lean-tos crowded close to the chapel but left a respectful distance. It was sacred. Many went there to pray. Many went to cry away from others, where it would not infect them like dirty water. I often saw my father go into the chapel. I thought about listening at the door to hear if he was praying or crying, but I did not. Whatever he looked for there, it did not seem to make him a whole man again.
My mother tried to make Jogoo Road Gichichi. Behind the accommodation block was a field of dry grass with an open drain running down the far side. Beyond the drain was a fence and a road, then the Jogoo Road market with its name painted on its rusting tin roof, then the shanties began again. But this field was untouched and open. My mother joined a group of women who wanted to turn the field into shambas. Pastor Elezeke agreed and they made mattocks in the workshops from bits of old car, broke up the soil and planted maize and cane. That summer we watched the crops grow as the shanties crowded in around the Jogoo Road market, and stifled it, and took it apart for roofs and walls. But they never touched the shambas. It was as if they were protected. The women hoed and sang to the radio and laughed and talked women-talk, and Little Egg and the Chole girls chased enormous sewer rats with sticks. One day I saw little cups of beer and dishes of maize and salt in a corner of the field and understood how it was protected.
My mother pretended it was Gichichi but I could see it was not. In Gichichi, the men did not stand by the fence wire and stare so nakedly. In Gichichi the helicopter gunships did not wheel overhead like vultures.
In Gichichi the brightly painted matatus that roared up and down did not have heavy machine guns bolted to the roof and boys in sports fashion in the back looking at everything as if they owned it. They were a new thing in Nairobi, these gun-gangs; the Tacticals. Men, usually young, organized into gangs, with vehicles and guns, dressed in anything they could make a uniform. Some were as young as twelve. They gave themselves names like the Black Simbas and the Black Rhinos and the Ebonettes and the United Christian Front and the Black Taliban. They liked the word black. They thought it sounded threatening.
These Tacticals had as many philosophies and beliefs as names, but they all owned territory, patrolled their streets and told their people they were the law. They enforced their law with kneecappings and burning car tires, they defended their streets with AK47s. We all knew that when the Chaga came, they would fight like hyenas over the corpse of Nairobi. The Soca Boys was our local army. They wore sports fashion and knee-length Manager’s coats and had football team logos painted in the sides of their picknis, as the armed matatus were called. On their banners they had a black-and-white patterned ball on a green field. Despite their name, it was not a football. It was a buckyball, a carbon fullerene molecule, the half-living, half-machine building-brick of the Chaga. Their leader, a rat-faced boy in a Manchester United coat and shades that kept sliding down his nose, did not like Christians, so on Sundays he would send his picknis up and down Jogoo Road, roaring their engines and shooting into the air, but because they could.
The Church Army had its own plans for the coming time of changes. A few nights later, as I went to the choo, I overheard Pastor Elezeke and my father talking in the Pastor’s study. I put my torch out and listened at the louvres.
“We need people like you, Jonathan,” Elezeke was saying. “It is a work of God, I think. We have a chance to build a true Christian society.”
“You cannot be certain.”
“There are Tacticals…”
“They are filth. They are vultures.”
“Hear me out, Jonathan. Some of them go into the Chaga. They bring things out-for all their quarantine, there are things the Americans want very much from the Chaga. It is different from what we are told is in there. Very very different. Plants that are like machines, that generate electricity, clean water, fabric, shelter, medicines. Knowledge. There are devices, the size of this thumb, that transmit information directly into the brain. And more; there are people living in there, not like primitives, not, forgive me, like refugees. It shapes itself to them, they have learned to make it work for them. There are whole towns-towns, I tell you-down there under Kilimanjaro. A great society is rising.”
“It shapes itself to them,” my father said. “And it shapes them to itself.”
There was a pause.
“Yes. That is true. Different ways of being human.”
“I cannot help you with this, my brother.”
“Will you tell me why?”
“I will,” my father said, so softly I had to press close to the window to hear. “Because I am afraid, Stephen. The Chaga has taken everything from me, but that is still not enough for it. It will only be satisfied when it has taken me, and changed me, and made me alien to myself.”
“Your faith, Jonathan. What about your faith?”
“It took that first of all.”
“Ah,” Pastor Elezeke sighed. Then, after a time, “You understand you are always welcome here?”
“Yes, I do. Thank you, but I cannot help you.”
That same night I went to the white chapel-my first and last time-to force issues with God. It was a very beautiful building, with a curving inner wall that made you walk halfway around the inside before you could enter. I suppose you could say it was spiritual, but the cross above the table angered me. It was straight and true and did not care for anyone or anything. I sat glaring at it some time before I found the courage to say, “You say you are the answer.”
I am the answer, said the cross.
“My father is destroyed by fear. Fear of the Chaga, fear of the future, fear of death, fear of living. What is your answer?”
I am the answer.
“We are refugees, we live on wazungu’s charity, my mother hoes corn, my sister roasts it at the roadside; tell me your answer.”
I am the answer.
“An alien life has taken everything we ever owned. Even now, it wants more, and nothing can stop it. Tell me, what is your answer?”
I am the answer.
“You tell me you are the answer to every human need and question, but what does that mean? What is the answer to your answer?”
I am the answer, the silent, hanging cross said.
“That is no answer!” I screamed at the cross. “You do not even understand the questions, how can you be the answer? What power do you have? None. You can do nothing! They need me, not you. I am going to do what you can’t.”
I did not run from the chapel. You do not run from gods you no longer believe in. I walked, and took no notice of the people who stared at me.
The next morning, I went into Nairobi to get a job. To save money I went on foot. There were men everywhere, walking with friends, sitting by the roadside selling sheet metal charcoal burners or battery lamps, or making things from scrap metal and old tires, squatting together outside their huts with their hands draped over their knees. There must have been women, but they kept themselves hidden. I did not like the way the men worked me over with their eyes. They had shanty-town eyes, that see only what they can use in a thing. I must have appeared too poor to rob and too hungry to sexually harass, but I did not feel safe until the downtown towers rose around me and the vehicles on the streets were diesel-stained green and yellow buses and quick white UN cars.
I went first to the back door of one of the big tourist hotels.
“I can peel and clean and serve people,” I said to an undercook in dirty whites. “I work hard and I am honest. My father is a pastor.”
“You and ten million others,” the cook said. “Get out of here.”
Then I went to the CNN building. It was a big, bold idea. I slipped in behind a motorbike courier and went up to a good-looking Luo on the desk.
“I’m looking for work,” I said. “Any work, I can do anything. I can make chai, I can photocopy, I can do basic accounts. I speak good English and a little French. I’m a fast learner.”
“No work here today,” the Luo on the desk said. “Or any other day. Learn that, fast.”
I went to the Asian shops along Moi Avenue.
