Uhuru Highway I look up at a twenty-foot Johnnie Walker strutting along the side of a skyscraper. ‘Keep Walking’ the smartarse tells us, as we’re overtaken by streams of pedestrians on the side of the road who easily outpace the bumper-to-bumper traffic.

  This feels like the real Nairobi, the beating heart of twenty-first century Kenya, where Google and IBM and the United Nations have their African headquarters. But we’re going back in time, to a much quieter part of town where people live in beautiful old houses on huge tree-filled plots. A place where residents ‘take tea’ on the verandah and play tennis behind eight-foot-high brick walls topped with jagged shards of glass, and go to bed every night knowing that even the barbed wire and electrified loops of razor ribbon on their perimeter won’t keep the most determined or desperate away.

  We pull up at an iron gate on a gravel driveway and Peter taps the horn. For a moment, nothing happens. My heart skips a beat.

  This, my parents had warned me, is where you are most likely to be car-jacked or kidnapped or killed in Africa. ‘Waiting at a bloody gate,’ Dad had muttered, during the personal safety lecture he’d given me on the way to Mackay Airport. My parents have quite a roster of murdered friends, and a good many of them breathed their last in the seat of an idling vehicle. ‘Listen, if you pull up at a gate and there’s any delay, especially at night, you don’t get out of the car,’ Dad said. ‘You put your foot down and get the hell out of there.’

  I’m just about to suggest this course of action when a lopsided giant of a man lumbers over in a navy-blue trench coat, heavy black boots, and an empty pistol holster. He looks to be about sixty. He has the friendliest face I’ve ever seen.

  ‘This is Patrick – the askari,’ Alice says, ‘the security guard.’ I add askari to my mental list of Swahili words, using the mnemonic ‘a-scary security guard’: how can this man possibly be an effective deterrent? He looks like he’s about to hand out ice creams.

  It takes Patrick a long, fumbling moment to find the right key to the padlock. He waves apologetically as the keys elude his fingers. Finally, having hooked the right one and cleared the way for our passage, he stands to attention and salutes as we drive past, a giddy grin spanning his face when we pull up beside him. Alice introduces me and lets him know I’m an approved visitor.

  He takes my hand through the wound-down window in both of his and shakes it like a snow globe. ‘Jambo, Madam!’ he says, nodding so furiously I worry he’ll hurt his neck. ‘Jambo, jambo! Karibu!’

  ‘Jambo!’ I say, wanting to hug him in return, and wondering how on earth he ended up with this job.

  ‘And what’s he saying? “Carry-boo?”’ I ask Alice and Peter as we drive on towards the house.

  ‘Yeah, karibu,’ Alice says.

  ‘It means “welcome”!’ Peter adds, turning around to repeat it. ‘Karibu to Kenya.’

  Huge bougainvillea line the driveway, erupting in fountains of fuchsia. Smooth green terraced lawns step behind them, rainbow-striped with flower beds. Springing out of the red earth are purple agapanthus, yellow daylilies, orange spikes of strelitzia, and white daisies with pink-tipped petals. Climbing night jasmine and shocks of bamboo stretch along the back fence; palm trees off-set acacias and, everywhere I turn, roses of every colour.

  The house looks like an English country manor, what with its peaking, shingled roof, softly smoking chimney, and walls of grey-brown stonework that crawl with ivy. Neat green hedges frame white lattice casement windows. Decorative metalwork gates enclose a small portico at the steps up to the front door, and beside them is the apparently recent addition of a gently sloping access ramp. I half expect a red-fezzed butler to appear and offer us tall glasses of iced tea, but no one is there to greet us.

  Before I can step inside, Alice sends me around the side to find Fiona and Walt on their afternoon stroll and let them know I’ve arrived. Fiona is guiding Walt along by the elbow when I walk over to say hello.

  That’s when I’m met with ‘You’re brave.’

  I don’t quite know how to answer this, which isn’t a problem – Fiona doesn’t expect a response.

  She puts a finger to her lips and nods
at the old man bent double beside her; he’s squinting at the inscription on the cement lid to a septic system embedded in the lawn. Walt hasn’t noticed me yet, and it seems his daughter wants to keep it that way. She shoos me away, whispering, ‘Ask Alice to show you your room. The staff will bring your bags in and unpack for you.’

  So I do what I’m told and go quietly inside, following Alice across polished floorboards through rooms full of ivory lampstands and Persian rugs, down a carpeted hallway to the twin bedroom we’re to share until Fiona returns to England, and where, sure enough, a maid – in a pink gingham uniform – is unpacking my suitcase.

  ‘This is Esther,’ Alice says, as the maid puts a stack of my underwear into a drawer in the dresser. She’s a slender woman, she doesn’t look to be much older than us – maybe in her thirties. Her hair is pulled back in a tidy bun, and her skin glows with a copper sheen. ‘Esther, this is Kirsten.’

  ‘Hello, Miss Kirsten,’ Esther says, giggling shyly, eyes downcast.

  I look at the now neatly folded piles of clothes she has laid on the end of the bed, and cringe. My bag was not ‘packed’ so much as aggressively stuffed – I wasn’t expecting anyone else to have to deal with it.

  ‘Oh – it’s okay – I can do that!’ I say. Esther looks at Alice for guidance, as though she’s not sure it really is okay to let me do it for myself, or maybe she’s worried I don’t want her touching my things? It’s the first of many small moments of cultural confusion.